Back in the 1990s, the TV show that people could not stop talking about was NBC’s ER. Starring a bunch of unknown actors (including Noah Wyle as a wide-eyed young neophyte doctor), the hospital show landed with seismic force. Its fast pace, gruesome injuries, overworked medical professionals, and heated atmosphere with new sources of drama always rolling in the door made the likes of Marcus Welby, St. Elsewhere, and Chicago Hope seem sluggish and passé by comparison.
In the 16 years since ER breathed its last, medical dramas have avoided comparisons with it by turning themselves into sitcoms (Scrubs), detective shows (House), and soap operas (Grey’s Anatomy). Now in 2025, after we’ve lived through a pandemic, HBO Max has decided that it’s time once again for a hospital show that’s just a hospital show, so we have The Pitt, which stars Wyle as a battle-scarred mentor. Creator R. Scott Gemmill, who worked as a writer on ER for some years, has proven the value of returning to the genre’s roots, and that would be true even without all the Emmy nominations that this show has garnered.
Wyle portrays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, and the first season’s 15 episodes follow him through 15 hours of what’s supposed to be a 12-hour shift as the senior attending physician at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, which its employees refer to as “The Pitt.” Four new medical students join the staff that morning, and they’ve barely had time to be introduced before they’re forced to tend to a woman (Arun Storrs) who was pushed onto the subway tracks. The sight of her leg hanging on by a few strands of tissue makes one of the students faint in the OR.
The Pitt is all about the grit, as Robby constantly lobbies the place’s chief medical officer (Michael Hyatt) for more staffing so that patients aren’t kept for hours in the waiting room. One man threatens, “I’m gonna fucking destroy you on Yelp,” which is something that medical professionals in the old days didn’t have to worry about. When two middle-aged women start trading punches in the waiting room, the charge nurse (Katherine LaNasa) breaks them up: “This ain’t Philly! What’s the matter with you jagoffs?” Later, a very large man (Drew Powell) who has spent six hours waiting for treatment punches that charge nurse in the face and breaks her nose. (The show does not note this, but assaulting a health-care worker is a felony in Pennsylvania.)
I detect some of the melodramatic excesses that plagued ER in its later years. The show begins on the roof of the hospital with Robby trying to talk the night shift’s attending (Shawn Hatosy) out of jumping off: “If you kill yourself on my shift, that’s just rude.” We didn’t need that to convey the stress of The Pitt, and the repeated flashbacks to Robby losing his beloved mentor in the early days of COVID may be true to real life, but they interrupt the dramatic flow without giving us enough in return. Also true to life are Robby’s disputes with that chief medical officer, but they typically take place via email. It’s clumsy having them play out in conversations when the doctor is on duty.
The show’s emotional weight could have been borne by the new arrivals, who include a neurodivergent second-year (Taylor Dearden) who knows how to set a troublesome autistic patient at ease. A first-year named Santos (Isa Briones) is fresh out of medical school and confident to the point of recklessness, which irritates senior resident Langdon (Patrick Ball), who’s nicknamed “ER Ken” because of his good looks. He wears his daughter’s charm bracelet to work and is a decent mentor to the other students, and it’s gratifying to see him snark at a COVID-truther patient by offering her the option to undergo surgery with unmasked doctors. However, Langdon’s unprofessional streak causes him to harass Santos and eventually call her an arrogant idiot in front of five other doctors and nurses who have just seen her save a patient’s life, which causes Robby to take him aside and sternly tell him that humiliating a student in front of their peers is a poor teaching tool. Later, Santos finds disturbing evidence that Langdon is taking benzodiazepine intended for his patients. (The show does note that stealing medications from a hospital is also a felony.)
The unquestioned highlight of the show takes up all of Episodes 12 and 13 and much of 14, as a mass shooting at an outdoor music festival sends more than 100 victims into the trauma center. While the millennial doctors acquit themselves well and that chief medical officer steps up in a big way, it’s Robby who buckles under the strain and has a near-total breakdown in the pediatric ward, sobbing next to cartoon animals painted on the walls. That’s why Wyle received one of the show’s major Emmy nominations.
The Pitt will not follow Netflix’s pattern of taking two years or more to follow up debut seasons of hit shows. The first season will air this month on TNT while the second season begins streaming next January. While the platform allows the characters to curse and patients to appear unclothed for treatment, this is a throwback medical show that comes in time to take on a new set of issues. What a tonic that turns out to be.
