The Pitt, the show everyone should be watching
If you didn't know, I'm from Pittsburgh. The Pitt, if you will.
Hello all!
I know I just recently wrote about television. But I just can’t help myself and I need to write more about my new favorite show, the Max1 medical drama that takes place in my hometown of Pittsburgh, The Pitt. Initially, I figured I would write this a little after the fact because I’m kinda bad at writing this newsletter on a deadline lol. But I was so hooked on this show that I was able to fully catch up right on time for the season finale.
I figure plenty of you haven’t seen The Pitt yet (hopefully this newsletter changes that), so I’ll try to keep the first part of this post spoiler free before moving into more dissection of the characters and themes of the show.
I’m so excited to share this with you. Here are my thoughts on The Pitt.
The Pitt, season 1
For starters, I will say that I never got around to watching medical dramas. I know I mentioned this in last week’s post, but I feel like I needed to repeat it because there can be a ton of gore and jargon that can get in the way for me. The Pitt changed that. Possibly it’s because of the Pittsburgh setting (more on that in a sec), but I truly think the gore and jargon take a bit of a backseat to some of the brilliant filmmaking that is on display. What makes The Pitt such an engaging watch for me is its editing, blocking and cinematography.
As I explained in my Severance post, I found the show to be frustrating because it was so beautiful, but there was little meaning behind the beauty. The cinematography didn’t have any reason to look as good as it did. Usually, that’s a compliment, but much of the look and feel of the show feels hollow and doesn’t add to the larger themes. This is not the case with The Pitt. So much of the show has blocking where the interpersonal dynamics of the doctors, nurses and patients all become clear. When two characters are having an argument or dispute, you can have two nurses in the background overhearing everything. Additionally, there are plenty of times when doctors are standing in a wide shot alone as fellow nurses rush by, or how the camera will just follow one stressful encounter with a patient to a whole separate scene, breaking any form of relief for the viewers. The handheld cinematography of the show also inherently adds to the stressful nature. It is not precious with the camera, making it line with how anxious the doctors are. Each cut feels precise and reveals new information. I always feel like I need to perk up once the camera picks its next subject. So much of “prestige television” has a beautiful gowns energy; namely, looks pretty, means nothing. The Pitt is a sharp and welcome inverse of that.At this point, I will personally hand the Emmy to Noah Wyle myself for his lead role as Dr. Robby. Wyle looks the part as the camera always catches the wrinkles near his eyes. We’ve only been with him for a day, especially on a crappy day where it’s the four-year anniversary of his mentor’s death during COVID-19, but you can tell he’s been doing this for a lifetime and it’s starting to catch up with him. The way Wyle reacts to patients being stubborn or one of his staffers fucking up is a mixture of annoyance/anger or genuine sadness that’s about to boil over into annoyance and anger. Every little inconvenience seems like it’s going to make Dr. Robby crack, but it never does until it actually does later in the season. And when you see those moments, you can’t look away. I might just steal the trophy from anyone who wins it and is not named Noah Wyle. If you aren’t convinced, I’ll have more about him down below.
I can’t, of course, leave out the rest of the stellar cast2 from this season. There are plenty of amazing moments from doctors and nurses who get just glimpses of moments. But I have to give some extra kudos to Taylor Dearden, the daughter of Bryan Cranston, for her role as Dr. Mel King, our neurodivergent queen who knows when to mentally reset and talk to patients that neurotypical doctors cannot. Some of the best moments of the show are the quiet scenes, where Dr. Mel sits on the stairs and looks at her phone, which is showing nothing but a lava lamp. These moments are never explained, but only make her so much more interesting as a character. I also wanna mention Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif), who wears an ankle monitor, struggles with her kid being present in the latter half of the season and deals with some of the more woman-hating patients in the hospital.
I want to reiterate. As Obama would say, uuhhhh, let me be clear. I very well may have such a strong love for this show because it takes place in Pittsburgh. And while the show may not exactly fully ingratiate itself to the ways of the city (needed a tiny bit more Pittsburghese), it had some really nice touches for being shot in a sound stage in Los Angeles. Mentioning some of the towns and neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill or South Park is nice, but some of the more interesting stuff came from where exactly they shot in Pittsburgh. The crew spent three days of shooting around Allegheny General Hospital, which is located on the North Shore and gives you a nice view of downtown.
This detail is critical because you can get a view of the tallest building in the city, U.S. Steel Tower. The largest tenant in the building is UPMC, the company with its logo at the top of the tower and one of the largest health care providers in the country. So in many ways, it’s a company that lurks over a place like Allegheny General Hospital, plenty of whose patients don’t typically have the luxury to have great health insurance or whose doctors have inadequate support and funds from the higher-ups. This location-based specificity leads to one of the key themes of The Pitt: privatized health care. With this hospital running on trying to make a buck with a lack of funding, tons of patients are left waiting for hours without care and ER teams are understaffed. On the day we get to view the titular Pitt, the ER of the Trauma Medical Center, we see the consequences of what happens when this is how your healthcare system is.(This is where the spoilers begin) The show has thrived on being totally committed to being the medical drama version of 24, where each episode is an hour of the day. Obviously, this season (and this day) have had A LOT of shit happen, including a mass shooting where nearly every victim came through the doors of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. But the show does a mostly good job of keeping you feeling like that this is genuinely a day. There are moments where you can see procedures or family medical decisions are sped up, but The Pitt leaves so many moments unspoken and quiet, to the point that it caught me off guard that I wasn’t having some stupid exposition poured down my throat. Yes, there are times when that isn’t the case — when some of the nurses read off stats about how incidents of patients attacking doctors have gone up since the pandemic. But that feels like small potatoes because the show lets you live in these moments of discomfort.
Which leads me to the season finale. We’ve seen Dr. Robby fully breakdown in episode 13, and we’ve seen parents infuriatingly deny their kids critical medical procedures and vice versa. To put it simply, these doctors and nurses have been to hell and back. And while the climactic moments are over, and the main points of stress like Dr. McKay’s arrest for destroying her ankle monitor evaporate in a matter of moments, there are still patients to be treated.
The season finale feels like an epilogue, but it also comes to be an examination of what exactly these doctors do now that they’re off the clock from the worst day of their professional careers and probably their lives. The responses vary, with Dr. Mel having a nice moment with her sister while Dr. Samira Mohan, nicknamed Slo-Mo for taking her time with patients, crashes from the adrenaline rush in tears, with shots potentially alluding to self-inflicted wounds or something of that nature3. But once again, the most interesting perspective is Dr. Robby. In this last episode, he has to deal with parents who refuse to have their Measles kid receive a lumbar puncture.
Since Dr. Robby has been through an emotional nightmare today, he is clearly not the best-equipped to handle dissenting parents, even if they are totally misguided with bullshit info from the internet. This sadly plays out where Dr. Robby not so subtly leads the father, who feels a little more open to the puncture than the mother, to a room full of the shooting victims from the prior episodes. It may not come as a shock considering Dr. Robby is, again, not doing too hot. But it is surprising that the last episode of the season will leave us in these moments of character regression. Yes, there are some scenes near the end of the episode that leave you with some sense of closure, but all in all, most of the characters are going to be scarred for life by this day, and no speech that says it’ll be alright will change that.
I’ll end on what I think is the most poignant moment of the episode. It comes from when Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones), an intern with a confrontational bedside manner with patients, finds fourth-year med student Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) sleeping in one of the empty rooms upstairs in the hospital. Once she realizes Whitaker doesn’t have a place to stay, she offers him the extra bedroom she has. This feels like a classic storytelling move, akin to the ending of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, where we finally learn two of the jurors’ names. These characters, along with the audience, learn key character details in the closing moments of a story. It hits harder for me and it only grows my appreciation for all these characters.
And the best part about The Pitt is that season two is coming back in January. I can’t wait to be with these folks again.
That’ll be all for today!
Cheers!
For anyone who still isn’t caught up with the lingo of all the streaming services. Just remember this is the HBO one. I don’t blame anyone for not knowing, this streamer has a really boring name!
Big shoutouts to third-year med student Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez), who in the first episode claims she earned her spot here and is a prodigy but also has a mother who works as a doctor in the hospital. She had plenty of great, quiet, contemplative scenes where you can see she’s starting to question if she wants to keep doing this, even though it’s day one for her.
Another shoutout to Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), our drug addict king. He’ll come back even though Dr. Robby wants to kill him after stealing drugs from patients.
Last shoutout to charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), who takes a sucker punch in the face from a racist and sexist patient and powers through the rest of the night. She was tough as nails and definitely reminded me of people from Pittsburgh.
That’s my working theory, but it honestly could be anything. All I know is that I saw her wash off blood. It very well could be her washing off blood that she got from being around ER patients all damn day.