The reunion of ER showrunner John Wells, writer R Scott Gemmill and longtime star Noah Wyle for The Pitt, a new drama also set in the heart of a hectic hospital, was enough to irk the estate of the hit show’s original creator, Michael Crichton. In an aggrieved lawsuit, his widow, Sherri Crichton, labelled it a “personal betrayal” and one that only happened when discussions between the two parties for an authorised ER reboot fell apart. The new series airing on HBO’s often substandard streamer Max (which is part of the same Warners empire that birthed ER) has a similarly chaotic energy, just relocated to a different city (this time it’s, title clue, Pittsburgh, rather than Chicago). Despite protestations from defensive execs, one can understand the furore.
But as a viewer, especially one who keenly followed the long-running drama for the majority of its 15 seasons, the main cause of bother is that The Pitt just isn’t anywhere near as effective. Since ER premiered – a near perfect modulation of personal and professional conflict – many, many other hospital-set shows followed, all of them failing to manage that balance quite as well. Grey’s Anatomy might have lasted longer – at 21 seasons, it’s starting to outlast most things on television – but its best days were long, long ago and its tendency to lean on sappy, Starbucks-soundtracked melodrama made it more of an acquired taste.
The Pitt arrives as streamers are more enthusiastically commissioning the kind of milquetoast shows that we more readily, and more negatively, associate with the networks (just this week the latest cop drama from Law & Order king Dick Wolf is premiering on Amazon Prime rather than NBC). It’s something of a straddler, stuck between prestige and procedural (I’ve grimly heard the word “prestige-ural” recently being used in the industry and am refusing to ever use it again) and suffers as a result. The 24-aping gimmick is that it takes place in real time, each of the 15 hours (10 of which were made available for critics) being part of the same hellish shift, and it can’t quite figure out if it’s going for immersive verité or primetime soap.
Wyle, who played fresh-faced medical student Carter in ER, has now, thanks to facial hair and the laws of time, become the grizzled senior doctor, in charge of what he, despite complaints from above, calls “the pitt”. It’s an inner-city teaching hospital, so as well as dealing with a non-stop procession of patients and the impossible demands of a profit-over-person system, also has to corral a group of eager first-day students. He remains haunted not just by working through the pandemic but also what was lost during, specifically an important mentor who died. Over a long, and what we can imagine is textbook strenuous, shift, we see how he, and those old and new around him, cope with the chaos.
The frenetic format, throwing us right into the middle of the mayhem for a darting, lightly structured series, does in its finer moments help convey what sheer hell it can really be, working in an underfunded and overstretched hospital. Criss-crossing between patients, and various other fires that need putting out, the layering of stress upon new stress upon still unfixed stress is successfully … stressful to watch. Wyle is an actor who has spent so long now in a hospital that he must often feel like he knows what he’s actually doing and it makes him a calm, confident choice of lead, entirely believable as both a manager who knows how to dole out salt and sweet and also as a man who’s, at this stage, seen far too much to ever unsee.
The ER updates – the post-Covid bruising, the increased pressure from senior management to be high-performing rather than personable – are welcome tweaks but when it’s not focusing on the hyper-specifics (as a layman, I was fully convinced by the show’s grasp of actual medicine), The Pitt can also be as hackneyed and pedestrian as the very worst of network television. It makes for a jarring experience, the show attempting gritty naturalism but with thin writing reliant on clumsy, bland dialogue and an overkill of headline-ready shock cases (just how many topical patients should one expect in a shift?) as well as, sadly, a group of mostly subpar actors failing to make us believe that any of this is remotely real. The cast is stacked with overly familiar archetypes (house mother charge nurse, plucky single mom with an edge, cocky intern with ambitions) who fail to distinguish themselves and their brief bursts of prodding, earnest emotion never truly pierce through.
The shadow of ER, a show that finished over 15 years ago, remains considerable and in trying to differentiate itself, The Pitt still finds itself stuck within it. Wells is never quite able to pick a lane and, as such, opts for the middle of the road.
The Pitt starts today on Max in the US and Binge in Australia with further episodes launching on Thursdays. A UK date has yet to be announced
