THE PITT: THE 15-HOUR-SHIFT REDEFINING TV

Doctor drama The Pitt has been a massive hit in the USA, sweeping up awards and sparking endless discussion about mental health and society’s treatment of doctors and nurses. Now, it’s finally come to the UK. But what makes it so special?

The premise of the show is simple: every season covers one 15-hour shift in a busy Pittsburgh emergency room. Events play out in real time – the audience sees the doctors and nurses enter the hospital, treat patients, and then leave again. The audience also only sees what the doctors and nurses see. If a patient is sent elsewhere for treatment, their fate is (in most cases) simply never revealed. The hospital workers would never find out, so the audience doesn’t get to either. It sounds frustrating, but it works so well, putting audiences into shoes they may have never considered wearing.

The Pitt prides itself on presenting the realities of an ER that people would prefer not to think about, but which doctors have to think about every day. Births are shown in explicit detail, doctors are urinated on, one foot injury is so gruesome that a med student faints. Season two, episode five shows another clueless med student performing what’s known as a “manual bowel disimpaction” which goes exactly how you’d expect. Is the scene darkly funny? Yes – but emphasis on the dark.

These doctors don’t only deal with the worst of bodily fluids, they have to deal with an endless stream of death after death after death. A episode in season one sees the team shaken up by the drowning death of a child – but there’s no time to dwell on it, it’s a case of taking a mere moment to recalibrate and then it’s onto the next patient.

The show makes it clear that this is simply no way for a person to be living, and it does this primarily via the character of attending ER doc Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle, who is also the show’s executive producer. Robby is arguably one of the most controversial characters on television right now. He’s depressed and clearly suicidal, but all his flaws are amplified considering what a position of power he’s in. He does great things, saves lives – but he’s hard on himself and the doctors working below him. He relentlessly rides Dr Mohan (Supriya Gamesh) after she suffers a panic attack at work, despite the fact that he himself suffered a panic attack when dealing with the victims of a mass shooting.

As controversial as Dr Robby is, Dr Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) is far and away the most polarizing character on the show. She is brash, arrogant and obnoxious – but the shreds of her backstory make it clear how she ended up that way.

Part of her arc revolves on her blowing the whistle on another doctor, Dr Langdon (Patrick Ball) for his drug misuse, and even though Langdon goes to rehab and rebuilds his life, Santos refuses to forgive him.

No Easy Heroes

It’s impossible to point at a character on The Pitt and label them “good” or “bad”. Neurodivergent ER doctor Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden) may be the show’s unlikely darling, but even she drifts into flashes of selfishness and control that give the dynamic an edge.  Med student James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) makes a terrible first impression when he arrives for his first day in the ER, but as the day proceeds it’s clear he has a more human side. All the characters in The Pitt feel like real people.

This commitment to realism has had interesting effects. Media critics have latched onto the fact that the online fandom for The Pitt often respond to the characters in ways the writers most likely didn’t intend. Robby may be unyielding with Mohan, certainly, yet to some viewers this severity shades into an abrasive misogyny. Meanwhile Santos, for her part, is so maladroit in human dealings that many viewers dismiss her outright as an unyielding bully, and a figure whose rough edges seem beyond redemption. Continued below…

In fandom there’s also a lot of focus on romantic relationships where the show doesn’t focus on these at all. This “shipping” culture often cancels out all other discussion, with fans focused on relationships between, among others, King and Langdon, or Robby and his more optimistic, naïve protégé Dr Whittaker (Gerran Howell). Shipping culture is not unique to Pitt fandom, but some think fans are setting themselves up for disappointment when the curtain never actually falls on a big, dramatic kiss between their favourites.

While season two was ongoing in the USA, Slashfilm published an article titled, “Many The Pitt Fans Are Proving That Yes, It’s Possible To Be Bad At Watching A TV Show”. Author Chris Evangelista noted the black-and-white thinking fans applied to the characters, commenting, “At one point during season 2, Dr. Santos dozed off at a desk while trying to compose some charting notes. This led Dr. Robby to firmly – but not cruelly – wake her up by raising his voice. This action was seen as tantamount to homicide on Twitter, with some claiming Robby was abusing his staff. To be sure, Robby has problems — he’s a complex character, and a running theme in the show is how he’s falling apart emotionally. But seemingly every character on “The Pitt” is complex and flawed in some way; that’s what makes them interesting! Even if you prefer Santos to Robby, an attending physician reprimanding one his doctors for being asleep on the job is not the war crime some people made it out to be.”

It’s no wonder some commentators are frustrated, because The Pitt just simply isn’t a black-and-white show. It presents hospital life as it really is in order to make a point about what society asks of healthcare professionals. The difficult characters, drug abuse and panic attacks are all part of that point.

Wyle spoke in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter about how he considers The Pitt to be “responsible storytelling”. He highlighted how he was shaken to hear that during filming, a doctor known to a crew member tfook his own life, just like the character of Robby had been planning to do. “That just underscored, to me, like how tragic [it] would be if Robby went through with it,” he told the publication. “We need to really explore this. We really need to take this all the way down to the studs to shout our comment.”

The Pitt is shouting comments right now about not only mental health, but issues including abortion, poor treatment of nurses, the Trump administration, and the terrifyingly high cost of healthcare in the USA. It’s a show that may be misunderstood, but is vitally important all the same.

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