Max’s new show is not HBO. It’s television.

Left for dead just a few years ago, network television sprung back to life in 2024. As streaming providers cut back on their original content, users turned to the comfort of long-running shows that could record them for weeks or months instead of a night or two. (I loved the second season of Netflix The Diplomatbut its six episodes barely lasted me as long as a one-way flight.) CBS’s Matlock reboot pulled monster numbers and ABCs High potentialstarring Kaitlin Olson as an LAPD janitor who also happens to be a crime-solving genius, drew the network’s highest ratings for a new series in six years. While The bear stumbled under the weight of his ambitions, billboards too Doctor Odyssey promised a frothy good time, brazenly touting the cruise ship medical drama’s “Big Deck Energy.”

There couldn’t be a better time to revive ISwhich transformed primetime drama in the mid-1990s, turning George Clooney from a veteran of short-lived sitcoms into a major star and sex symbol. One of the rare pre-Sopranos show to be defined by its visual style – and one of the first to make the jump to widescreen – the show used a mobile camera to snap and dart around the chaotic emergency room of a Chicago hospital, plunging viewers into a world , where the life-or-death drama could come through the swinging doors at any moment. Although it was as much a ratings powerhouse in its time as Seinfeld or Friends, IS hasn’t found the same audience among today’s viewers, but that just makes it ripe for rediscovery, an old show that still has the potential to feel new.

The Pitt is not quite ER: 30 years latereven though it was created by IS veteran R. Scott Gemmill, produced by IS showrunner John Wells, and stars ERs Noah Wyle, who played medical student-turned-attending doctor John Carter for the first 11 seasons. It started that way, but after failing to come to terms with the estate of Michael Crichton, who created IS and scripted its pilot episode, the Max series creators changed course and set their show in a different city’s emergency room, with Wyle playing an entirely different emergency medicine specialist named Michael Robinavitch, the overworked head of the ER at an overwhelmed Pittsburgh hospital. Exactly how similar the two shows are is the subject of ongoing legal proceedingsbut if Dr. Robby, as his patients call him, is no John Carter, it’s impossible not to think of him as you watch Wyle juggle incoming patients, shift from command to compassion as he instructs anxious medical students and reassures the families. the sick and wounded. His sorrows may be different, but the look is the same, the eyes full of focus and concern that you hope to see staring back at you in the scariest moments of your life.

Elaborate Steadicam footage is no longer such a TV novelty, then The Pitt is built around a different gimmick: Each of its approximately hour-long episodes covers an hour in real time, with the entire 15-episode season spanning a single hectic workday that starts at 7 in the morning. watch, the show rolls out on Max one week at a time after a two-episode premiere on January 9. The format is suitable for mid-grade pulp such as 24with its ticking clocks and relentlessly convoluted drama, but it’s a less secure fit for a show that wants us to empathize with its characters rather than just pump our fists every time they defuse a bomb. The writers use the real-time conceit to stretch out storylines for multiple episodes/hours: the parents who keep ordering more tests to delay the realization that their teenage son’s accidental fentanyl overdose has left him brain dead; the burly man in the waiting room who grows increasingly short-tempered and begins muttering racial slurs as other patients are triaged in front of him. A fresh-faced medical student (Gerran Howell) keeps getting covered in dirt and struggles with the machine that dispenses fresh scrubs; another (Isa Briones) pursues what at first seems like a minor concern over minor irregularities in the hospital’s supply of painkillers until the problem comes up enough times that you suspect she may be onto something. Meanwhile, Robby struggles to hold it together on the fourth anniversary of his beloved mentor’s death, for reasons that remain unclear after the 10th. The Pitt‘s 15 hours, he blames himself for.

Even in binge-watch mode, the slowly unraveling mystery of Robby’s guilt becomes more distracting than tantalizing, an attempt to milk a conventional character out of a structure hostile to it. The Pitt is in some ways a show at odds with itself, trying to cross the long-term storytelling of the prestige TV era with the more immediate pleasures of a network procedural: the mysterious illness cleared up by the final commercial break, the entertaining non- critical damage that eases the mood. And while the doctors of IS‘s County General was constantly pairing off and breaking up, there isn’t much room for romance in a show that only covers a single shift and rarely departs from the hospital floor. There were times when, for a few minutes, I would have killed an orderly awkward flirtation with a desk nurse.

The Pitt wants to be all things to all audiences, but it’s a clumsy hybrid, not sophisticated enough to be a great show, not satisfying enough to be fun. It makes the simple act of constructing a traditional episode—an A story, a B story, maybe some comic relief—feel like a disappearing art, and if Wells, the former showrunner of The West Wingcan’t handle it, one has to wonder who can. There are moments when The Pitt trying something new, but it’s best when it’s in a well-worn groove. It’s not HBO. But it’s not quite TV either.