The Pitt review – real-time medical drama puts Noah Wyle back in the ER | American television

Tthe 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 busy hospital, was enough to annoy the estate of the hit show’s original creator, Michael Crichton. IN a wrongful lawsuithis widow, Sherri Crichton, termed it a “personal betrayal” and one that only happened when discussions between the two parties about an authorized ER reboot fell apart. The new series, which airs on HBO’s often substandard streamer Max (which is part of the same Warners empire that spawned ER) has a similarly chaotic energy, just relocated to a different city (this time, the titular clue, Pittsburgh, rather than Chicago). Despite protests from defensive leaders, the furor is understandable.

But as a viewer, especially one who avidly followed the long-running drama for the majority of its 15 seasons, the main reason for annoyance is that The Pitt just isn’t nearly as effective. Since ER premiered — a near-perfect modulation of personal and professional conflict — many, many other hospital shows followed, all of which failed to strike that balance quite as well. Grey’s Anatomy could have lasted longer—at 21 seasons, it’s starting to outlive most of television—but its best days were long, long ago, and its tendency to lean on sappy, Starbucks-soundtracked melodrama made it more to an acquired taste.

The Pitt arrives as streamers more enthusiastically commission the kind of milquetoast shows we more readily and negatively associate with the networks (just this week, the latest cop drama from Law & Order king Dick Wolf premieres on Amazon Prime over NBC ). It’s something of a straddler, stuck between prestige and procedural (I’ve grimly heard the word “prestige-ural” being used in the industry recently and refuse to ever use it again) and suffers as a result. The 24-Ape gimmick is that it takes place in real time, with each of the 15 hours (10 of which were made available to critics) being part of the same hellish shift, and it can’t quite figure out whether it’s going to be immersive verité or primetime soap.

Wyle, who played the fresh-faced medical student Carter in ER, has now, thanks to facial hair and the laws of time, become the grizzled head doctor in charge of what he calls “the pitt” despite complaints from above. It’s an inner-city teaching hospital, so in addition to dealing with a non-stop procession of patients and the impossible demands of a profit-over-person system, it also has to accommodate a group of eager first-day students. He remains haunted not just by working through the pandemic, but what was lost during it, specifically an important mentor who died. Over a long, and what we can imagine is textbook grueling, shift, we see how he, and the old and new around him, cope with the chaos.

The frantic format, which throws us right into the middle of the chaos of a darting, lightly structured series, helps in its finer moments to convey what pure hell it can really be to work in an underfunded and overburdened hospital. Interspersed between patients and various other fires that need to be put out, the loading of stress upon new stress upon still unfixed stress is successfully…stressful to watch. Wyle is an actor who has spent so much time in a hospital now that he often feels like he knows what he’s actually doing, and that makes him a calm, confident lead choice, utterly believable as both a manager who knows how to dish out salty and sweet and also as a man who at this stage has seen far too much to ever see.

The ER updates – post-Covid bruises, the increased pressure from upper management to be high-performing rather than personable – are welcome tweaks, but when it doesn’t focus on the hyper-specific details (as a layman, I was fully convinced by the show’s familiarity actual medicine), The Pitt can also be as rushed and pedestrian as the very worst of network television. It makes for a harrowing experience, where the show attempts gritty naturalism but thinly relies on clumsy, bland dialogue and an overabundance of headline-grabbing shock cases (how many current patients should one expect in one shift?) as well as, unfortunately, a cast of mostly subordinates actors who fail to make us believe any of this is remotely true. The cast is stacked with all-too-familiar archetypes (housewife, nurse, picky single mom with an edge, cocky intern with ambitions) who fail to distinguish themselves, and their brief bursts of stuffy, serious emotion never really come through.

The shadow of ER, a show that ended over 15 years ago, remains significant, and in trying to differentiate itself, The Pitt still finds itself stuck in it. Wells is never quite able to choose a lane and as such chooses the middle of the road.