At first the Max show, The Pitt, seems like a remake of ER, the ought-era television hospital procedural that launched George Clooney’s career. Noah Wyle, who played fresh-faced John Carter on ER, is all grown up as The Pitt’s chief emergency room doctor, Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. The pacing is similar, with wave after wave of bloody, unconscious, and confused patients surging through the ER, attended to by a thin layer of medical students, residents, nurses, and specialists.
As the show unfolds, over a single very long day, it reveals a more nuanced storyline, one that mirrors the social, economic, and institutional cracks that bedevil America. A muscular, white, 40-ish male, after impatiently pacing for hours in a waiting room that bobs like a Noah’s ark of gender, race, and caste, ends up punching a head nurse in frustration. There are multiple deaths, or near deaths, from fentanyl masquerading as a more benign study-aid or party drug. A mother struggles to get her teenage son mental help before he goes murderously psycho.
It’s a bit like a zombie movie, with the wounded and afflicted banging at the emergency room doors, demanding access to the skilled brains inside to relieve their pain. There’s both a thrill and satisfaction in witnessing competent doctors mostly doing what’s needed to save lives, even souls, sometimes their own. But the parallel, not so hidden, story is that we, the zombies, are at the precipice of overwhelming the last sane system standing between us and utter devastation.
Flashbacks to COVID-19 remind us that not so long ago it took all-hands-on-deck to barely contain a voracious pandemic. Still, 1.2 million Americans died, with another more than 100 million impacted in long- or short-term ways. The Pitt is pit-of-the-stomach terrifying because it suggests that our present reality may be even worse. We are the angry white man who feels that the government has put us last in line for essential services. We are the parents of the teenager who took the wrong poison pill or who’s looking to self-sooth by harming others. We are the innocent bystanders at a concert, having a good time, when very bad things happen, to us or our neighbors.
Meanwhile, that thin medical line embodies the present primacy of individual identity, clashing with the need to effectively operate as a whole. Wyle, ethnicity-less in his role 20 years ago, is now firmly Jewish. His student-colleagues are immaturely gifted, on the spectrum, being ankle-monitored for harassment, and drug-addicted. These traits aren’t background information, they’re featured, as superpowers, vulnerabilities to be accommodated or leveraged, square pegs that must be compassionately fashioned into roundish holes.
An underlying theme is the cascading tragedies caused by a constant need or desire to generate profits, along with patient jockeying to be seen first, or escape being seen at all.
The ER doctors and nurses, no matter how capable, cannot cure all that ails us. The Pitt might prompt a viewer to want to visit an ER, not for assistance, but to give a health care provider a hug. But the show suggests that we can’t just hug it out. The real way to express our appreciation for essential workers, our first and last line of defense, is to take responsibility for our part in stirring the chaos, working to fix what’s going on outside hospital walls. We should all aspire to be as competent and caring as what’s depicted by the show’s actors. Who would have thought that it’d need to be said: science is real.