‘The Pitt’ Premiere Recap – Max’s Real-Time Medical Drama Is As Good As It Gets

The premiere of The Pitt covers 07:00-08:00 and 08:00-09:00 of a single continuous shift at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center; it’s a two-episode, two-hour span of drama that turns out to be long enough to make it feel like you’ve been punched in the stomach, poked in the eyes, spun around a few times and asked to walk a tightrope over a pool of sharks. Everything about the show seems designed to stress you out. It’s about as good a medical drama as I’ve seen in quite some time.

The secret is twofold, I think. There’s a bluntness here that feels almost remarkable in the context of wibbly contemporary medical dramas that are all about tiptoeing around sensitive issues and scoring social brownie points by making an enormously overblown song and dance about all the medical staff being on the right side of moral history. One of the first scenes here is a back-and-forth between the protagonist, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, and a colleague who is taking a break to teeter on the edge of the hospital’s roof. I left the scene not being sure about whether he was seriously contemplating suicide or not.

That’s a weird headspace to sit in, but The Pitt leaves you there. You don’t have time to dwell on it because then the other secret weapon kicks in – an overwhelming string of introductions to junior and senior doctors, patients, and a hospital administrator who makes it clear the whole place is barely holding together. As if we couldn’t see that for ourselves.

The real-time gimmick doesn’t feel like a gimmick in this context; within these two episodes, I’d started to feel like I was on shift, pulled this way and that by a never-ending series of crises, never managing to snatch even the briefest reprieve. After a while, I’d got a sense of the key characters: Nebraska farm boy Whitaker, quirky VA transplant Dr. King, and particularly Dr. Victoria Javadi, the daughter of two of the hospital’s legendary doctors who is discovering pretty quickly that being book smart doesn’t mean being able to remain conscious when a woman’s leg is crushed to mulch by a train. This is called a “degloving” injury, by the way. Google it.

After a brief siesta Javadi is sent to accompany Dr. McKay, a very lovely single mother who is also, it’s later revealed, wearing an ankle monitor. More to come on that in subsequent episodes, I suppose. Meanwhile, Dr. Collins is hiding a pregnancy, Dr. Langdon is being impossibly handsome, and Dr. Mohan is trying to keep some sense of empathy and care in a facility that is being run ragged by quotas, numbers, and less-than-satisfactory reports of the team’s bedside manner.

A still from The Pitt | Image via WarnerMedia

Along with the woman now missing the bottom of her leg, there are a slew of other little cases introduced in The Pitt Episodes 1 and 2, from an older guy with gallstones to a kid who has accidentally overdosed on weed gummies, to a woman who has induced vomiting in herself to get her laconic teenage son to the hospital so she can tell someone about the “death list” of female students she found in his bedroom. It’s a lot, to an aggressive extent, but it’s really the details – Whitaker stealing a packet sandwich off the ER food cart, for instance, or King reciting “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion to calm herself down – that really color the setting.

Robby is our anchor in all this. Noah Wyle plays him as a man who is extremely seasoned in keeping up a happy, jokey façade, but he’s visibly close to the bone. It’s mentioned a couple of times that this particular day is the anniversary of his mentor’s death – he died during the pandemic, which we return to very briefly in a couple of PPE-dense flashbacks – and Robby wears the stress in the lines around his eyes, which his smile never seems to reach. He’s Max Goodwin if everything went wrong instead of right, but his refusal to play by the rules of the administrators and willingness to take medical risks when he’s sure he’s right doesn’t feel performative. It’s more like he’s a very good and experienced doctor who is genuinely sick to death of being one.

You can see why. The ER is teeming with people, constantly; the suffering lingers in the air. Episode 1 of The Pitt isn’t necessarily enough to see the toll this takes, but even by the end of Episode 2, which only chronicles the second hour of the shift, there has been more than enough heartbreak to go around. Robby is forced to tell a couple that their son is braindead, then he’s forced to ventilate an elderly man against his wishes because his children flex their power of attorney to keep him alive by force rather than deal with losing him. Even Whitaker loses the gallstone patient, who had quietly died in the corridor he was wheeled into without anyone noticing. The inexperienced, ill-fitting, well-intentioned intern continuing to give the guy CPR while the more experienced doctors sadly indulge him despite knowing the efforts are fruitless is one of the more quietly crushing moments of television I’ve seen in a long while.

There’s so much more to come that I’m genuinely terrified at the kind of stress The Pitt might provide. Its premiere is exceptional in how easily it situates us in this nexus of suffering, allowing glimmers of hope and compassion to creep through just long enough for the inevitable tragedies to wound all the deeper. It’s an expert, adult medical drama of a kind you don’t really get anymore. I can’t wait to see more of it – I think.