Welcome Back to The Pitt, America’s Bastion of Medical Competence
Warning: Contains spoilers for Season 1 of The Pitt
The début season of the HBO Max drama The Pitt kicks off the way a lot of workplace pilots do: new characters arrive, and their introductions to their various colleagues and to the processes of their job efficiently bring the audience up to speed. The new staffers here are mostly medical students, because Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center is a teaching hospital. The students will spend their very stressful shift on a “see one, do one, teach one” rotation through a wide range of ailments and crises, but they’re not the only ones who learn about medicine through the cases they treat. As we pick up with Season 2 of The Pitt this week, much of the satisfaction of the show comes from the specificity and realism of the medical plotlines: every patient offers viewers a concentrated dose of the kind of hard-earned, scientifically sound, prosocial expertise that is under attack politically right now.
Medical narratives on television have a long history, for obvious reasons: episodic TV requires high stakes in a story that can run its course over just a few days, and the generally short relationship between a doctor and patient perfectly meets the brief. The sub-genre of emergency medicine is even better suited, since patients tend to be seeking care for injuries that (a) can’t wait for an appointment with their primary care providers and (b) are gnarly in a way that makes for good TV. ER, which premiered on NBC in 1994, made 15 seasons’ worth of drama out of these core concepts and is The Pitt’s most direct antecedent, in that they share a star in Noah Wyle and Executive Producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells. (Precisely how closely the two shows are related is a matter of legal dispute: the estate of ER creator Michael Crichton is suing Warner Bros. Television for essentially producing an ER sequel without appropriately compensating Crichton’s heirs.)
Medical procedurals were a thriving genre when the COVID pandemic hit, requiring all the shows about doctors to acknowledge it somehow. The Good Doctor, an ABC drama Freddie Highmore headlined as a surgeon with autism, returned for its fourth season in fall 2020 with a covid-focused two-part premiere; then it infamously moved on, prefacing Episode 3 with an out-of-character Highmore explaining that what viewers were about to see “portrays our hope for the future — a future where no one will have to wear a mask, or take other steps to stay safe from COVID.” Elsewhere on ABC, Grey’s Anatomy — counter to showrunner Krista Vernoff’s initial impulse to ignore the pandemic — gave its titular Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) COVID, putting her in a coma that allowed several deceased characters to return and visit Meredith in her dreams.
The Pitt decidedly does not take place in a reality where everyone’s moved on from COVID. The pandemic is a trauma that Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Wyle) still hasn’t healed from: We meet the senior attending physician on the anniversary of his beloved mentor’s COVID death, which occurred in the ER where Robby still works. Among the knock-on effects of the crisis — including a rise in violence against medical professionals, a real-life problem so prevalent that even the NBC sitcom St. Denis Medical built a recent episode around it — is the likelihood of patients distrusting established science. In The Pitt’s first season Hillary (Kerry Knuppe), a mother who declined to vaccinate her son Flynn (Ivan Fraser), brings him in with measles; when Flynn needs a lumbar puncture due to possible acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, disinformation she’s found online convinces her to refuse. Robby and his staff have just barely finished handling mass casualties from a shooting at a music festival — now they have to convince a parent that they know better than she does about a disease that has surged back after virtual elimination, thanks to people like her who’ve made an increasingly unreliable Google their PCP.
Season 1 of The Pitt had a lot to teach those of us already convinced of the importance of vaccines. We learned how a clinician’s biases might blind them to the agonizing symptoms of sickle cell disease; that illicit Xanax could be laced with a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl; the importance of organ donation; to be on guard against live vermin that might be brought into the ER in a patient’s coat.
