Checking in on The Pitt

The Pitt, Max’s new medical drama series, sits comfortably within a tradition of television that includes ER, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere and House. But as it reaches the midpoint of its first season (of what I hope will be many), it's carving out an identity of its own. It's exceptionally propulsive and interesting — as well as moving and emotional.

The staff is under great strain, none more than Dr. Robby (his full name is Michael Rabinovitch), played by Noah Wyle, who's the senior attending physician on duty and effectively in charge of much of the staff. On this day, Dr. Robby is welcoming a new set of young doctors and trainees to the ER, including Dr. Melissa King (Taylor Dearden), who's been working at the VA; Trinity Santos (Isa Briones); Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell), who keeps having to change his scrubs after getting various fluids all over him; and Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez), a very young medical student who was effectively a prodigy and who lives in the shadow of her mother, one of the hospital's most prominent doctors.

The cast also includes Tracy Ifeachor as Heather Collins, one of Dr. Robby's closest colleagues; Fiona Dourif as Cassie McKay, a resident whose past turns out to be complicated; and Katherine LaNasa as Dana Evans, the ER's charge nurse and — according to Dr. Robby — the person who really runs the place.

What has made the show sing in this first half of the season is the mix of fascinating medical details and stories, like the appearance of an automatic CPR machine that a real doctor talked to Vulture about this week, and moments where everything slows down and character beats predominate. Both the story of an overdose that led to a young man's brain death and the story of two adult children struggling to accept the death of their elderly father stepped back from the details of medical interventions and jargon and focused on how overstressed, adrenaline-filled doctors and nurses deal with people who are quietly experiencing the worst moments of their lives.

It feels, too, like The Pitt understands how enormous the pressure becomes on the people who work in this environment. Wyle has an excellent grasp of Dr. Robby's frustration as he tries to teach young doctors and get patients out of danger while also handling long and delicate situations that land in his lap. Early on, a woman admits that she faked a reason to be admitted to the ER in the hopes that someone would do something about the son who brought her, because she fears he may become violent and she's desperate for help. Should an emergency room doctor be in charge of this? Probably not. Is the ER the only place she could think of? In this case, yes — and there are other stories that play out similarly. The ER is, in many places, the facility of last resort for a wide variety of problems, not just broken bones and strokes.

And yet, among all this chaos, there is room for things that are funny (poor Whitaker, trying to work the machine that's supposed to dispense clean scrubs). And there is room for things that are emotionally satisfying, like Dr. King's ability to treat patients by figuring out what they need as human beings. (Taylor Dearden, as King, is really wonderful and distinctive — as are most of the actors playing the young doctors.)

It's not easy bringing new life to the doctor show (or the cop show or the detective show). Surface signifiers, like a patient rolling in on a gurney or someone being shocked into a normal heart rhythm, can feel familiar. But they're doing something interesting with The Pitt, in that the story feels sympathetic to hospital staff and also to patients, to the people inside the healthcare system and the people trying to navigate it. In my own visits to the ER, I've been treated with a lot of kindness and calm, and I've also wondered why the heck it was taking so long and why the insurance paperwork was so infuriating. All these things can be valid. The Pitt is expansively compassionate in that sense, even while it is sometimes devastatingly sad.