So, if you’ve been around here a while, you know I’ve been rewatching ER. The MVP hit of NBC procedurals, circa 1994-2009, ER is like six hundred hours long, so this is taking me forever. But I’ve rounded the corner into the final third, which contains the majority of the episodes I’ve never seen; I have no idea when I “officially” dropped out, back in the ’00s, but it would’ve been around now. Carter’s in the Congo, Noah Wyle’s episode commitment per season is starting to drop (18 in season 10; I think he’s down to, like, 4 or 5 in season 11), and soon he’ll be into official eminence grise status, while Jess Bhamra and Uncle Jesse and Chad McCann, the Coolest Boy In School, mind the ER for its last few calamities.
Jump forward twenty years, and here’s The Pitt, and everyone — myself included — and certainly Michael Crichton’s widow — wanted to call the new show ER II: The ERening, and see Carter rise fully reanimated from the salty earth beneath Cook County Hospital, same dude, different clothes, like that time Seth Bullock reincarnated as Raylan Givens and just kept shooting people. Except, it’s not that. One is not — I think — ten minutes into The Pitt before one realizes we didn’t just not get that, we arguably got something better.
The other day I noted how odd it is that three of the best television series of all time dropped within a few months of each other; and then I remembered that a season of Severance also happened in this timeframe, too, so wowsers. Good luck Emmy voters, I guess. Regardless of what sturm und drang churns Hollywood right now, we are in an art-form-defining era of excellence in the category of what television can and should do.
I hope I’m not overpraising The Pitt; just, I can’t remember how long it’s been since I saw television that was so joyously, intrinsically television, carried off at this level of polish. It’s like the streaming wars incubated a theory for weekly procedurals in all of our collective unconscious in absentia, and then The Pitt showed up full-formed to deliver. (It’s wild that it came from HBO WhateverTheFuckIt’sCalled; but, I’m assuming Zaslav Suicide Pact paid for the set, so kudos.)
Well, it’s time to get into The Pitt for this newsletter. You know the deal from Andor: first one’s free, next two will go out to paid subscribers only. You should subscribe! It’s only $5 per year, although I’ll admit in advance that I’m thinking of putting it up to $6 in 2026.
7am — Crash gets her nickname
We’re not going to talk much about the Crichton vs. Pitt lawsuit, but there are a few points of connection to unpack, which I’ll get to. I’ll also mention that I read the teleplay for this first episode — it’s on the Deadline site — just in case it was hiding any struckthrough text along the lines of “Dr. Ross enters, carrying Carol Hathaway.” (There was not.)
What’s interesting about that pilot script is how it functions foremost as a selling document for the show, and far less as an actual teleplay for the episode they ended up making. The draft posted on Deadline does a lot — arguably too much — heavy lifting for the plotlines to come, fleshing out (for example) the Dr. Adamson backstory and the Dr. Langdon end-of-season plotline, in much more aggressive detail than we see in the final episode. This is good and fine! — this is how you give execs, casts, whole teams, a sense of the arc of the show you’re making — but one of the things that becomes intrinsic to the narrative strategy of The Pitt is that it is not working more than a move or two ahead of the characters. Doing that would gobble up all the protein for the downstream episodes; but moreover, it would rob the show of the frisson of watching the characters work their way around the curves of the story in something very close to real time. This latter is crucial to the show’s narrative strategy, and per the above: it is so, so, so TV. And not just TV: weekly TV. It’s beautifully counter-intuitive: this show whose entire storyline takes place in a microscopic-seeming 15 hours, is designed to play to an audience that is taking in only one hour per week.
Next topic, and to carry on from the ER II of it all: I absolutely refute the “Dr. Robby is just Dr. Carter, but 50” premise. I guess it’s there if you really want to see it, but to a degree that surprised me (and pleased me immensely), I see Noah Wyle playing a very different man here than the one he played on ER. And that… like… takes guts and skill, you know? I don’t want to under-appreciate it, because it’s a more complicated and interesting choice than just playing the Cook County hits, which (with a handful of instances of medical-issue overlap notwithstanding), The Pitt chooses not to do.
There’s a zenlike tranquility to Dr. Robby in the early episodes (when he’s not freaking out in a PTSD crush, of course). He speaks to his patients in a gentle murmur, always counselling, easily breaking down complex (and sometimes heartbreaking) ideas in pragmatic terms, with an (almost unnerving) mix of efficiency and empathy. Maybe the character’s name is the clue: Dr. Robby is rabbinical, and the Pitt is his temple. (Dr. Rabinovitch, and Wyle, are Jewish; Carter was as WASP-y as they come.)
I don’t know why I care if you think Robby is 50-plus Carter or not. (Certainly not as regards the lawsuit.) It’s only that I think Wyle is doing really detailed, nuanced work here that deserves to be considered on terms that have nothing to do with a performance he gave thirty years ago. His command of craft has evolved by orders of magnitude, and it deserves celebration; to do otherwise feels slightly patronizing to me.
There is, of course, one more inevitable ER connection in the pilot: we’re introduced to a phalanx of student doctors at the top of the hour and are told, once again, that “this is a teaching hospital.” This was the strategy on ER, and it’s kept here. It stocks the shelves with audience surrogate characters who have to learn about the Pitt environment and procedure at the same time as the rest of us.
So we get another character who’s nothing like Carter: Whitaker, The Pitt‘s “fresh-faced med student with a heart of gold” (Gerran Howell). He’s great. They’re all great: I love the whole student team, from so-excited-she’s-definitely-on-the-spectrum Dr. Mel (Taylor Dearden) to painfully young Victoria “Crash” Javadi (Shabana Azeez).
Isa Briones, as Dr. Trinity Santos, is the only actor I was previously familiar with (she played Soji on Picard, who turned out to be, overall, maybe the only part I really loved about Picard?). Spoiler: Isa Briones, as Dr. Trinity Santos, is about to become my favourite part of this show, too.
8am — Whitaker kills his first patient
Let’s hover around Dr. Robby for a moment more. Much has been made of Dr. Robby’s “slutty little glasses.” They’re fine. But I want to draw a particular circle around Dr. Robby’s “slutty little hoodie.” It’s awesome.
I used to cosplay ER when I was in university. Yes: you read that correctly. I wore scrubs to school, the whole thing. You’d better believe I was looking up black scrub options after the first two episodes of The Pitt aired. Now, when I was a youngin’, the move was to wear a long-sleeve tee under the scrub top (what is a scrub top for, if not to catch the first wave of fluids, sprayed upon the wearer?); but on The Pitt, the scrubs are under the outerwear, for both Dr. Robby and his counterpart, Dr. Collins. Robby wears blue. Collins, who is his counterpart in the series in a number of ways, wears red.
We’re introduced to Collins puking in the bathroom because she’s pregnant with a child she conceived through IVF and like, let’s face it, anyone who’s ever watched a medical show is probably aware in moment one that she’s not carrying that child to term, or even till the end of this shift. The one-hour-per-episode format for The Pitt feels slightly elliptical when it comes to plotlines like this — Collins is going to feel the first pangs of something going wrong with her baby in, like, five hours; and lose the child in seven — but again, the show was designed to roll out weekly. Time is supposed to lens outward, heightening the drama and narrative compactness at the sacrifice of (some) realism.
Theresa Saunders (Joanna Going) is in the E.D. at this point. She’s a middle-aged woman (she has the most magnificent grey hair I’ve ever seen; grey-haired women are the whole thing, right now) and she’s a mother, and she made herself vomit so that her son David (Jackson Saunders) would bring her to the hospital. This, as it turns out, was a tactic to get David into the hospital, because he’s made what might be a kill list for girls in his class, and Theresa has seen it. Joanna Going plays Theresa as a finely-calibrated collision of fatigue, anxiety, and years-long grief (her husband, David’s father, died during Covid). When Robby asks her if she actually thinks her son — who flees the hospital at the end of the first hour — would hurt anyone, she says no. But then she adds “I’m sure a lot of parents felt that way.”
So here we are on strategy #2: The Pitt has a lot to say about the modern lived reality of America, the case load is the delivery mechanism. The show has a clear-eyed stare about a lot of systemic breakdown that has become, for that shithole country, a Russian nesting doll of potential disasters, all waiting to spring on our harried Emergency Department. David, incel violence, and shooting rampages, are just the first of the strands.
9am — Robby desperately needs to piss
A multi-episode runner starts here, and it’s my favourite, stupidest runner on the show: Whitaker keeps getting gunk on him (here, it’s a bottle of Mylanta that he shakes up while the cap is loose), and keeps having to replace his scrubs, which involves talking to a robot scrub machine that only sometimes gives Whitaker what he wants. NBD, right? ‘Cept next time, the Kraken fully pisses all over him (first silicone genitalia — of several on the show — spotted!); and then he gets a blood pumper right to the face and chest, and then he gets splattered with so much gore he looks like an extra from Reservoir Dogs. So episode after episode after episode, Whitaker keeps turning up in newer, weirder scrubs — morgue scrubs; nurse scrubs; too-small scrubs. It’s so fucking stupid. I love it.
There’s a kid called Nick Bradley who came into the ER, and now he’s brain-dead, because he took some internet Xanax and it was laced with fentanyl. It’s a long-term storyline this season — I think we’re still dealing with the fallout of this with his parents by the eighth or ninth hour — but my favourite bit of it is here, when a different student, Jenna (Mika Abdalla) comes into the ED all fucked up, and the doctors work out that she and Nick took the same shit as part of the same study group. Abdalla gives what I think is a seriously credible performance here, navigating a very sharp turn — when Nick’s dad confronts her initially, she’s a complete asshole to him, and then when she finds out who he is, having registered all the shock and grief of what happens to Nick, she plays against everything you assume about her in a small, quietly heartbreaking scene with the parents, offering her service. It’s a very part of a much larger arc, but the actor sells it beautifully. And you’d better believe The Pitt has some words for the opioid epidemic, while we’re here.
While I’m giving flowers, a new favourite doctor is emerging: Supriya Ganesh’s Dr. Samira “Slow-Mo” Mohan. Her presence is so understated in the first episode that I pretty much didn’t notice she was there; but that’s where the “Slow-Mo” moniker comes from (I guess this is a heartily nickname-obsessed ER, for some reason), along with the start of what turns out to be one of the season’s best overall arcs: Samira spends too much time with her patients, and Robby is really pushing her about it; but it’s also the source of a wellspring of communication that lets her solve diagnostic riddles, where other doctors completely whiff. From these beginnings, Samira’s character arc gets a full-ass first, second, and third act this season, as the series explores her capabilities and limitations. It’s great.
10am — Noah Wyle writes a banger
You could have knocked me clean over when Noah Wyle’s credit comes up at the end of this hour, which is already an emotional whallop in a number of ways (an older sibling pair say goodbye to their very elderly father; they just happen to do it in the same pediatric room where Dr. Robby got to watch his mentor die while a creepy cartoon fox grinned at him from the wall, so you can guess in advance how that’s going to go). Wyle’s the star, Wyle’s the EP, Wyle’s in the writer’s room?? Clearly I wasn’t paying enough attention to his post-ER career.
I love it — I fucking love it — when tenured Hollywood all-stars have something to say.
This is also the episode where I found out young girls can have fully imperforate hymens, and that month after month of nascent period blood can get backed up in there and threaten to explode. The Pitt, which is no slouch to showing nightmare-inducing medical imagery, conveys this medical fun-fact demurely, with a quick glance beneath the sheet by Samira and Dr. Mel, and then some (far too analytical) description of same, by Mel. Their scene with Jia Yi’s father, who is a widower and considers himself under-prepared for his daughter’s womanhood generally, is performed beautifully by James Lontayao.
Dr. Mel is making a case for herself as a standout character, too. And the Star Trek nerd in me can’t help but point out that having Taylor Dearden playing on-the-spectrum scenes of Mel having difficulty gauging emotional repsonses or jokes, against Isa Briones who literally played Data’s daughter, is kind of incredible. (Soji and Mel even do the same “processing… processing” head-tilt.)
On the nickname front: we’ll spend a lot of time this season waiting for Crash, Huckleberry and the others to give Trinity a mean nickname back (I’d suggest “Stab” myself, for reasons that become clear just after noon), but it never happens. Disappointing!
11am — Everyone keeps giving Robby’s kid condoms
Ok, it’s not his kid. And Jake’s not a “kid” unless you’re knocking on fifty like I am, in which case everyone on this show under thirty looks like a “kid.” Which is half the cast.
Speaking of kids: Abby Ryder Fortson is here, and she’s having a kid. I consider Fortson the secret weapon of the first two Ant-Man movies, in which she pays Paul Rudd’s daughter (before she gets cruelly aged out of the MCU by the Endgame time jump); and she anchored last year’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret adaptation, so she rules. Here, she’s a teenager who’s pregnant — like, 11 weeks, 6 days pregnant, in a country where (when this sweet, innocent episode was written!) you can only get medical abortions till the 12 week cutoff.
(Sidebar: There are areas of the medical bureaucracy in this show that, even as they aired, seemed like touching relics of a time long lost. See also the 10am episode’s neat little subplot with a transgender sommelier, in which Crash updates her medical information to list the proper gender markers, without having to be asked. Now, I’m not saying that in spring 2025, Crash would not still have been willing to do that; I just question whether the America that Crash now inhabits would have allowed her to.)
(Sidebar 2: I call Crash “Crash” because in this regard, Trinity is actually right: that nickname is a badge of fucking honour. Embrace it, Crash. Embroider it on your labcoat, when you get one.)
Anyway. This is a bit of a heavy-lifting episode, plotwise. Jake is here to pick up tickets to Pittfest, which has already been introduced via an ER patient (an injured roadie), and will continue to be “kept alive” (in the screenwriting sense) for the next five hours until, well, all hell breaks loose. We also get the first sniff of the Trinity vs. Dr. Langdon feud re: missing narcotics, which is going to go exactly about as well as you’d expect.
It’s almost time for lunch. Do the kind doctors at Pittsburgh Medical get lunch? It turns out no: no they do not.