Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch can’t save everyone in his overcrowded Pittsburgh emergency room, but maybe he can save all of us watching at home.
Played with a gruff smolder by longtime medical drama veteran Noah Wyle, the hero of Max’s new series “The Pitt” (Season 1 now streaming) stitches up wounds, pumps donated blood into veins and prescribes medicine, but inevitably he doesn’t heal anything. Certainly not the broken system in which he is stuck. But there is so much solace in watching him try nonetheless.
A “real-time” medical drama set over 15 hours on one very long emergency room shift, “The Pitt” has caught on: Fans are swooning over TikTok clips, style website The Cut is promoting fan fiction about the show and real doctors are feeling seen and validated.
Paging TV doctors: The best medical TV shows of all time, ranked, from ‘ER’ to ‘The Pitt’
And it’s not the only new medical series trying to “stat!” its way into our hearts this year. The current TV season offers a slew of other new shows, including “Watson” (CBS), “Doc” (Fox), “Doctor Odyssey” (ABC), “Brilliant Minds” (NBC), “St. Denis Medical” (NBC) and “Pulse” (Netflix). You’ve got everything to go with the gritty realism of “The Pitt,” from a medical mystery Sherlock Holmes take (“Watson”), to a sitcom (“St. Denis”) to a ludicrous Ryan Murphy drama set on a cruise ship (“Odyssey”).Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
Of course, Hollywood trends are cyclical. For a while there were too many vampires or zombies, and a few years ago all the “Game of Thrones” wannabes drowned us in high fantasy. But the Big Three of TV procedurals − cop, lawyer and doctor shows − come around like clockwork. For the past decade or so, it’s been an overload of cop shows. Now the docs are getting their turn again.
But it’s more than just a coincidence of network bigwigs all picking up new medical shows at the same time: They’ve showed up at the right time to heal ailing viewers.
Americans have been living in unprecedented times – a very nice euphemism for constant crisis – for nearly a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic, contested elections, political chaos, natural disasters, violence, inflation, climate change: It all adds up to a burned-out population looking for some ease and comfort. And in spite of the blood and the gore, medical shows are distinctly comforting.
When a new patient walks into Grey Sloan Memorial (on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy”) or a Miami hospital during a hurricane (“Pulse”) or even the infirmary on a massive cruise ship (“Odyssey”), professional, experienced and calm people are there to try and save them. The emergencies in these shows are contained and often solvable. There is order and procedure and grownups in the room to tell everyone what to do. And the best thing about these medical emergencies? They’re fictional. They take us away from the very real problems we don’t have any idea how to solve.
Doctors have been rushing around hospitals on TV since the 1950s, and as the camera follows them to scrub in, it can feel like going home. A whole generation of millennials is primed to be nostalgic for the medical shows of the 1990s and early 2000s, when “ER” and “Grey’s” dominated our watch schedules (yes, “Grey’s” has been on the air long enough to generate nostalgia for its early years). There is seemingly a show for each subgenre for fans of all those great 2000s series. If you liked “ER” watch “The Pitt.” If you liked “Grey’s,” go for romance and melodrama-heavy “Pulse.” If you liked the wacky medical mysteries in “House,” try “Watson.” If you want giggles like “Scrubs,” try “St. Denis.”
Many of these shows are admirable and watchable: “St. Denis” is fun, “Odyssey” is silly, “Watson” is absurd and “Pulse” has an exciting young cast. But “The Pitt” is the most exciting reinvention of the genre (despite its many similarities to “ER,” which are too many, according to a lawsuit from the estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton).
The “real-time” gimmick of “The Pitt” (seen earlier on Fox’s “24”) makes it even more unrelenting than all the other unrelenting shows in this genre, leaving viewers scant time to catch our breath than the fictional doctors and nurses. It’s not concerned with intraoffice romance so much as it is with something far more existential. Season 1’s 15-hour shift (the show has already been renewed) gives us a too-perfect image of what it’s like to live in America right now: Fentanyl overdoses, mass shootings, vaccine denial, the “manosphere,” bigotry, burnout, violence and anger. It’s all wrapped up in primary colored slap bracelets to triage our national maladies from green to red: survivable to critical.
“The Pitt” offers no answers, and there are moments when its overworked and underpaid healthcare workers want to give up hope for the souls of the patients they’re treating. But they don’t. They keep trying. They keep CPR compressions going. Zachary Quinto’s enigmatic “Minds” neurologist never gives up on a patient, either, and the same goes for the cruising and handsome Dr. Max Bankman (Joshua Jackson) on “Odyssey.” Because while watching “The Pitt” or “Watson” or any other medical show, we want to know that there are people left in this world who will try to help even when all hope seems to be lost.
Maybe if we see them on TV, we can find them in real life, too.