Millennial nostalgia creeps up on you slowly. One day, you notice that the music you used to listen to in middle school – and perhaps even thought of as transgressive – is playing at the grocery store now. Then some idiot decides to declare that “vintage low rise jeans are back” (please, no). And then Noah Wyle decides to play a hot emergency room doctor again.
Jokes aside, HBO’s The Pitt, now in its second season, is a wonderful show. While it carries on the legacy of network television powerhouse, ER, it deals with no network television constraints.
Full-frontal nudity involving a patient who took too many dick pills ahead of his anniversary? Check. Liberal swearing? You got it.
The American healthcare system is a famous shitshow – although considering Canada’s MAID scandals and NHS wait times, it doesn’t seem that we Americans are alone in this.
Either way, shitshows make for great television drama. And setting The Pitt in Pittsburgh (that’s where the name comes from, if you are unfamiliar) gives viewers a fresh setting. Who needs another medical procedural set in Chicago, after all? Pittsburgh is smaller and more intimate and lends that intimacy to the show flawlessly.
The authenticity and politics of The Pitt have been debated vigorously on social media, and as a layperson, I have to say that these elements neither break nor make the show. HBO is known for being sharply political and The Pitt is no exception to this rule.
It’s just that the heart of its intertwined subplots has to do more with the fragility of human bodies and human life than with anything else.
The Pitt takes that fragility and explores it through banter, medical rivalries, and tense, bloody sequences in trauma rooms. The end result is wonderfully, off-handedly humorous and horrifying.
The heart of its intertwined subplots has to do more with the fragility of human bodies and human life than with anything else
The second season also plays the long game. It doesn’t just focus on immediate disasters like the first season of the show did. Here, the drama unspools slowly – like a degenerative disease.
A beloved alcoholic patient’s backstory is tenderly and brutally revealed. The gradual encroachment of AI into healthcare is both funny and mind-numbing. Greater and greater reliance on advanced technology in emergency rooms is exposed as a looming vulnerability. A doctor’s fall from grace in season one continues to have lingering effects in the new season.
The second season is, therefore, not as dynamic, but that’s not a criticism. Things move fast in an emergency room. So fast that individual stories can become a blur. A slower second season for The Pitt results in more emotional clarity.
And while Noah Wyle remains the backbone of The Pitt – even as his character has a truly wrenching and temperamental turn – other actors now have much more room to shine. I especially want to single out Fiona Dourif, who plays Dr. Cassie McKay (if you’re a Lord of the Rings freak like me, you’ll know all about her famous dad, Brad Dourif, who played Grima Wormtongue).
Dr. McKay had a prickly and unsettling first season, plagued by problems with her ex and an ankle monitor and a perpetual malaise etched onto her expressive face. It’s good to see a different side of her this year – a woman who giggles when a patient flirts with her, who coaches a younger doctor on how to accept a terminal patient’s decision to die, who possesses a patience for others while eschewing indulgence.
McKay is probably my favorite character this season, and Fiona Dourif’s acting abilities animate her in a wonderful, warm way. She deserves big and complicated roles in the future.
The pacing is uneven this season, but considering how taut the first season was, that’s actually a blessing. The first season introduced us to many compelling characters. We have now been given a chance to slow down and observe them more. And then the crash cart arrives and chaos erupts anyway, as it is supposed to.
I’ve written all of this as a person who doesn’t really like medical dramas. Hospitals tend to – rightfully – scare me. Even my old, beloved ER, which basically had a younger and more idealistic version of the Noah Wyle character from The Pitt, used to scare me. So much so that I never want to revisit it (and I usually love rewatching old shows).
But good television writing can paper over even the most rational of our aversions. The fact that The Pitt has been renewed for a third season is great news, medical paranoias be damned.
Image: Kevin Paul
