I loved The Pitt, it was excellent.
The greatest Medical Show of all time is MASH.
The Pitt was…interesting.
It doesn’t touch Scrubs, which is by far the best medical show of all time.
This is my opinion mixed with the opinion of a good friend who’s a GP…we both thought it was “OK”.
The strength of The Pitt was that it was generally medically accurate in the moment. But, because it was structured as 24-style real time drama…the situations because absurdly compressed. It took place over what…15 hours in the ER? In those hours we saw way too many once in a lifetime events…if the mass shooting event wasn’t enough on its own.
The show might have been elevated to a top tier show if they didn’t try to have every episode play out the 90s drama formula. Somebody didn’t get the memo that the streaming wars have given writers the opportunity to write plots that build and develop character…and viewers can be ok with and often embrace the mundane…if it pays off.
It was just too much…the show didn’t need it to be the first day for a bunch of students, a staff assault/the last day for the head nurse, a mass shooting, the first day for an intern/a neurodivergent intern, a fake-out drug addicted doctor, an ambulance theft, a nonsensical ongoing father-son thing, abortion, medically assisted death, a rat infestation, etcetcetc (I got bored).
It’s not meant to be a representative day. The characters even hang the lampshade well, telling the newbies that this was an insane day, and the rest will be easier. It being someone’s first day is a common writing technique, it gives the writers a chance to explain things to the audience. The idea is that these are the sort of things that may happen on any given day in the ER. They just all happen on that day for the sake of showing the audience.
The mass casualty event is especially interesting. It’s directly based on the hospital closest to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.
Throwaway dialogue explaining an impossible day isn’t helpful. I can’t think of a since reason why it needed to all happen on one day…beyond a pretence to get people to keep watching it.
They had a huge opportunity to show what a day is really like for the staff in an ER…which is never ever boring…but they chose to sensationalize one instead. It was a weird hybrid of 24 and a 90s sitcom…with ultra graphic medical scenes.
Like I said…the mass casualty event would have been more than enough for the show to step it up after they showed us what real people are like and what really happens in an ER. But instead we got a perfect storm of staff with every personal problem on earth dealing with every type of patient on earth…with contrived comedic relief as a tone-deaf cherry on top. A clown showed up in the ER to give us dry one-liners? Check.
Swing and a miss.
I’ve only watched House MD and The Good Doctor (completed both). What does The Pitt offer over those two?
Realism, mostly. It’s in pretty much real time. Each hour-long episode covers one hour of an ED shift, and the medical problems are actually believable.
I haven’t seen the Good Doctor but House MD is mostly luck and medical malpractice. I like the show, but it’s not realistic in the slightest.
House is really more an interpersonal drama in a medical setting. It’s not about the medicine.
The pitt is like a medical documentary in the format of 24. It’s absolutely fantastic.
You’re correct, but even more accurately, House is Sherlock Holmes in a medical setting.
No, it’s not. When I watched House MD, there was an excellent medical blog that rated the medicine and the drama separately. Most of the time, House’s team made rookie or inexcusable mistakes to extend the drama out to an hour. Of course the drama is fine.
The Good Doctor is Freddie Highmore (Bates Motel) playing a surgeon with ASD (he’s autistic). And Richard Schiff in a supporting role as his mentor/father figure. I think it comes down to if you like Highmore’s acting. He’s certainly a good actor, but he kinda rubs me the wrong way sometimes. Or rather the characters he’s pigeon-holed into, do. The man himself is fine.
Real time like 24? That’s certainly interesting. Thanks for answering!
Comparatively, those shows are basically slop next to the pitt. Like no offence to them, I love house and really respect the good doctor for its messaging. A huge difference is HBO vs network tv, and the seamless shift narrative really makes the whole show
House is great. But neither of those shows approach anything resembling reality
I watched it twice, but found it to have limited re-watch ability and, if they keep the format, I’m not sure how well it’ll do in re-runs.
The thing with most dramas is that you watch relationships develop over a period of months and years. Here, you watch the relationships “develop” over a period of 17 hours, which really isn’t a long period for changes to happen: they have to establish the base relationship, establish the reasons for the change, work through some of the ramifications, and bring it to a (semi)satisfactory conclusion. If they do that with staff too much, you get melodrama. If you do that with patients too much, it becomes shallow and repetitive: here’s a person, you should care about them, they have this problem, you should care about that, here’s a resolution and now you’ll never see them again.
My understanding for series 2 is that some of the original cast is leaving and some new people coming in (and it’ll take place a year later, with everyone moving up a year in medical school). So for returning characters, there’ll be a big gap in their lives and they’ll have to reference “events” that occurred in that gap, but they can’t do too much talking about it. For new characters, they have to do the whole character introduction/care about me, balancing that with both the returning characters and the patients.
Also, in their drive to have have emotional impact, they have a very high body count: when I did my re-watch, I counted 17 deaths, an average of one per hour during that shift.
I enjoyed the show, and I fully intend to watch series 2; I just didn’t find it as re-watchable as you did, and I suspect it won’t do well in syndication. (How well did 24 do in syndication, anyway?)
It’s really really good, but towards the end I felt like they were really basking in the limelight for a bunch of “big character moments” and it started to feel like it was straying into daytime tv. I don’t know what it was.
It was only a few moments but it took me out a bit.
Overall though, incredible show with some really great characters. Gale King being the standout if say (other than robinovitz of course)
I felt the same. It was just “off”…structured like a 90s show complete with cast members inserted just to deliver one-liners like it was filmed in front of a live audience at Cheers.
It had major tone problems…and it was really dumb to pack every single medical situation they could think of into one shift.
That’s a good way to put it, yes. It was his old war buddy chiming in with quippy, against the grain commentary that kept taking me out. It’s a shame but his whole character is just “one liner guy”
The show almost entirely left my head in between watching it and this post…which doesn’t speak well for the show…
…but I do remember there was a clown delivering one liners for an episode or two? Did that happen? Some of it reminded me of that terrible John Larroquette bus station show where they just thought you needed a lot of doors into a main room for a show to be good. No joke. It was half hard hitting drama…half 90s sitcom. Not great.
Is every character portrayed by Brad Pitt?
You must see Being John Malkovich, if you haven’t already, for a very similar scene.
Funny, I was recently watching Falling Skies again, which is a meh show I came to realize. But it’s weird to see Noah Wyle without a gun on him now.
