Why “The Pitt” is the TV show of the moment (also, “Grey’s Anatomy” is totally screwed)

Sorry Meredith Grey, but your shift is UP!

A rare letter of support amidst Hate Read season! We are halfway through; hope you are getting nice and recreationally steamed over there :) -D

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Nurse Perlah supremacy »>

I, too, have fallen victim to (HBO) Max’s new emergency room drama, The Pitt, in the best way. Much has been made of the show’s ability to take the classic network television format — serialized medical drama doled out in weekly episodes — and make it feel bold and meaty with a stellar ensemble cast, great writing, and the inimitable Santa-like twinkle (if Santa were a hot middle-age ER doctor) in Noah Wyle’s eyes.

But it’s the show’s pacing, wherein an hour-long episode is dedicated to each successive hour in the ER, that is both The Pitt’s operant premise and its primary appeal. I saw a tweet about how someone wanted to save up all 15 episodes (the Season 1 finale drops this Thursday) so they could binge it at once, which honestly sounds like it would be a remarkable experience, in that the feat of bingeing 15 hours of television would no doubt conjure up a kind of physical empathy from the viewer for the characters rushing around their 15-hour shift (call it 4D TV: television viewing with an added temporal special effect).

Within each episode, events unfold with real-time urgency without a change of setting; the net effect of this feels theatrical — as if we’re watching a perfectly choreographed play — or akin to those super-long tracking shots that have come to define prestige film. In other words, The Pitt feels live in a way that nothing on television comes even close to resembling, especially in a TV season where Severance and The White Lotus felt like coy homework assignments. No wonder that, even with our 2025 ADHD-addled attention spans, we can’t look away from Dr. Robby and his team.

I was discussing the show with Vulture critic Nick Quah earlier this week, and I made a quip to him about how Grey’s Anatomy, as the reigning grand dame of modern medical dramas, is totally screwed. Imagine going back to the snooze-fest of Grey Sloan Memorial, where Meredith Grey is barely even around anymore (and certainly not flexing some new ultra-creative intubation method every few minutes), after experiencing the non-stop action of The Pitt. Imagine caring about whether some sixth-generation medical resident character’s interpersonal drama gets resolved with some on-call room bonking or not, when The Pitt showed us LITERALLY how a baby comes out of a birthing canal, delivered by a female doctor whose own sense of motherhood had just been shattered minutes before?

It’s not entirely Grey’s Anatomy’s fault — after all, Grey’s used to be the dazzling medical drama with the insane storylines (remember body bomb? Or the pole with the two victims?) and lovable characters. I spent all of quarantine watching Grey’s from the beginning all the way through, past the somewhat interesting covid season and into, well, overt speechifying and 20 lukewarm characters (I’ve spent 16 years not caring about Owen Hunt and counting!). This is probably the natural end result of a show that just got renewed for its 22nd season, albeit with an increasingly mutinous lead, but perhaps in these modern times, televising poreless surgeons’ inner lives and their medical metaphors is simply too elitist for our appetites. Give us the tired, poor, huddled masses of Pittsburgh Trauma’s ER waiting room! Those ones we can relate to.

Still, much as I am on my hands and knees jonesing for this finale (and Season 2, which we’ll get as soon as January), I do have quibbles with The Pitt. For one, I’m not sure how well the hour-for-an-hour premise will replicate for a second season (unless we’re getting a full night shift arc? Which would be cool for Season 2 but maybe not sustainable into Season 20-something).

For another, I have made it a habit of cracking jokes about The Pitt as “Disney Hospital,” in that the hospital staff characters—as sharply drawn as each individual character is—are a little…. too likable. (Even the Big Bad Administrator figure is reasonably competent when it matters.) The Pitt would have us believe that mostly every staff member of Pittsburgh Trauma is a patient, tireless empath with saint-like politics who would gladly drain their own blood to save a stranger; their teamwork is symphonically pleasing.

Meanwhile, the few “antagonists” we are given are in the form of quickly-sketched out patients (the Big Bad Racist, the visibly moody incel) who often immediately repent for their sins (Mom Who Won’t Let Her Daughter Get an Abobo But Eventually Comes Around, unhoused guy who pees everywhere and then apologizes). In this vein, you could read The Pitt almost as a form of post-covid pro-healthcare advocacy/agitprop, which is not necessarily a bad thing for society in our MAHA-vibed age, (or our age of gun violence) but I do wonder about the potential tipping point for a show that asks for near-total allegiance to the “establishment,” or at least, its most exemplary evangelists. Hospital experts good, only regular people sometimes bad. We’ll have to see how interested The Pitt is about complicating that divide.

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