Everyone is talking about The Pitt, the new gross-out medical show on Max starring Noah Wyle. Legally speaking, a lot of people are talking about how much the show does or does not differ from Wyle’s previous med show outing, ER. Michael Crichton’s widow Sherry has filed a breach of contract suit against Warner Bros. Discovery, showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, producer John Wells, and star Wyle.
So, how does The Pitt differ from ER? For starters, it’s a 24-style “one hour of TV = one hour life” tour through one 15-hour shift for senior attending Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinavitch (Wyle). It’s far more graphic, thanks to the allowances of streaming. The show has no score, diverging from the iconic soundscape of ER. And for Wyle, what he’s being asked to do is completely different.
“This is a totally different acting exercise,” Wyle said at the Warner Bros. Television press day. “I haven’t even thought about similarities or differences to the other character.” For Wyle, having to maintain the same (or increasing) level of stress as this one shift goes completely off the rails has been a completely unique experience. “This is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient,” he said, “playing with levels of fatigue and an ability to compartmentalize things that need to be compartmentalized. This has been a wonderful sort of psychological examination of one guy having one of the worst days of his life.”
From the writing standpoint, a big difference between Wyle’s old and new shows has been the increasing sophistication of TV audiences. As the television world has been clogged with procedurals medical, legal, and criminal, a lot of tropes have gone from cute to washed. “You know, people have become so familiar with narrative devices and tropes and patterns that it’s out of respect for them, that you have to sort of up your game,” he said. On The Pitt, the writers often rely upon consulting doc Dr. Joe Sachs and what he calls his “tickle trunk” of disgusting medical anecdotes. According to Wyle, “he never runs dry.”