Recently, when I tried to tally how many hours of my life I’d sunk into watching reruns of hospital shows, I realized (to my slight horror) that it might be on a par with the amount of time the average applicant spends studying to actually get into medical school. This is not entirely my fault—I was raised with E.R. reruns as background noise thanks to my mom, a fellow med-TV devotee—but by age 11, I was fully bought into the froth, fun, and occasionally frantic energy that accompanied our culture’s collective obsession with Grey’s Anatomy.
I was by no means singular in my teen TV affections, also devoting plenty of time to rewatching episodes of Scrubs and House when I should have been doing my earth science homework. But it was Grey’s Anatomy that really hooked me. Not only did I pick up some medical lingo from the show (go ahead, ask me what a DNR is), but the show’s vibe of endless sexual and romantic drama occasionally interrupted by medicine was what consistently made me tune in to see who Meredith was kissing in on-call rooms and, later, what on earth would happen with Denny’s…ghost? Sorry, but I’m still not over that particular plotline.
My TV-watching tastes may have evolved a little over the last two decades, but when it comes to hospital shows, I’ve long thought the soapier they are, the better. That is, until I watched the first episode of The Pitt, Max’s new emergency-room drama that has drawn praise from real-life doctors for hewing spookily close to their lived experience. While a grizzled, older Noah Wyle is obviously the hottest man alive, I don’t think that’s quite what’s drawing me to the show. Instead, I’m finding myself obsessed with the way The Pitt spotlights real—and, in far too many cases, life-threatening—gaps within the health care industry.
I’m genuinely surprised to have inhaled the entire first season of The Pitt and still found myself craving more of its mix of hard-boiled medical jargon and minimal interpersonal drama, but maybe that makes sense as we approach the five-year mark since COVID upended everything many of us thought we knew about the way our society deals with illness. It’s gratifying to see Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch rail against the systemic inequities that force him and his fellow doctors to leave patients waiting in hospital hallways at length, but his anger makes all the more sense given he’s still dealing with the trauma of working on the front lines of the pandemic. While the capitalism-enforced pressure to get quote-unquote back to normal left many of us adrift in the wake of the initial outbreak of COVID in 2020, it’s a painful fact that health care workers around the world are still dealing with the disease’s effects in a much more vivid and brutal way.
This isn’t to say, of course, that The Pitt doesn’t have its lighter moments. Robby’s jovial yet world-weary bedside manner grew on me as the season went on; Isa Briones’s brash intern Trinity Santos is bringing old-school Cristina Yang levels of medical sarcasm; and the plot line surrounding nepo-baby resident (and almost literal baby—she’s a third-year medical student at the age of 20) Victoria Javadi (played by Shabana Azeez) is genuinely fun. I’ll always have a place in my heart for the over-the-top hospital shenanigans of Grey’s Anatomy, but right now a show like The Pitt—one that spotlights the painful reality of working in medicine in the era of COVID—feels like exactly what the medical-drama landscape needs.
