The stellar Max series isn’t just telling the story of modern healthcare anymore.
f you’ve followed Max’s The Pitt into its home stretch, then you already know that it’s one of the most essential stories—across television, film, books, you name it—we’ve seen in a long time. In introducing the fictitious Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center to the world, former ER scribe R. Scott Gemmill created a series that has so many healthcare practitioners feeling like they’ve finally found accurate representation in mainstream media. If that was The Pitt‘s only achievement, then Gemmill and star Noah Wyle did a damn good job, right?
Well, Gemmill and Wyle clearly had far greater aspirations than achieving medical accuracy in The Pitt. “We can all identify with having had situations occur during the pandemic that were so extreme that we put them in a little bit of a locked room,” Wyle told me in a recent SAG-AFTRA Foundation panel in support of The Pitt. “[We did that] out of necessity and to move on—and to show up for our kids or parents or bosses. And yet, every once in a while, you behave strangely. You react oddly. You don’t recognize yourself. That, to me, is The Pitt.”
After I spoke to Wyle, who clearly cares about The Pitt in a way that borders on vocational, I left thinking about what he said about the pandemic. Just like Wyle’s Dr. Robby, there are so many doctors and nurses who still have unaddressed PTSD from fighting coronavirus—because they’re still battling every day in our hospitals and emergency rooms, five years later. (With dwindling resources, as The Pitt makes clear.) I championed The Pitt to anyone who would listen as one of the first crucial works of art to grapple with the pandemic’s lasting impact on us all—until episode 12, at least.
Whether you work in healthcare or not, this week’s episode turns The Pitt into an entirely different show—and it affects us all.
ou knew this was coming. The Pitt throws so damn much at us—look to your right, and you’ll see a cockroach cascading from an ear; to your left, there’s a severe burn victim—but you probably connected two plot threads: 1/ PittFest jamming away somewhere near the hospital, and 2/ The disappearance of David, the 18-year-old who supposedly wrote a list of the women he wanted to hurt, per his mother. The Pitt loves a cliff-hanger, and so episode 11 told us that a mass shooting happened at PittFest. And, yeah—Dr. Robby sums it up when David’s mom pleads, “David wouldn’t do this.” Dr. Robby: “Really hope you’re right.”
Just as our heroes at PTMC enter hour twelve of enduring horror after horror, they now have to face something truly unimaginable—even for those who have clearly seen it all. To put it bluntly, episode 12 of The Pitt—which is directed by co-Executive Producer Amanda Marsalis—shows how an ER actually responds to a mass shooting. I’ll let Dr. Jack Abbott explain it from here. He’s a hell of a welcome sight, by the way. We last saw him in episode 1! Time clearly does not fly in the ER. “We’re a MASH unit now,” he says. “There is no charting. No electronic medical records. No board. This is no-frills, combat-zone medicine. No ultrasound, no X-rays, no CT, no labs. Assess based on mental status and pulse strength.”
As for what we bear witness to over the next 40 minutes? A devastating level of carnage, more oh-my-god realizations of what someone with a medical degree is actually capable of, and simply one of the best episodes of television in recent memory. If the newbies at PTMC hadn’t earned their stripes yet, we see them all mature into veterans in the face of tragedy: Whittaker no longer hesitates in the face of someone nearing death, Santos actually applies her supreme sixth sense to her patients, Victoria sticks it to her mother, and Mel donates blood in the middle of the panic.
John Johnson/Max
Give it up for all of the Danas working in healthcare.
On top of all of this, The Pitt somehow manages to keep every character’s personal storylines moving along. Victoria is still crushing on Mateo, Chad actually begins to register that his ex is a superhero, and… Dr. Langdon is back. Once again, I defer to Dr. Robby: “What the fuck are you doing?”
As for PTMC’s leader, when his text to his son, Jake (who was at PittFest with his girlfriend), doesn’t go through—his face says that he’s that much closer to finally breaking down. As Wyle told me about his thought process in forming Dr. Robby: “How do we make a character that sort of embodies the undealt with trauma of the pandemic and the never-ending need to show up for the unceasing responsibility that you have?” It seems like we might find out what happens when Robby just can’t show up anymore.
That said, I’m now convinced that episode 12’s greater goal is what just might be The Pitt‘s ultimate mission: To tell the story of what’s plaguing America through what happens throughout the day—and now, the night—in one single ER. With just three episodes in left in season 2, The Pitt has already depicted vaccine denial, how racial and gender biases still linger in the workplace, the identity crisis facing our young men, and so much more. Now, through a mass shooting, The Pitt will show us exactly what failures in gun control reform looks like.
Clearly, Gemmill and Wyle had their designs on something greater in ambition and scale all along. I can’t wait to see what they set their sights on in season 2.