Let Me Show You My Reverse Tracheotomy: “The Pitt” on Max or HBO or whatevef

“The Pitt” on Max starring Noah Wyle: this medical drama fucking RULES and we should talk about it

https://picen.tvmao.com/images/8f/5d/a0724e31d5cdc68d96cb07f051ad507380155d8f.jpg

i’m caught up and cannot wait for ep 6. notes so far

- pvmic but grizzled Noah Wyle is hot af
- i love the 1 hour= i episode structure
- no music! maximum intensity
- i understand like 5% of the jargon but i am fucking RIVETED to my seat
- the plate spinning of all the building storylines is fantastic
- love the chemistry btw Wyle & Dr Collins
- love Dana the head nurse
- i need Princess to crack soon bc i haaaaaate her character so much (but i know at least 2 versions of her irl)

i never was obsessed w ER or House & dont usually care abour medical shows but i am full heart-eyes emojis for this show

episode 4 really proves how good the show is imo

We've watched the whole thing so far as a family (well, most of us), including my daughter, a near-future medical professional. We love it, and while there are a few TV moments here and there, it seems pretty level-headed and relatively realistic. Ironically, the person that reminds me the most of a legit young doctor (in training) is Brian Cranston's daughter, who nails the right level of nerdy competence.

1) I didn't even notice there is no music!
2) I wonder if the doctors that wrote/consulted kept notebooks of all the random or mundane cases they had, because some of the stuff the show depicts is so very specific without coming across Very TV Doctor Show.

I used to watch ER, back-when, but not House or Grey's Anatomy or whatever, so can't compare to those. But as good as ER was in its prime, this seems different and in many ways better.

My good friend’s wife was an ER nurse in NYC was telling us they really captured the vibe and feel of a busy urban emergency room.

yeah the specifics feel very true to irl experiences on the writing staff or consultants or something — my BiL was a paramedic & i have ER nurse friends

like even the way Wyle ducks into the bathroom to kinda cry for like a nanosecond (about something genuinely devastating) but then looks at himself in the mirror & laughs felt so truthful

love Cranston’s daughter, she’s so competent and handles her shit so well in those intense procedures!

I am not usually a fan of doctor shows — I watched a few episodes of ER back when Linda Cardellini and Parminder Nagra were on it, because... well, Linda Cardellini and Parminder Nagra. And I have seen a few episodes of House, but never Grey's Anatomy. The hospital show I've probably seen the most is Chicago Med, which is... OK. But yeah, The Pitt is pretty compelling. Some of the kid doctors are annoying (the one who's a huge bitch who thinks she knows everything, and the one who keeps getting splattered with blood), but some of the others are just dumb kids and entertaining about it. They're setting up some interesting plotlines that I hope resolve well and not as horror.

the one who keeps getting splattered is kinda fun imo. waiting for him to run out of scrubs of ~any~ kind lol

oh and i said i hate Princess -i meant Trinity! I hate Trinity!

princess boned a dave navarro dude under the stars -she’s cool as hell lol

I might have said this in the other tv thread, but I started this show with a fair amount of ambivalence and maybe even skepticism. I was especially wary of the 15 eps = 15 hours of one shift; it just sounded like it was going to get really tedious. And the whole plot of the woman with the moody son who may or may not become a school shooter just felt very forced.

But lo and behold by the third or fourth episode all my reservations went away and I think this show has only gotten richer with each passing episode. I’m impressed with the depth it’s developing - a long simmer of a show.

And now for better or worse I’m expecting the school shooter plot to come back in a more unexpected way - like maybe an attempted suicide rather than a bunch of injured kids… something less predictable. Hoping for something less on the nose, at least.

the way this show handles death so matter of factly but with so much empathy is like nothing i have seen on tv in a long while

like maybe Leftovers was the last show i can think of

Only thru ep3 so not reading the board yet. Love Noah Wyle in this. Hopefully he gets to pee in ep4 :) Also appreciate casting and acting from the patients and family members. Adds to the verisimilitude

i still have not gotten over them uh, popping out the dent, in that dude’s FACE in episode 1

like

i didn’t know faces could do that. that was hardcore

my fiancé and I are both physicians and we both thought this was the most realistic medical show we’ve ever seen — or at least that I’ve ever seen, since I don’t usually gravitate toward them. it’s really tightly scripted and well acted, super enjoyable. the medical student who’s the daughter of one of the surgeons is a bit of a caricature but having known a lot of similar people it is fun to root against her.

Is this too-much intense like the Bear? or heartbreakerly so like This Is going to Hurt? Or a more general ER meets 24 kinda idea?

I have a feeling my other half will inevitably want to watch this lol. Though he's just started on 6 feet under of all things so it might be a while.

More general ER, I'd say. It's got its sad spots (so far) but nothing terribly melodramatic and intense yet. It's pretty grounded.

yeah cosign that

Yeah, it's a very grounded show. Blood, tension, anxiety, but they haven't resorted to a single "no one's ever seen this disease before" or "if we don't get this contained, the whole city will be at risk" plotline yet.

Tonight's episode was good. Very glad to see the student doctor I dislike the most fuck up badly (without harming a patient) and get slapped down for it. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder whether sexual tension was building between her and the surgeon, or if it was just the beginning of a mentor/mentee relationship, but neither of those things is happening now, ha ha.

haven't seen this but is is v. curious to me that two shows set in pittsburgh debuted in january: this and the latest sherlock holmes spinoff (watson, 'a medical drama with detective elements' on cbs)

that watson show is a goddamn lie: thinly veiled sherlock notions but it’s basically just “Morris Chestnut IS House” zzz

tbf i just want artistic shots of the mighty allegheny and monongehela confluencing into the ohio river. and decent scripts i guess

who had primanti bros on their bingo card

I read a few interviews about the show, mostly with Wyle, and I think the pivot from making a new ER to the episode-per-hour format has been very clever. ER was a melodrama partially by necessity because it was really focused on the medical staff with the majority of the cases being one and done.

The individual patients have so much more room to breathe (until they're intubated?) in the script and they feel just as important as the staff.

I really like this

can't wait for Data's daughter to get slapped down some more as the day winds on

I really love the rhythm of this show, how there's no traditional rising or falling action structure, how each episode doesn't really conclude so much as pause the story.

yeah same, makes it very enjoyable and sort of cliffhangery, more like old fashioned serialised plays and stuff

"Sort of" cliffhangery is pretty much right, because rarely does an episode end on or even aim for an "oh shit!" moment, at least not so far. I forget how each episode of "24" ended, with, like, snapshots of whatever four conflicts/cliffhangers are going on at once?

But with this, so far there's been no "tune in next week to find out what happened!" sort of suspense, because there is a lot going on at once.

Could do with the show cooling it on the med students embodying clichesarchetypes bit.

We're still learning about them, though. Who was the person Cranston's daughter was talking to on the phone, for example? And arrogant student has a back story we haven't gotten yet, too. And Huckleberry, I feel we have a lot to learn about him as well. And of course surgeon's daughter is being set up for ... something.

mainly i just need propofol and ketamine stat

rarely does an episode end on or even aim for an "oh shit!" moment, at least not so far

The biggest one was "that's not the pregnant girl's mom, that's her aunt — the screaming angry lady is her mom".

The character I'm keeping a close eye on is the angry guy who keeps getting sent back to the waiting room; a violent outburst would not be a total surprise.

cranston’s daughter i guessed was talking to her sister, so maybe she was not only caring for a mom (who passed) but a sibling still as well idk

The angry man is also a racist MAGA dude. I forget why he's (still) there. Chest pains?

have you guys missed the entire plot point where she has a sister that has special needs and has assisted living arrangements during the day? it's why she was trying so hard to relate to the lady with the schizophrenia-having mom

Yes. Though eventually I sort of pieced that together.

have you guys missed the entire plot point where she has a sister that has special needs and has assisted living arrangements during the day? it's why she was trying so hard to relate to the lady with the schizophrenia-having mom

Yeah, I caught that; my question is, how special needs is she supposed to be? She seems at least somewhat autistic, but it's not clear yet whether we're supposed to care about that or if it's just a minor character trait.

angry guy is there for chest pains

I'm surprised angry guy hasn't just fucked off in frustration yet. Also, of course, potential school shooter guy, will that come back in the form of victims or *his* return to the ER? A lot of stuff hanging out there.

it was floated on The Watch podcast that maybe the possible shooter story intersects w the music festival story?

Hmm. That would also rope back in Noah's son. I kind of hope it doesn't go supernova dark and tragic, though tis the world we live in, I guess.

honestly that storyline with the shooter kid & the mom irked me the most, like jeez lady why are you making this kid the ER’s problem? i understand not knowing where to go for help but this really should not be the move.

honestly that storyline with the shooter kid & the mom irked me the most, like jeez lady why are you making this kid the ER’s problem? i understand not knowing where to go for help but this really should not be the move.

I did actually think this was ER: The Next Generation for a good while and chalked up any wincy tropes to being an unavoidable inheritance before vaguely remembering the lawsuit by the Crichton estate. The main actors do a really good job physically inhabiting their characters versus the patients who seem like they're making the most out of their guest spot (though does that apply here when it's essentially one long episode?), which I also associate with ER!

Between the schizophrenic woman whose daughter abandoned her and the lady who's handcuffed for some reason, this show is slightly overpopulated with sassy senior citizens.

don’t worry, there are still some very tired and boring looking senior citizens in the waiting area

that demographic is probably the largest at the ER, right? that and parents with their injured/suddenly ill children

Making yourself sick to go to the ER to tell the ER doc your kid might be a school shooter was such a strange choice it seemed like a real life event one of the writers read about or something.

I enjoy hearing about asystole again, I haven't heard that word since ER

this show is slightly overpopulated with sassy senior citizens.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Wednesday, February 12, 2025 1:52 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I invite you to spend 14 hours in an actual emergency room

E.R. certainly did a lot of the things milo listed. It did notably stray from the main premise a number of times, but it was at its base a character-based melodrama where the patient of the week had something extreme, often gimmicky, going on and the main track of the show was the ups and downs of the hospital staff.

Which devolved over time, with a lot of recycling of character plots and crazier things happening that were more about spectacle than empathy or process.

The 90s flip side was Chicago Hope, which was iirc less ER and more character than case oriented. And now NBC has Chicago Med as part of a slate of Hospital/Police/Fire department shows kind of cranked out by Dick Wolf’s production style.

If anything, The Pitt deserves an award for not being set in Chicago?

I only sporadically watched ER and figured any given episode would be interchangeable with another, but when someone told me Bobcat Goldthwait once voiced a cadaver on the show I thought he was joking.
He was not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePT29wbF64o

tbf I appreciated that gimmick

Never once watched ER but did love Chicago Hope. I think I was just an Adam Arkin fan.

I happened to be living in California in 1994 when the television season began, and ER and Chicago Hope were put up head to head. ER was the favourite from the get-go, and I think Chicago Hope admitted defeat and got moved pretty early on in the season. I got to go to a panel that John Wells and one of the other producers held to discuss the show and its phenomenal success in its first few months. Noah Wyle and Sherry Stringfield were also there. I remember thinking that Sherry Stringfield must be a tremendous actor, because she had absolutely nothing to say for herself at all. Mind you, it was 10am on a Saturday, I'm sure she was only DELIGHTED to be there.

I have told that story a million times, so I apologise if you have read it before. I should retire it completely, really.

I haven't seen this yet and was anxious about the gore, but I watched the clip of the throat intubation, where the guy's face suddenly cracks outwards like an imploding Coke can, and that was fine!

Unfortunately I can't handle the grief. Watching people break down as their children/partners/friends die, get permanently maimed, or something else awful. I'm curious why I have such an extreme reaction, because I'm a counsellor and consider myself to be fairly emotionally resilient. But I think I need to wait until I feel happier to watch something this sad.

That sunken face but was in the top 5 yikes moments for me. There’s more but they never stay with it too much.

that was WILD had no idea that was a thing that could a) happen and b) be done

degloving def an alltimer

also the multiple instances of external uh chest slicing to reduce internal swelling was cool & also crazy

my favorite was the childbirth just for showing it so completely & trying to show it “as-is”, from potential peril & complications to relief & beauty & just trying to capturing the fullness of an experience like that was fucking awesome

the baseball eye kid wth

I miss this show. An island of competence, action and caring in an ugly world.

FWIW, there are a few episodes a watched a second time, because I was with someone catching up, and they held up well to a second viewing, just as effective/powerful.

The revival of the Dennis Hopper thread reminded me that Katherine LaNasa, who plays Dana, has two ex-husbands and they are ... Dennis Hopper and French Stewart??? (She is currently married to Grant Show.)

wow, thats quite a variety

noticed that myself when looking up her bio while watching the show

I was also momentarily confused because I thought French Stewart was gay for some reason?!

season 2 coming in January!

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/the-pitt-season-2-start-of-production-los-angeles-1236433458

watched this last month. what a show

medical stuff makes me really squeamish, i’ve always avoided hospital shows. but my bf wanted to check this one out and i relented and it is really a fantastic show

I've watched a hunk of the show a second time and it really holds up, too.

everyone really acts their ass off in this

So no one was at all annoyed with every character feeling like a straw man for trending issues of the times? I say that having enjoyed the show

comes with the territory. reminds me of “ripped from the headlines” classic law & order

yeah thats literally every episode of ER
buy the ticket, take the ride baby!

Fair enough!

There were a few on the nose things that seemed ripped from the headlines, but on the other hand, anti vaxxers, anti maskers, mass shootings ... those are the headlines.

season 2 apparently takes place during the 4th of july. gonna start taking bets on number of lost fingers and toes throughout the season

I thought for sure they would do a season of the exact same time period but from different POVs.

do we know yet if Dana and Collins return? Hope so

I thought for sure they would do a season of the exact same time period but from different POVs.

This would suck so hard.

Well, sure, if Robert Zemeckis is guest directing...

i’ll take blown-off-face for $500 alex

I understand, but :(

TVLine can exclusively reveal that Tracy Ifeachor, who starred as Dr. Heather Collins in Season 1 of The Pitt, will not return to the acclaimed HBO Max medical drama for Season 2. Sources tell us that the decision was a creative one, and it was not Ifeachor’s choice to leave.

Boo

noooooo :( :(

BOO

word on the street is that the reason why Collins wasn’t back for the final few episodes (and probably at least partially why she won’t be back for S2, regardless of whose choice it is) is that she is an anti-abortion Christian nutso and was not thrilled about her character’s storyline

I guess she stood too hard in her faith: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHfd-jGonKT/?igsh=MXB4bzQyZHF0ZzZyOA==

unboo

On a different note, from threads of old (in this case on the 'oh yeah that was a movie' John Carter thread):

they really should have gotten Noah Wylie to star in this

― (thinks and smiles) (DJP), Friday, February 17, 2012 7:26 AM (thirteen years ago)

you say that about every movie!!

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Friday, February 17, 2012 7:27 AM (thirteen years ago)

yes, but they could have started another "Predator ship"-style fanboy debate with this between "A Princess of Mars" and "ER"

― (thinks and smiles) (DJP), Friday, February 17, 2012 7:36 AM (thirteen years ago)

https://www.themirror.com/entertainment/tv/hbo-show-cast-member-axed-1261766

"as her very gay publicist" is sending me, an absolute all-timer

Season 2 teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuZnRRVWnbQ

15 episode season baby

Really would love them to level up and do 22 ep for s3 but that’ll never happen

but yay! January we scrub in!

I wonder how often I have to see a character before I remember their name, or is it just the same thing that happens to me with books: if I don't talk about them with someone (or write an essay on them) I can't remember the details. Like, I think all these characters are great, I'm delighted to see them all back, but I can't remember a single one of their names except for Doctor Robbie. I'm the same with Strange New Worlds. I am only now beginning to learn the characters' names properly (the ones I didn't know already). I'm sure this used to be different in the old days when seasons were longer and everyone watched the same programmes.

Same here. Santos probably the only other name I remember

lfg

oh yeah. nice to see that Dana, the charge nurse, didn't walk away. from the credits on imdb it looks like Langdon (addiction guy) is back as well

You can see Langdon around the 18 sec mark (looks like he's wearing a penguins cap)

You are all very kind to include the names. This is teamwork.

Super excited. January is too far off.

I'm just impressed they stepped on the gas and turned it around so fast.

I thought it was first reported s2 would be out this summer?

maybe I was conflating that with the reported 4th of july setting

well either way odds are in our favor for at least a gnarly fireworks injury :D