Max’s Big New Show Isn’t HBO. It’s TV. – Slate

Left for dead only a few years ago, network television sprang back to life in 2024. As streaming providers slashed their original content, users turned to the comforts of long-running shows that could occupy them for weeks or months rather than a night or two. (I loved the second season of Netflix’s The Diplomat, but its six episodes barely sustained me for the length of a one-way flight.) CBS’s Matlock reboot drew monster numbers, and ABC’s High Potential, with Kaitlin Olson as an LAPD janitor who is also a crime-solving genius, drew the network’s highest ratings for a new series in six years. While The Bear stumbled under the weight of its ambitions, the billboards for Doctor Odyssey promised a frothy good time, cheekily touting the cruise ship-set medical drama’s “Big Deck Energy.”There couldn’t be a better time to revive ER, which transformed prime-time drama in the mid-1990s and turned George Clooney from a veteran of short-lived sitcoms into a major star and sex symbol. One of the rare pre-Sopranos shows to be defined by its visual style—and one of the first to make the leap to widescreen—the show used a mobile camera to swoop and dart around the chaotic emergency room of a Chicago hospital, plunging viewers into a world where life-or-death drama could come busting through the swinging doors at any moment. Although it was as much of a ratings powerhouse in its day as Seinfeld or Friends, ER hasn’t found the same audience among present-day viewers, but that just makes it ripe for rediscovery, an old show that still has the potential to feel new.The Pitt isn’t quite ER: 30 Years Later, although it was created by ER veteran R. Scott Gemmill, produced by ER showrunner John Wells, and stars ER’s Noah Wyle, who played medical student-turned-attending physician John Carter for its first 11 seasons. It did start out that way, but after failing to come to terms with the estate of Michael Crichton, who created ER and wrote the script for its pilot episode, the Max series’ creators changed course and set their show in a different city’s emergency room, with Wyle playing an entirely different emergency medicine specialist named Michael Robinavitch, the overworked chief of the emergency department at an overwhelmed Pittsburgh hospital. Exactly how similar the two shows are is the subject of ongoing litigation, but if Dr. Robby, as his patients call him, isn’t John Carter, it’s impossible not to think of him as you watch Wyle juggle incoming patients, switching from command to compassion as he instructs anxious medical students and calms the families of the sick and injured. His sorrows may be different, but the look is the same, the eyes full of focus and concern that you’d hope to see staring back at you in the most frightening moments of your life.Elaborate Steadicam shots are no longer such a television novelty, so The Pitt is built around a different gimmick: Each of its roughly hour-long episodes covers an hour in real time, with the entire 15-episode season spanning a single frenetic workday, starting at 7 a.m. Although that would seem to make it an ideal binge-watch, the show is rolling out on Max one week at a time, after a two-episode premiere on Jan. 9. The format lends itself to mid-grade pulp like 24, with its ticking clocks and relentlessly ginned-up drama, but it’s a less secure fit for a show that wants us to feel for its characters rather than just pump our fists every time they defuse a bomb. The writers use the real-time conceit to stretch storylines out for several episodes/hours: the parents who keep ordering more tests to delay the acknowledgement that their teenage son’s accidental fentanyl overdose has left him brain-dead; the burly man in the waiting room who grows increasingly short-tempered and starts muttering racial slurs as other patients are triaged ahead of him. A fresh-faced medical student (Gerran Howell) keeps getting doused in filth and struggles with the machine that dispenses fresh scrubs; another (Isa Briones) pursues what seems at first like a petty concern about minor irregularities in the hospital’s supply of painkillers, until the issue comes up enough times that you suspect she may be onto something. Meanwhile, Robby is struggling to hold it together on the fourth anniversary of his beloved mentor’s death, which, for reasons still unclear after 10 of The Pitt’s 15 hours, he blames himself for.Even in binge-watch mode, the slowly unraveling mystery of Robby’s guilt becomes more distracting than it is tantalizing, an attempt to milk a conventional character arc out of a structure that is hostile to it. The Pitt is in some ways a show at odds with itself, trying to cross the long-range storytelling of the prestige TV era with the more immediate pleasures of a network procedural: the mystery illness that is unraveled by the last commercial break, the amusingly non-critical injury that lightens the mood. And while the doctors of ER’s County General were constantly pairing off and breaking up, there’s not much room for romance in a show that only covers a single shift and rarely departs from the hospital floor. There were times when I would have killed for a few minutes of an orderly awkwardly flirting with a desk nurse.The Pitt wants to be all things to all audiences, but it’s an ungainly hybrid, not sophisticated enough to be a great show, not satisfying enough to be a fun one. It makes the simple act of constructing a traditional episode—an A story, a B story, perhaps some comic relief—feel like a vanishing art, and if Wells, the onetime showrunner of The West Wing, can’t manage it, you have to wonder who can. There are moments when The Pitt tries for something new, but it’s at its best when it’s in a well-worn groove. It’s not HBO. But it isn’t quite TV either.
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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/01/the-pitt-max-show-er-noah-wyle-sequel.html