I write about a lot of television. And that usually means I watch a series before it airs, compile my thoughts in a review, and then move onto the next show. It’s rare I get to savor a series or watch it like everyone else – even when I’m churning out episode reviews. That’s part of the gig, although it often means that when everyone is chatting about that hot new series, I’m left trying to remember a certain episode, character, or moment and coming up blank – even when I loved the show and gave it a rave. I remember when the first season of Severance became a hit (which happened about midway through it airing its first season), I would get asked my thoughts about a twist or turn and I honestly couldn’t remember anything about the show save for its finale – which wouldn’t air for another month – because it had been at least a month and a half since I watched the entire season to write my review. But lest you think this is a piece whining about my job, this is actually an explanation about why I opted not to review The Pitt throughout its second season: I wanted to have a show that was for me.
Sure, not writing about the hottest show on TV might have been a professional mistake, but I wanted to have a show where I could enjoy it all, enmesh myself in the fandom a bit, guess excitedly about what was going to come next. So, that’s what I did. And what I realized, other than that The Pitt remains an excellent series, albeit one that showed a few cracks in its armor this time out, was that there’s a vocal subset of the fandom that really doesn’t understand how a show like The Pitt works. And that’s troubling.
Over the last, say, twenty years or so, the television landscape has changed in massive ways with the advent of streaming services delivering us single-drop shows on demand, puzzle box shows trying to emulate the success of the early seasons of Lost, and the (more or less) disappearance of episodic dramas in favor of a massive push for serialized storytelling. It’s been a seismic change, teaching a generation of viewers (well, several, although it was really only a formulative change for Gen Z and younger since this is most of what they’ve known their whole lives while the older generations had to adapt to this switch in how to watch TV) how to consume television in a new way.
Instead of long, 20-24 episode seasons (which were peppered with “filler” episodes that some argue weren’t really filler, as they often ended up as character-driven episodes that might not have had a major bearing on the season arc, but taught us something about a supporting character) that appeared on the calendar like clockwork (starting in September, ending in May), we started getting 10-14 episode seasons that appear maybe every two years if we were lucky, often hampered by extensive mythology and world building (or at least a complex web of character relationships to keep track of if it wasn’t a fantasy or sci-fi epic), asking its viewers to remember everything while also trying to “solve” story beats. And if the show stuck to a more “traditional” release and style (usually on network TV), it was more prone to soap opera-esque twists and turns, not grounded in “reality”.
And that’s all perfectly fine! There’s a valid way to tell a story within that structure, and I’ve enjoyed some of the shows that embarked down either of these paths. But that’s not what The Pitt is – and, most pressing and troubling for critics like me, it’s never once indicated that it was shooting for either of those narrative techniques. The premise is shockingly simple: Here is a real-time look at a day in the emergency department of a Pittsburgh hospital. We will get to see 15 hours of the day – a full Day Shift and the partial handover into the Night Shift. We will meet patients. We will spend time with the staff of the ED as well as select members of other departments who appear when needed. Patients will be treated, some will be fine, some will not. The medical staff might be having a good day, they might not. But it’s a real time experience for us and them. And then the next season will jump into the future an unspecified amount of days, weeks, or months, and we’ll see a new set of 15 hours.
It’s a genius structure, to be frank, combining the ticking clock of a 24 with grounded medical-based storytelling. But what it isn’t is a puzzle box (outside of the doctors and nurses attempting to diagnose a patient). It’s not a show that takes huge emotional swings. It’s grounded – as much as any television series can be – in reality. We almost never see our characters outside the walls of the ED, and when we do, it’s for an important reason. This isn’t a show about spending time at home with Robby or Whitaker. It’s not about exploring the (potentially) toxic romantic entanglement between Drs. Santos and Garcia. It’s about these characters, in this moment, doing their jobs and how well they’re able to accomplish that.
So, when I started seeing fans hypothesizing that the season was going to end with a cliffhanger where Robby gets into a motorcycle accident and appears as a patient in the ED and we won’t know his fate until season three, I was gobsmacked. And then there’s the theory that Langdon stole Whitaker’s badge to steal drugs and relapse. Were we all watching the same show? Because The Pitt, like every other show on television, tells you the “right” way to watch it. It offers clear context clues as to what the writers want you to do, how you should experience moments, what you should walk away thinking at the end. A show like Lost asked us to parse everything for clues, presented us with mysteries to be solved, wanted us to dive deep into character motivations and make judgements before the “truth” was revealed. The Pitt is asking us to take in the chaos each episode and follow along to see how it impacts each character. It’s not asking us to try to figure out who Baby Jane Doe’s mother might be – at least not by the third episode where she’s still alone – or take wild guesses at which of the female patients being treated is secretly the baby’s mother.
Every single time, a patient’s appearance in the series is meant to be taken at face value. A deaf patient struggling to receive treatment because the interpretation options are failing is a look at that exact situation. An obese patient having trouble receiving treatment due to his size is a commentary on that exact situation. A man with medical debt choosing to walk out against medical advice and then returning grievously injured from a fall that might have been intentional is exactly what it seems: an indictment on the insane medical costs of treating people in the United States. Yet, every week, more and more unhinged theories seemed to pop up looking for ghosts in the machine where there were none.
I’m rarely someone that says “you’re watching TV wrong,” largely because I believe that if you’ve found a show you love and are invested in, that’s the real point. But I’m totally flummoxed at how many folks out there seem to not understand how The Pitt is asking them to watch the show and how that’s leading to crazy theories, frustration, and disappointment at times. Part of it is that The Pitt is a show that requires single-screen viewing thanks to the minute details embedded in episodes (one example: Garcia’s throw-away line in the premiere that Whitaker used her toothbrush, which tells us that she and Santos are in some sort of romantic relationship, a moment that many, many people missed the first time around). Part of it is that the series doesn’t employ a score, which means that big emotional or dramatic moments lack a musical cue for viewers that asks them to take note or feel a specific way. It’s a smart choice, in my opinion, but again, it’s asking people to watch television in a different way than we’ve been conditioned to for our entire lives.
The Pitt makes for a really compelling viewing experience when you put your phone down and really lock in. The characters are richly drawn, the stories being told are fascinating. And the writing isn’t trying to trick any of us. It’s incredibly clear about what we’re seeing, where our characters are mentally and emotionally at any given moment, and it generously seeds clues about what we can expect, on the whole, to unfurl over the course of those 15 hours. If you give yourself the chance to spend those 45 minutes really focused on what you’re watching, I promise you’ll get something out of it. Like I said at the beginning, it’s rare that I get to have a show that I don’t write about. The Pitt is the perfect show to really give yourself over to in the moment. My hope is that next January, when season three starts, folks will take the time to lock in and enjoy it. And take what they see at face value. I promise, it’s well worth that minor commitment.
