Looking for healing in “the pitt”

I am the kid who passed out in high school when the Red Cross gave a presentation about the value of donating blood. The woman hadn’t even gotten to a discussion of actual needles before my head hit the desk. Medical dramas, as you might imagine, have never been my cup of tea. But it has been many months since I watched a show as passionately as I watched The Pitt (created by R. Scott Gemmill; streaming on Max), a medical drama set in an overcrowded, underresourced emergency room in Pittsburgh, nicknamed “the pitt” by its overworked staff.

The Pitt’s creative team was also responsible for ER, the juggernaut critical and commercial success that ran for 15 seasons between 1994 and 2009, so they know something about the genre. But where ER married frenetic emergency room pacing with long, sweeping personal arcs for the main characters, The Pitt is all trauma all the time. The sense of ceaselessness is heightened by the choice to constrain each episode to one hour of a 12-hour shift, which balloons into a 15-hour shift thanks to a catastrophic event near the end of the season.

This device both slows time down (nothing can be wrapped up quickly) and heightens the sense of urgency (there is no skipping ahead to the resolution). When a young adult overdoses on fentanyl, we watch hour by hour as his parents face the excruciating decision to remove life support, then whether to donate his organs, then how to say goodbye with the help of their priest. In most shows, this would be compressed to one of several plotlines in a single episode. In The Pitt it lasts for half the season, and we are forced to feel how long the hours in that never-ending day must have felt for those parents, and for the care team advising them.