The Pitt

The Best…

…Series I Watched This Week

The Pitt (2025) — Created by R. Scott Gemmill
Streaming on MAX

At a time when Severance and The White Lotus have — justifiably — captured the attention of “prestige” TV watchers everywhere (myself included), The Pitt has emerged as the sleeper hit of the year so far. And for good reason.

I didn’t know it when I first sat down to watch it three months ago, but I needed this show right now. I’ll get to that in a bit.

The Pitt is a medical drama set in the emergency department of a teaching hospital in Pittsburgh. Each episode is an hour in a single day’s shift, which means that across the 15 episodes, you see the workday unfold in more or less real time.

Some of the storylines are self-contained within an episode, others play out across several hours. So you get to see not only interesting, weird and sometimes shocking medical cases, but also how working in the ED affects the doctors, residents, med students, nurses and other staff as the season progresses.

Noah Wyle stars as Dr. Michael Robinavitch, known to all as “Robby.” As a grizzled, senior attending physician, he oversees the department with soulful, paternal care but also an undercurrent of anger and frustration. When the series begins, you can sense that something is off with Robby, but you don’t know what it is.

Wyle, who is also an executive producer of the show, leads an outstanding cast of actors you’ve probably never seen before. Across the board, their performances are wonderfully differentiated and nuanced.

Wyle is known for starring in another famous medical TV drama: ER, the blockbuster hit of the ’90s. His John Carter was a young, hotshot doctor then; Robby is something completely different. (John Wells, who was the showrunner for ER, is an executive producer here too.)

This is the part where I acknowledge that I’ve never seen ER. In fact, I’ve never been interested in watching any kind of medical drama. Maybe they seemed too melodramatic to me or maybe I just don’t like the sight of blood (even when I know it’s fake).

But for whatever reason, early in its weekly run on MAX, I checked out The Pitt and was instantly hooked — despite, at times, A LOT of blood.

The showrunner, R. Scott Gemmill, his team and MAX made some smart decisions. First, setting the show in a teaching hospital means that when the more senior physicians are schooling the residents and students on how to diagnose or perform certain procedures, they’re also telling the audience what’s going on without it feeling like heavy-handed exposition.

Second, having each episode be an hour in a single shift means the drama keeps compounding as the season goes on until it becomes so stressful that you almost can’t watch. Yet it’s so compelling that you have to keep watching.

Third, rolling out each episode the old fashioned way — once a week, Thursday nights at 9 pm ET — gave the characters room to grow even though the events of the season only last a single day. The story arcs feel truly earned when you watch across three months (the season finale ran last week). So I’d recommend resisting the urge to binge and give yourself time to digest each episode.

Ultimately, what I think resonated the most with me was that the show is a celebration of expertise. ED doctors see patients with all kinds of problems. They have to diagnose and treat them or send them off to specialists, and sometimes it’s not immediately clear what's ailing them. If they make mistakes, people can die.

The show is clear: these are highly-trained experts who, while not perfect, know what they’re doing. At times, they can even be heroes.

Which is why this show came at the right time for me.

Even though The Pitt can be stressful to watch, I found it to be a surprising salve for the anxieties many of us are feeling right now. The characters may be flawed, but within the walls of their emergency department, science, teamwork, problem solving and, most of all, expertise win out. They are fixing things — people — rather than tearing them down.