'The Pitt' An Early Contender for Show of the Year with Realistic Portrayal of E.R. Life

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Max

 
Max’s medical drama “The Pitt” holds the title, at least for the moment, as both the best new series and the best series overall for 2025.

​Season one, which consists of 15 episodes, wrapped on Thursday, April 10, with a fascinating episode that ended a very long, hectic, emotional, and tragic shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room.

“The Pitt,” from creators R. Scott Gemmill, John Wells and Noah Wyle, follows the staff of an E.R. in a teaching hospital in Pittsburgh as they make their way through an ordinary shift that turns into a mass casualty M.A.S.H. unit toward the end of their day.

Wyle, who you’re instantly drawn to thanks to his past role on “E.R.,” is Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending still reeling from the loss of his mentor and friend during Covid years before, as he oversees the E.R. with his senior residents, Dr. Heather Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) and Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball). There are many faces and names to know in this E.R. with the other primary characters including charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), third-year resident Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), second-year resident Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif), second-year resident Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden), intern Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) and med students Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez).

I realize almost all of these aren’t household names for most TV watchers, but you’ll be mesmerized by every single one of them at points throughout the season, as well as other characters who pop in and out throughout the 15 hours of this shift.

“The Pitt” is told in real time, with each episode being an hour of the shift method popularized by the Fox drama “24.” I had some concerns at first that this method might cause storylines to drag or lead to a lack of character building, but this certainly wasn’t a problem with the first season.

Most of the season is told about typical cases you would see come into a hospital E.R., such as broken bones, drowning victims, burn victims, etc. The cases and procedures used to help save the patients are among the most realistic and lifelike you’ve ever seen, which keeps your attention and often mesmerizes you with their realism.

If you suspect “The Pitt” isn’t the most realistic medical show you’ve ever seen, just wait for episode 11 when there’s a birth scene.

The season truly ramped up as the day shift doctors were nearing the end of their shifts, when a mass shooting took place at a local music festival, and injuries came flooding into the hospital en masse. I was entertained and happy enough with the regular run of the mill E.R. cases for the bulk of the season that I don’t worry about the show in the future. Hopefully, viewers of the show won’t need the sort of mass casualty event you can’t have every season to thrive.

Wyle’s Dr. Robby is the emotional heart of the series. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this kind of performance out of him – I didn’t stick with TNT’s “Falling Skies” long, and despite enjoying TNT’s “The Librarians,” it wasn’t this kind of show – that I think I forgot what he was capable of. Season one gives us everything from Wyle’s character: charm, humor, sadness, depression, caring, anger, heroism and more, and he knocks every aspect of it out of the park. Wyle has assuredly locked up an Emmy nomination for the performance and might be considered the front-runner.

I think the cast overall is too much of an ensemble to garner more award consideration, especially when it shares a category with “The White Lotus,” which will receive multiple supporting nominations, whether worthy or not (and “The Pitt” is certainly better). Make no mistake, though, every single performance should be considered. Among my favorites of the season were Ganesh as Mohan, Dearden as King and Shawn Hatosy as Dr. Jack Abbot, a night shift attending, who only appears in about a third of the season.

I can’t wait for the second season of “The Pitt,” which should be out around the beginning of 2026. It is supposedly set 10 months after the events of season one over a hectic July 4 weekend.​