The Pitt

Decades after playing the fresh-faced Dr Carter in ER, Noah Wyle dons the latex gloves once again with The Pitt. This time around, he’s the troubled, albeit kind-hearted, Dr Robby, overseeing the emergency department at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital (colloquially referred to as “The Pitt”). One may be forgiven for thinking this is just ER with smartphones, but The Pitt is that rarity of a medical drama: realist, earnest and lacking the soapy melodrama that so many of these shows succumb to. 

Suffering from PTSD following the death of his friend and mentor during the pandemic, Robby is tasked with supervising a group of young medical students. Set in real time with each episode encompassing an hour, starting at 7:00 AM, it moves at a brisk pace, emulating the tense atmosphere of an emergency department.

The series is a highly compassionate look at what it means to be a frontline worker in a facility that tends predominantly to working-class and marginalised communities. Take, for instance, Louie (Ernest Harden Jr), an “unhoused” regular struggling with alcohol dependency, who is treated with dignity and respect. Moreover, there are evident parallels to be made between the underfunded “pitt” and the NHS. Robby is berated by an administrator for low patient satisfaction ratings, much like NHS staff are scapegoated to justify its supposed “unfit for purpose” designation by the right-wing media. Robby points out that, in fact, understaffing and poor pay are to blame for such failures.

While Wyle is the star and shines as Robby, it’s the supporting characters who are the most intriguing. Australian actress Shabana Azeez is excellent as student Javadi, a nepo baby whose mother is a surgeon at the hospital and whose nausea at the sight of gore suggests a medical career was not a decision of her own making. Then, there’s the curious case of Santos (Isa Briones), who gives underhanded nicknames to her fellow trainees; Briones plays her exceptionally well, her performance suggesting that there’s more to Santos than a medical mean girl. Meanwhile, Taylor Dearden is a standout as the neurodivergent-coded Dr Mel King. 

The Pitt is proof that the medical drama genre hasn’t gone stale. A deeply empathetic portrayal of healthcare workers and patients, ultimately, its success as a series lies in multifaceted characters whose company we’re happy to be in.

Antonia Georgiou

The Pitt is released on HBO Max on 26^th March 2026.

Watch the trailer for The Pitt here: