Triage My Soul
The Pitt on HBO Max is Healing Television
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
― Fred Rogers
One day in 1993, my mom came home from work to find me grey in the face and bleeding from my ears. While climbing our treehouse with a toy truck in one hand, I’d slipped, fallen, and shattered the back of my skull. She called 911.
The hospital they rushed me to took one look at me and called for a helicopter to rush me to another hospital.
I had a depressed skull fracture. The occipital bone in the back of my skull had caved in. It was a particularly dangerous injury because of its proximity to the brainstem, which controls breathing and heart rate. If any of that goes offline, you die. To save me, doctors lifted the fragments of my skull off my brain with surgical wire, like a grotesque retelling of Humpty Dumpty. More than a dozen people—EMTs, nurses, flight medics, surgeons, ER techs, and one very skilled helicopter pilot—worked in concert that day to keep me alive.
Months later, an EMT followed up with my mom to ask what had happened to me. When my mom told her I was okay—and still very much myself—she was stunned. She hadn’t expected me to survive.
Despite this family trauma, or maybe because of it, watching ER was a weekly ritual growing up.
My mom loved it. And while I was too young to follow the plots, I too found it oddly comforting. The squeaky synths of the theme song are, in the words of one Youtube commenter, “the official bedtime music for 90s kids.”
Like much of Michael Crichton’s work, ER reshaped pop culture. It launched George Clooney into orbit and brought a new level of speed, realism, and emotional chaos to medical television. With its overlapping dialogue and handheld camerawork, ER brought a kinetic urgency to hospital TV—the medical equivalent of The West Wing’s walk-and-talks.
I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with medical procedurals since then.
I never watched Grey’s Anatomy, but I did benefit from its excellent soundtrack. “Portions for Foxes” routinely played through my mom’s Volvo speakers when she drove me to high school crew practice.
I did watch House, a Sherlock Holmes inspired diagnostic medical show that alternated between dazzling wit and hilarious predictability. The formula for every episode: it’s never lupus, someone starts bleeding unexpectedly at the 30-minute mark, and the solution involves a violation of ethics, privacy, or both.
House made me believe that medical dramas were a limited sandbox. They had to be realistic enough to seem smart but unrealistic enough to be entertaining. Defibrillation scenes were used to defibrillate flagging storylines. Medical mumbo jumbo became a stand-in for actual intellectual depth. I believed that this genre couldn’t surprise or interest me any more.
When my mom recommended we watch The Pitt together, I was curious, but skeptical. Created by the team behind ER and starring Noah Wyle, this HBO Max tentpole has all the makings of a lazy retread.
Thankfully, it isn’t. This show doesn’t just get medical drama right—it redefines the genre. It’s also the most gripping, emotionally honest, and bingeable thing I’ve watched in years.
Each episode spans one hour of a single shift at a busy Pittsburgh trauma center. It’s ER meets 24, but that undersells its emotional depth and realism. Where Grey’s Anatomy used on-the-nose needle drops to tell you how to feel, and House used acidic banter to tell you what to think, The Pitt lets the drama of the work and the humanity of the people speak for itself. The result is immersive, intimate, and devastating.
Its ensemble cast is stunning across the board, but the medical students are a standout. They’re our entry point into the ER’s labyrinthine politics, colorful personalities, and blistering pace. They ask the questions we would ask—and learn who to trust, who to emulate, and who to avoid.
A highlight for me is Melissa King, a neurodivergent med student portrayed with nuance and depth by Taylor Dearden. Another is Gerran Howell as Dennis Whitaker, an earnest Iowa farm boy who never met a pair of scrubs he couldn’t ruin. Both bring a mix of vulnerability and nuance that makes their scenes surprisingly funny, raw, and revealing.
The med students guide us through the hospital, a textured world that feels like it’s existed for decades before cameras started rolling.
Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robinavitch (Dr. Robby) is the scarred leader of this realm: emotionally wounded by the trauma of COVID, but still deeply committed to care. In a media landscape full of toxic or emotionally constipated male leads, Robby feels like a revelation. He leads with integrity, mentors with humility, and holds his team together not with ego, but with empathy.
All of the characters are believable in their strengths and their flaws. A doctor who shines in one scene may flail in the next. Frank Langdon is commanding in a crisis and off-putting in the quiet moments that follow. Samira Mohan’s calm, detail-oriented approach to patient care is both inspiring and at odds with a numbers-driven medical system plagued by a shortage of beds and overcrowded waiting rooms.
The show thrives on the friction between doctors. Mohan’s quiet compassion rubs up against Robby’s pressure to meet quotas from leadership. Langdon and Santos clash because both are hyper confident, and neither likes being doubted. Santos may be The Pitt’s most polarizing character, but her arc delivers one of the series’ biggest emotional reveals—and made me examine my own internalized misogyny.
These differences add tension, but also richness. There’s no single right way to practice medicine. The best doctors are those who know how to modulate their approach to each patient and adapt to the circumstances on the fly.
Unlike too many medical shows, The Pitt doesn’t relegate nurses to the background. They are lovable characters, with medical perspective, bedside manners, and character arcs with just as much weight as the doctors.
Just when a scene settles, another emergency crashes in—reminding us that in an ER, even urgency gets interrupted. Doctors are constantly pulled in new directions, and so are we.
That constant movement—cutting between patients, doctors, and storylines—gives the show its engrossing pace, held together with the precision of a symphony. The plot blends multi-episode character arcs with patient cases that resolve within an hour. Instead of relying on cliffhangers or fake-outs, The Pitt keeps us hooked with flawed people facing compelling challenges. It’s a rare kind of bingeability—nuanced, grounded, and fully earned.
Oddly, the show The Pitt most reminds me of isn’t House or ER—it’s Derry Girls. Like that masterclass in TV writing, it uses empathy, humor, and heart to transform a potentially tricky topic—ER medicine or life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles—into remarkably watchable television. Its empathy shows up in the care given to even the smallest characters. In nurses gossiping in Tagalog or ER techs taking bets on where a stolen ambulance will end up, we see how boredom, routine, and dark humor live right alongside blood, trauma, and incessantly beeping machines.
Like Derry Girls, The Pitt balances heartbreak and humor— each making the other land harder. This deep well of empathy— the show’s heartbeat— is what allows it to break us and heal us—sometimes in the same scene. While weaker shows rely on blood and death (or yelling in House or sex in Grey’s Anatomy) to keep us watching, The Pitt leans on quieter moments of connection, pain, and grace—and trusts its actors to carry them, and us.
A brother and sister intubate, then de-intubate, their dying father. A college student arrives after a fentanyl overdose, already brain-dead. A six-year-old drowning victim is rushed in too late to save. These scenes aren’t milked for drama—they're portrayed with restraint, dignity, and deep emotional clarity. And somehow, the show still leaves space for humor and hope amidst all this darkness.
The Pitt’s commitment to realism isn’t limited to accurate terms or procedures. Like The Wire, it uses an institution, in this case a hospital, to explore broader societal dysfunction. This isn’t a show about the crisis of the day. It’s a show about a medical system in crisis.
Who ends up in the ER offers a stark snapshot of American life. Emergency rooms aren’t just treating wounds—they’re responding to mental health crises, homelessness, and addiction. The Pitt reminds us that hospitals aren’t simply places of care; they’re makeshift safety nets for a society coming apart. And they’re doing it understaffed, underfunded, and overwhelmed.
To visualize this, the show effectively uses ambiguity when introducing new patients. Some appear to be victims of abuse or sex trafficking. Others may be unhoused or trying to harm themselves—but we, like the doctors, rarely get the full story. Many arcs end without neat resolution. All we can do is wonder who these people are outside the worst day of their lives.
There are timely subplots about fentanyl-tainted pills, patients “doing their own research” on smartphones, and the resurgence of measles. Some of these are a little on the nose. At one point, a Greek chorus of nurses recites stats about violence against healthcare workers like they’re quoting a Times op-ed— but most of the time, the show embeds its themes with a subtlety that masks the research that clearly went into writing them.
All of this comes to a head in a multi-episode arc centered on a mass shooting. This unspeakable tragedy is rendered with new levels of intensity, compassion, and realism, carefully modeled after the real ER responses to events like the Pulse nightclub and Las Vegas shootings.
Watching it is harrowing, but oddly thrilling. It feels like the big game at the end of a sports movie or, as a video essayist I admire aptly put it, the hospital equivalent of Helm’s Deep.
The beleaguered ER team rallies. Med students like King and Whitaker step up and find their confidence. Veterans like head nurse Dana Evans and Dr Robby hold everyone together. People who had beef in previous episodes put it aside and work together. Even the bureaucratic hospital administrator—who I had been cursing just episodes earlier—jumps in to help Robby’s team save lives. When Jack Abbot, the gruff night-shift doctor, arrives to back up the overwhelmed day team, I wanted to stand up and cheer. It’s truly moving and life-affirming television.
In this climax, we clearly see what makes this show so evocative and revealing: an ER is a place where we see people at their worst, and humanity at its best. As Mr Rogers sagely reminded us: when things look dire, always look for the helpers.
Thanks to those ER workers in DC, I was able to grow up alongside this genre of television. Since that fateful fall, I’ve come a long way—and thankfully, so have medical shows. House captured the snark I mistook for brilliance in high school. Grey’s Anatomy embodied the sweeping melodrama that colored by life for years, right down to the soundtrack. The Pitt feels like the medical procedural has matured. It shows us something quieter, deeper, and more enduring: what real grief, grace, and heroism look like in moments big and small. Most shows try to comfort us with what we wish medicine—or life—looked like. The Pitt earns its place by showing us how it really is.
I never got to meet the many people who saved my life after I fell from that treehouse.
I never got to say thank you.
Thanks to this show, I feel like I finally have.