Medical drama 'The Pitt' shows us how much can happen in an emergency room: 'This is how it would unfold in real life'

The Pitt works on a lot of levels. The Max medical drama, which follows health care workers at an underfunded trauma hospital in Pittsburgh, is fast-paced and delivers adrenaline-pumping scenarios without dipping into melodrama. It’s gritty, emotional and, at times, bleak. It’s also realistic.

The series, which premiered on Jan. 9, has already secured an early renewal for Season 2 on Feb. 14. Since its premiere, The Pitt has become one of Max’s Top 5 most-watched original debuts of all time, both globally and domestically, according to the streamer. It was also the most-streamed show on Max and television overall for the week ending Feb. 14, FlixPatrol reported.

Led by Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), the hospital’s chief attendant, each episode follows one hour in a 15-hour emergency room shift at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. The show unfolds in real time, allowing audiences to feel the same sense of urgency the characters do.

“I think one of the things that separates the emergency department from other forms of medicine is the time factor — not just the amount of time you wait to be seen, but also the patients that are brought in who only have moments to live if these guys don’t work fast enough,” creator R. Scott Gemmill told Variety. “The real-time aspect seemed to be the best way to capture this world that we’d never seen before, and we weren’t sure it was going to work, even up until we started shooting.”

For Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, a board-certified pediatrician at UMPC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh who served as a medical adviser on The Pitt, the show’s unique form of storytelling works so well because it “fits the specialty.”

“[The format] highlights that so much can happen in just an hour,” Owusu-Ansah told Yahoo Entertainment. “I think it lends itself to the volume and fast-paced work life that we live in, what is called the emergency department.”

One element of a hospital scenario The Pitt gets right is capturing just how chaotic the emergency room can be. Doctors may be juggling several patients at once, the department may be understaffed and the waiting room may be bursting at the seams with people waiting for care.

“It is the only division or department where no one is turned away,” Owusu-Ansah said. “We take everybody. I think doing the hour-to-hour [format] emphasizes just how much emergency medicine and first responders take on even in a short period of time.”

Owusu-Ansah first spoke to The Pitt’s writers room via Zoom in March 2024. During the two-hour video call, she pulled from personal experience, sharing anecdotes about scenarios she encountered as a clinician. Owusu-Ansah’s goal was to highlight health disparities in emergency medicine that aren’t commonly shown in the media.

She spoke of her experiences working in the hospital system, which include treating patients with sickle cell disease whose pain is often overlooked and the moment of silence she and her colleagues observe when a patient dies in their emergency room.

Many of the experiences Owusu-Ansah shared have been written into episodes of The Pitt.

The show’s format gives stories the time and space to be explored thoughtfully. Whereas another medical drama might skip ahead or jump in time, The Pitt plants itself in the moment, however grueling it might be.

“Over [a] whole episode, you see the story unfold, and that’s how your shifts are,” she said. “It’s hard to poke holes in this because they’ve made it so realistic to the point of like, ‘This is how it would unfold in real life.’”

For many health care workers that have seen The Pitt, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Online, ER doctors and nurses are sharing how the show accurately depicts what they go through on an hourly basis.

“It’s not just the hour-to-hour, it’s the accuracy,” Owusu-Ansah said. “Every single thing, every single disease process, how we treat it, our side conversations, our interactions with patients. It heightens the degree of accuracy, and that heightens the realism to have this hour-by-hour [format]. It’s what sets it apart [from other medical shows] because time becomes essential in this medical drama.”

Owusu-Ansah is grateful for The Pitt and the awareness it brings to the trials and tribulations of working in emergency medicine.

“This is our lives, you know, and now it’s finally captured in a way that’s almost like a historical time capsule,” she said. “So I commend them, honestly, for taking us seriously and for honoring us with this medical drama series.”