Let’s begin by harkening back to the days of old: January 2025, when I first happened upon The Pitt on my HBOMax account. Was this a poorly cast Brad Pitt biographical series? Or perhaps a sci-fi outing of sorts about some very large, very mysterious chasm? Why, no, it was a hospital drama. I brushed it aside immediately, as I assumed all medical shows were lowbrow slop made for mass consumption. Atop my high horse, I dismissed the praise that had been lavished upon this show because the fans simply did not know as much as I did. For context, I worked in a hospital for the last three and a half years, from the quasi-pandemic days of 2021 until just a couple months ago when I made my valiant escape. I never worked in an emergency department (ED), so I can’t claim to know the full challenges of treating patients in their most critical state, but I can certainly relate to the general plight of the overworked, undervalued, deeply stressed healthcare worker just trying to keep people alive and safe even when it feels like the entire system is often stacked against you.

Perhaps connoisseurs of medical television can prove me wrong, but it was always my impression that the vast majority of medical dramas were uninterested in a grounded, reverent portrayal of healthcare and instead used the hospital as a mere backdrop for trivial personal drama. This is not to say real-life healthcare workers are devoid of drama or basic human feeling and needs, but these people are in the field because they love it and find the work meaningful. There is a poignancy and humanity in healthcare that I had always thought of as untapped potential in television…until I finally caved and watched The Pitt. 

The Pitt tells the story of the ED staff of a trauma center hospital in the shining metropolis of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but there’s a catch. The entire season takes place over one particularly long and traumatic shift, with each episode amounting to a sequential hour of the shift. This show provides an opportunity for people to understand the minute perspective of healthcare workers like never before. Numerous and rapturous are the praises sung for the noble sacrifice of healthcare workers, especially in our pandemic-laden age, but the mental and physical endurance required to persevere through 12+ hours of life-or-death stakes multiple days a week is a burden rarely brought to life before The Pitt.

Our guide through the harrowing 15 hours of this shift is Dr. Robby, the head physician of his hospital’s ED (which he has dubbed “The Pitt”). He is well-mannered to his patients and peers alike, providing them with support and guidance in his own stoic way, but gruff to administrative forces that go against what is best for the patients and workers for the sake of capitalistic goals and reduce the hard work of him and his colleagues to numbers. There is a scene in the first episode, when Robby enlists himself in a war of words against a hospital administrator over survey scores and brewing financial strife, that made me realize this show was far keener than my cynicism allowed me to expect.

I know full well what it’s like to deal with the endless bureaucracy of healthcare. You give it your all everyday, seeking to help people within a crippled American system that is organized not to help people succeed, but to raise profit margins. Yes, there is a practical need for hospitals to remain financially viable under our unfortunately privatized system. However, being forced to do the best you can in the moment for chronically struggling individuals while you know it’s never actually enough, outpatient resources and insurance companies consistently drop the ball on their clients, and higher-ups judge everything you do based on numbers on a page can lead to a never-ending battle with a broken system where everyone loses. There is an innate, Sisyphean psychological torture present when you attempt to make waves in a hospital while the system around you is crumbling. Perhaps all healthcare workers are a little masochistic and derive a strange satisfaction from the constant sense that you may be showered in some bodily fluid, physically assaulted, or so tired that you collapse on the floor. Or perhaps, it is the insurmountable gratification from saving people’s lives, from realizing that you were the last safeguard between life and oblivion, that overpowers the mental, emotional, and physical taxation that comes with every single shift. 

The Pitt masters this dichotomy brilliantly. Robby and his fellow staff go from patient to patient, where lives are saved and destroyed in tandem, loved ones grieve and rejoice, and the staff grapple with their perceived failures and celebrate their successes in rapid fire. All the while, they maintain that pitch black sense of humor that serves as the last coping mechanism in the way of quitting it all. Working in healthcare is a cacophony of emotions that’s always changing, yet the chaos of it all manages to be a constant. It’s poetic, nightmarish, and never been nailed so aptly as it is in The Pitt.

On a more grounded, less apocalyptic note, while Noah Wyle’s Robby certainly runs the show with his charismatic and stoic but emotive and traumatized turn, neither a hospital worker nor a TV star can do their job alone. Thankfully, the cast supporting Noah Wyle is fantastic. It’s pointless to name standouts when the entire ensemble is phenomenal, but the characters that resonated with me the most had to be Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), Dr. King (Taylor Dearden), and charge nurse/work mom Dana (Katherine LaNasa). Dana in particular touched me, since charge nurses are truly a special breed and her character reminded me of so many cathartic moments I had with charge nurses in moments of high stress (I’m thinking about you, Sue). Everyone breathes such life and complexity into their roles, and nobody is exactly as they seem either. It’s honestly impressive how much nuance the show gleans from these characters with such a microcosmic chronology. But, above all else, The Pitt reminds us all that healthcare workers are fallible, imperfect, often traumatized individuals who come to their work with their own immense baggage and have to reconcile their grand aspirations with the harsh realities. You may never see more flawed angels in any profession. We see these characters celebrate, grieve, panic, and flat out break down, yet they have no choice but to get back up, persevere, and hope that one day they will be able to make sense of all the trauma in their lives.

This especially comes to a head in the last few episodes, which are some of the most stressful hours of television I’ve ever watched and serve as a bold, shrieking thematic capstone to hospitals as the blunt force trauma recipients of society’s most vile and pervasive illnesses. But when the momentary dust settles and the characters are left to pick up the pieces, the show comes back down to earth in a truly compelling and astonishing way. This unilaterally accepted sentiment that you must mutually come to terms with what you’ve just horrifically endured together, be resolute in your decision not to end it all, and come back to do it all again tomorrow is the most honest poignancy I’ve ever seen from a show of this ilk. This show like no other understands that this perpetually sick world needs medical workers, even if the job slowly breaks them down.

Ultimately, The Pitt demonstrates that working in healthcare is an epic catch-22 of absurdity. Everyone and everything are working against you, but you must either paddle upstream or careen over the edge of Niagara Falls trying because the world needs you. The trauma, hardship, and danger that comes with the profession cannot be ignored. In many ways, your life is on the line as the well-intentioned fixer of wounds literal and figurative with no real protection of your own. And yet, the field keeps people coming back in spite of the unspeakable because there is paradoxically that grand, fleeting reward and that camaraderie you form with those you work and trauma bond with, all with the darkest sense of humor ever conceived. It’s a cliche at this point, but it holds completely true: you better laugh like there’s no tomorrow, lest you fall into a pitt of despair. Carry on the good fight, my fellow administers of humanity. I hope seeing your plights depicted in such an unflinching way on television can, if nothing else, make you feel seen.

9/10