Season one of ‘The Pitt’ is a TV masterclass

The show is also quick to have a pair of Filipina nurses—the playful Princess (Kristin Villanueva) and the straight-shooting Perlah (Amielynn Abellera)—speak Tagalog as a casual part of their day, crafting an unobtrusive and realistically multicultural texture. In an era where “representation” can be a cynical cudgel, it’s rare to find a Hollywood show that has as many as half a dozen Asian and Asian American women in its ensemble (of Filipina and Indian origin, especially), each one authentically conceived without the need for the story to lend excessive time to explaining their backstories, or justifying their existence. It might sound cliché, but they’re allowed to simply “be.”

This survey-esque reflection of the medical field is one of several ways The Pitt commits to verisimilitude. Another is the way its stylized, hyper-active verbal exchanges are rooted in the realism of complicated medical jargon. Student doctors like the mousey bumpkin Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and interns like the ambitious Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) and the awkward overachiever Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) are forced to run their quickfire diagnoses and treatment plans by senior physicians like Robby no sooner than injured patients are wheeled through their doors. There’s little chance this dialogue will confer an amateur medical degree on any viewer, but it has the consistent function of illuminating character dynamics at every turn.

The story remains locked into the present except for a few brief flashbacks to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mental scars of which still hang over Robby several years later. He’s the show’s emotional anchor, though he barely keeps it together, even as he throws his weight around about proper procedure. Although he’s the ostensible hero, he’s not without his flaws too, especially when it comes to noticing and reporting the festering societal underbellies of trafficking, sexual assault, or misogyny that threatens to turn violent. If the show plays fast and loose with reality, it’s only with the details of mandatory reporting, yielding drama that concerns the limitations of the medicinal practice, and of doctors as individuals, whose own baggage informs their decision making.

Noah Wyle and Supriya Ganesh in "The Pitt."

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Robby is, for instance, correct a lot of the time, but when he browbeats third-year resident Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) for spending too much time on each patient, the ugliness of racial bias in the hospital system, and the way Mohan seeks to combat it through genuine connection, comes to the fore. The show is often a snapshot of the modern United States—between its rapid subplots of drug abuse, pressures placed on the medical industry, and eventually, gun violence—but it seldom stands on a soapbox, despite its clear perspective on all these things. In The Pitt, drama is paramount, superseding all notions of politics and identity. These things influence each character and decision, but the intended outcome isn’t a clearer picture of individual backdrops, but rather, the friction between them.

The series has been bestowed with numerous accolades and critical acclaim, but it may very well be underrated despite this, if only because there’s only so much praise that can be lavished on each individual actor who enters the frame. Every supporting character walks through the emergency room doors fully formed, as though complete and detailed lives had been interrupted by urgent maladies. Some are aggressors, who place the hospital staff on the backfoot. Others are aggrieved, and are forced to suddenly deal with pain and mortality. But they are all irrevocably human, just like the doctors and nurses who make up the central cast.

Even when these minor patients cease to enter the fray—thanks to a mass casualty event in the final episodes—The Pitt remains a bustling and detailed venue for new faces, as the doctors of the hospital’s night shift descend like superheroes. Of course, this sort of divine praise is conferred upon them by us, the audience, rather than the show itself, because so long as they’re within the frame, they maintain recognizable feet of clay.

Shabana Azeez and Gerran Howell in "The Pitt."

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This is perhaps the show’s greatest and most admirable paradox. It’s a tale of human complexity and the many layers to each person, and yet, from the moment someone appears on screen, they’re filtered to their most essential qualities through a combination of detailed performance and exacting dialogue. There’s never a moment when you don’t know exactly who someone is, and revealing more of themselves isn’t so much narrative subversion as it is an act of addition—or perhaps exponential multiplication—enhancing and magnifying the details of their behavior, and their very being. By the time the first season is said and done, the series catharsis lies not in transformation, but in the surety of knowing your fellow human being, what they carry with them every day, and the things they’re willing to do despite this.