Noah Wyle hadn’t planned on going back to a medical series but after the pandemic, the “nuclear bomb that was dropped on the medical community,” he felt compelled to revisit the landscape.
“There’s something happening here that’s probably worth talking about again,” he said.
“Part of doing this was to shine the spotlight back on the community and, hopefully, inspire the next generation of health care workers to go into these jobs,” Wyle says. “Our system is fragile and it’s as fragile as the quality of support we give our practitioners.”
Working with former “ER” writer R. Scott Gemmill, Wyle pitched the concept to Wells, the show’s longtime executive producer, and came up with “The Pitt,” a look at an emergency department in a Pittsburgh hospital. There, viewers get a glimpse of the hectic atmosphere and the strain it produces. Like “24,” the events take place over the course of one day.
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From left, Melvin Robert, Gerran Howell, Taylor Dearden, Supriya Ganesh, R. Scott Gemmill, Patrick Ball, Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa, John Wells, Fiona Dourif, Isa Briones, and Shabana Azeez of “The Pitt” attend the Warner Bros. Television Press Day in Burbank, California.
The format, Gemmill says, is important because “time is of the essence. That’s the best way we could come up with in terms of really being in there.”
The 15-episode series shows how health care workers interact, support and cope.
“ER doctors don’t follow up with patients,” Gemmill says. “They’re there for 12 hours and they’re gone. They’re on to the next case. It comes with challenges – how do you tell a character’s story when you only have 15 hours to get to know them? That’s a challenge that makes it fun.”
In the opening episode, several student doctors are introduced into the mix. That gives veterans a chance to provide background on the ones who’ve been there for quite some time. Wyle plays the senior attending physician who tries to teach while shuffling the staff.
Gerran Howell plays a student doctor experiencing his first day in an emergency room rotation in "The Pitt."
Katherine LaNasa plays the charge nurse who serves as his right hand. Together, the two have a good handle on the personnel at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital.
The shift – from newbie on “ER” to senior staffer on “The Pitt” – was an intriguing one for Wyle.
“I was shocked to find out that this was the first year (schools) didn’t match all of the positions in emergency medicine,” he says. During “ER’s” run, “we had been responsible for this huge spike in candidacy and an outpouring of money going into the discipline. And then the trend started to decline rapid after Covid. I was shocked to see what the need is out there and how bad it’s gotten – what the boarding crisis is like, what the nursing shortages are like, in real terms when we talk to the experts.”
Robby (Noah Wyle) begins his shift talking a colleague off the ledge in "The Pitt."
To get a flavor of health care today, “The Pitt” has four physicians and eight emergency room nurses as advisers.
“The show has a secret weapon named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a technical adviser and producer and writer who’s still a practicing ER doctor,” Wyle says. “He goes into what he calls his ‘tickle’ trunk and pulls out cases and really good ideas. He’s never run dry.”
Noah Wyle plays a veteran emergency room physician in "The Pitt."
In each episode, dozens of emergencies turn up. Because it’s shot on a single stage, crew members are encouraged to wear scrubs so they look like they belong if they’re caught in a shot.
To lend authenticity to “The Pitt,” actors participated in medical boot camp two weeks before shooting start.
For Wyle, it was a bittersweet journey. The stage where he played Dr. John Carter in “ER” was only 200 feet away. “That 200 feet felt like 200 year and 20 pounds. It felt like a thousand miles,” he says. “But it’s been rewarding to come back and get to play in this arena again.”
Because he’s not the newbie anymore, “this is a totally different acting exercise. This is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient, playing with levels of fatigue and an ability to compartmentalize things that need to be compartmentalized. This has been a wonderful sort of psychological examination of one guy having one of the worst days of his life and the presence required in just that exercise.”
Wells says the show is shot in order so actors understand the arc of their characters. “This has allowed us to grow organically through the day,” he says.
“It leads to the naturalism of the work because we become so relaxed,” says LaNasa. “We wear the same things every day. We’re in the same space…and it feels very real to us.”
"The Pitt" airs on Max.
Bruce Miller, Sioux City Journal entertainment editor, talks with Josh Lawson, the Australian actor who plays Dr. Bruce Schweitz on the NBC comedy "St. Denis Medical."
