The Pitt: Raw bodies, raw humanity alongside dignity and grace
Death is real and has real consequences and this show is not going to try to soften that fact. It can also be the bearer of beauty, grace, wisdom, honesty and self-revelation.
By Kelly Fenton
Perhaps it’s the snob in me but I’ve never been a fan of medical dramas. It always seemed to me that the drama itself was, by definition, too easy, too ready-made, too unearned. It was ripe for emotional manipulation and lacked the complexity of more subtle affairs of the heart and of human nature.
Then I heard from folks whose sensibilities I implicitly trust that MAX’s new series The Pitt was a cut above the rest. Made by the creators of ER, it follows a full shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room, with each episode representing one hour.
What makes this show so good? Foremost, Noah Wylie as the head of the ER. Wylie was the boyish-faced star of ER 30 years ago. He is now grizzled and plays the role with the accumulated weight of someone who has witnessed death and grief up close. But that weight is leavened by a grace and awareness that is never maudlin. His humanity has not been curdled but rather forged by his experience and he confers a quiet dignity upon every patient and their loved ones.
The surrounding cast is uniformly solid and despite a couple of early chunks of clunky dialogue, the show finds its way quickly. There is little focus on personal lives which makes the show all the more urgent. If there is any flirtation among the staff it is only there because, well, flirtations happen in close working quarters. But it is dropped and we are right back again in the immediacy of the neverending cases rushing through the doors.
In The Pitt, Death isn't a symbol. It isn't playing chess in a cape on a clouded beach. All of that may be good for art but it removes us from death's inescapable reality, the looming presence on the horizon. In The Pitt it stares us in the face and offers us no allegories to offload it onto.
What also makes it so affecting – and so earnest and visceral – is the lack of a soundtrack. This not only eliminates the potential for playing cheaply for our emotions but heightens the sense that we are living the experience ourselves. This has a documentary feel at times.
By way of warning, it is visceral in another way – just as the show does not spare us the rawness of grief, it does not shy away from the graphic nature of violence against our bodies or how vulnerable they are to brute force and impact.
It all culminates in Episode 4, which is a powerful and beautiful reckoning of a father’s death by a brother and sister who have been clinging to false hope for three episodes. Death is real and has real consequences and this show is not going to try to soften that fact. But death can also be the bearer of beauty, grace, wisdom, honesty and self-revelation.
I highly recommend you give this a try.
