This article contains spoilers for the 12th episode of The Pitt, “6:00 P.M.”Noah Wyle has felt a bit disingenuous talking about The Pitt with friends
This article contains spoilers for the 12th episode of The Pitt, “6:00 P.M.”
Noah Wyle has felt a bit disingenuous talking about The Pitt with friends and family. Until now, the star and executive producer of Max’s hit medical drama has had to keep its trajectory to himself—specifically the keen, harrowing turn of this week’s episode. “You can look at the first 11 episodes as one series,” he tells me, “and then it becomes a whole other show in its final act.”
Structured like ER meets 24, The Pitt’s first season depicts a full shift at a Pittsburgh emergency room, one hour at a time. Max accepted this initial pitch from creator R. Scott Gemmill with one caveat: The network wanted the first season to consist of 15 episodes, not the 12 hours that would be covered during a typical ER shift. So for the first 11 installments of The Pitt, viewers bear witness to an ordinary, if unusually dramatic day in the ER. “The question was, what would keep people around for another three hours?” says Joe Sachs, a real-life emergency physician and Gemmill’s cowriter on this episode. (The pair previously worked together on ER.) The 11th episode’s devastating cliff-hanger revealed the answer: a mass shooting at a nearby music festival. As a result, all of the doctors and nurses we’ve come to know must stay in the hospital—with intensely raised stakes.
The Pitt has drawn acclaim from both television critics and actual medical workers. Here, as in the rest of the show, authenticity ruled the day. “With mass shootings, they’re in the newspaper every week. Everybody’s numb to it,” says Sachs. “We thought, Let’s see the tragedy of what really happens—the families that have to deal with grief and loss, and the tragedy of the psychological and moral trauma to the emergency physicians.” Episode 12 follows couples separated by violence, parents wondering if their children are alive or dead, and impossible choices on how to allocate care amid so much trauma.
When he first got to devising The Pitt, Gemmill had about 100 scenarios he’d jotted down for potential exploration in the show. Gun violence was one of them. “We are as strong or as fragile as the mental health of our practitioners, and nobody gets out of this experience of being a career physician unscathed,” as Wyle puts it. “They’re dedicated and fallible and human, but also hurting and burning out and in a system that lends itself to madness.”
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