There’s a new medical drama on our screens, and it’s quickly become one of the standout shows of 2025. Max’s The Pitt is only halfway through its first season, but it is already building a reputation of medical accuracy and attention to detail.
The Pitt is set in a busy Pittsburgh ER and follows the ER staff through their 15-hour shift, with each episode covering an hour of the shift. The unique timing aspect of the show adds to its realism because it shows just how hectic and overwhelming the ER constantly is. When one episode is one hour of real time, it gives the viewer a better sense of the passage of time as well as a better understanding of just how much is going on at any given time in an ER.
What is covered on The Pitt isn’t what every shift in an ER looks like, but what we’ve seen of the shift (at least so far) has been relatively accurate to what an actual ER is like. According to doctors and frequent ER-goers alike, the ER itself is accurate as well. It’s crowded, loud, and full of long wait times, just like real ERs.
While The Pitt is only 8 episodes into its 15 episode season, it has already established itself as a show that focuses on medical accuracy as well as emulating the environment of real life ERs. Multiple doctors have commented on how accurate the show is, a stark contrast to the typical response to medical shows from professionals. Most medical shows are filled with improper procedure, many extremely rare cases and diseases, and mistakes and lies that are made to prioritize the excitement of the show.
The majority of doctors who’ve watched The Pitt have been able to agree that, so far, the show has managed to avoid falling into these traps. Not everything is perfect, but the medical procedures and general environment are usually accurate.
A lot of the patients and cases that have been seen have been relatively mundane. They aren’t dealing with the aftermath of explosions or natural disasters, but sickle cell flare ups, overdoses, mental health issues, and minor accidents, things that happen all the time that many people deal with or can relate to. This choice grounds the show and adds an extra degree of relatability, because the things we see are things that we’re familiar with. Not every case is rare or super serious because not everyone who goes to the ER goes for serious issues. The focus on more common cases also gives more opportunities for viewers to relate to the actual issues and to the treatment and environment in the ER.
The Pitt also adds relatability to the show through its depiction of the American healthcare system, from the perspective of patients and doctors. Every patient deals with excruciatingly long waits in the waiting room and once they’re back in the ER, and many of the patients we see have been waiting since before the events of the show started. One patient in particular complains about how long he has been waiting every time he’s on screen, and it serves to highlight just how inefficient the healthcare system is. There are people sicker than him who have been stuck waiting just as long, if not longer, but he isn’t wrong for being upset about the wait time. What he is wrong for is the way that he takes it out on the staff because it isn’t their fault. The doctors are no happier with the system than the patients, but they’re doing their best to work within it and help as many people as possible.
In one case in which a 17 year old girl is trying to get an abortion in the ER, Dr. Robby puts in the chart that the girl is around a week less far along than she really is. It’s only a few days difference, but it’s the difference between this girl being able to get an abortion and her being stuck in a situation that would change the course of her life completely. The few days don’t change anything in regards to if the abortion is procedurally possible or not, but it changes whether or not doctors can give her the abortion after she’s come to Pittsburgh from out of state. It’s only a small moment, but it demonstrates some of the restrictions that the healthcare system creates and the way that these doctors want to help the people around them.
On the doctors’ side, Dr. Robby is under pressure to get the patient satisfaction scores up and the wait times down. Because he’s head of the department, it’s his job to get everyone else in the ER to move faster and make their patients happy, despite those things often contradicting each other. When people take too long with a patient they have to speed up, but to satisfy patients they often need to spend more time with them. Everyone is being pulled in five separate directions, with multiple patients to help and keep happy along with the miles long list of people in the waiting room.
One highlight of The Pitt is its ability to represent the different roles throughout the ER. The main cast includes two medical students on their ER rotations and residents in every year of residency, as well as a senior attending doctor and a charge nurse. There are multiple other named nurses in the recurring cast as well, who don’t have storylines of their own but the show does a good job demonstrating the differences between what medical students and residents can do, and what responsibilities different resident years are trusted with. It’s a stark difference from many other medical shows, which tend to leave out medical students and nurses in order to focus on the residents and attendings.
This balance is something that it shares with its sister show, the classic medical drama ER. The Pitt has the same showrunner as ER did, and if you’ve watched ER you might recognize a familiar face running the pit. Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch in The Pitt, and he starred in ER as Dr. John Carter.
The two shows share more than just the showrunner and a major actor. Originally, The Pitt was envisioned as a sequel to ER, where Wyle would reprise his role as John Carter. But when Wyle and the showrunner, John Wells, couldn’t get the rights to ER, they pivoted and changed the show to what has graced our screens this year.