Ever have one of those endless days at work? For 15 hours in the Pitt, the emergency room that lends its name to the Max medical drama, a team of doctors and nurses, led by Dr. Michael Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), have been tackling every woe that human frailty and the city of Pittsburgh can throw at them.
What do they treat? You name it. Mass-shooting injuries. Overdoses. Problem pregnancies. Heart attacks. Measles.
A big precipitating factor is Covid and the aftermath of the pandemic on health, system strain and trust.
There is trauma in the aftermath. There are staffing issues, especially among the nurses. There is drug abuse, among the patients and staff. There is mistrust, both personal and social, personified by a couple who did their own research on vaccines and are now refusing a needed spinal tap for their measles-stricken son.
The series often doesn’t trust the audience to get its serious points without a ham-handed line of dialogue — “I doubt she’ll be back, but sadly there will be many, many more just like her” — or a didactic lecture.
There’s a flip side, though, to all these stories of heroism. If the message of “The Pitt” is that ingenious, self-sacrificing healers will somehow get the job done anyway — despite cutbacks and anti-science and the breakdown of the social fabric — why bother fixing these bigger systemic problems? We’ll be fine, right? If you think too much about how this fantasy relates to real life, it starts to seem like palliative care for a terminal patient.
It’s when the chaos relents and “The Pitt” embraces its seriousness and lessons that you sense the show’s network-TV heritage and its drawbacks.
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