It is very difficult to evaluate what goes on in The Pitt for fifteen episodes. It is a world of medical care so dense and intense, it feels like a reality show, without of course the artificial realism of the genre. Everything here is so real , it feels fake. Set in real time, each hour-long episode captures fifteen real hours in fifteen episodes.
Fortunately the episodes are not all done in one shot. That would be a very….ummm….’Adolescence’ thing to do, if you know what I mean. Once in a while a series is so shorn of gimmicks, so sure of its genuine intentions, that it feels artificial. How can anything fictional be so authentic?!
The Pitt reminds us of how traumatic hospitalisation can be to the patient and the family even if it is a posh place. In the series we are constantly reminded of death’s presence at the door, as patients of all kinds storm in. Some leave soon, some never. All this happens within fifteen hours of one day.
Real time, real medical problems, real pain, and not just for the actors who don’t look like they are faking it, but also for us the audience, as every patient crammed into an impatient crisis, comes with his or her own problem.
This is the series’ weakness and strength. While we are unable to know any patient or doctor up close and personal, this breathless running through lives locked in a fight to finish, also reminds us that the blur of the sick and bleeding is indicative of the impersonal non-intimate nature of mortality.
I didn’t come away with any specific medical crisis only a mob of nervous tired faces. The larger picture is certainly the issue here. We are taken from one scene of–if we could be slightly flippant– action to the next with not even the minimum pause for breath. The pacing of each episode is synchronized with work pressures of the doctors. They are barely out of one life-or-death crisis when another one shows up, demanding their attention.
Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael Robinavitch is the only anchorable presence in an otherwise decentralized narration. He sort of takes us along for the trauma travel warning us, not in so many words, that we are in this at our own risk.
The Pitt is a journey through fifteen hours of a medical facility where doctors and patients are wedded to a crisis point so critical, nothing else matters. That the series, created by R. Scott Gemmill succeeds in sucking us into its vibrant anxious world, is an exceptional achievement .
On the minus side, to be watching medical challenged people for fifteen hours , no matter how skilfully the deed is done, is not easy. Many viewers would be gasping for a breather, or just giving up, not for the lack of watchability but simply because, life is unpredictable, and where else are we better reminded of this than in a hospital? In this one we can almost smell the anxiety.
