So true, and if I may dare suggest it, that’s very intentional.
Seeing the tag feed for the show made me realize a lot of people are frustrated—generally, but especially with the lack of closure for the characters’ arcs. And honestly, as a fic writer and amateur screenwriter, nobody loves a good character arc more than I do. I’ve written about this at length re: BBC Sherlock, bemoaning the lack of completed character arcs. But the minute I understood the format The Pitt was using, what it was trying to convey, I realized I can’t really expect the same kind of payoff I expected from something like Sherlock.
The Pitt's structure is designed to give you whiplash and leave you helpless and confused, in the same way an ER shift probably does for anyone experiencing it. Fifteen episodes feels long and substantial. We as viewers invest months of waiting for new episodes to drop. By the end, it feels like something huge should have happened, like we should be arriving at some grand emotional resolution, because as viewers it feels like we’ve been with these people forever.
But really, it’s only (barely) been one very long day. Even if a shift like that probably feels like months to the doctors living through it, it isn’t. That’s the format—and it’s executed so well in that sense!
No, I take that back - it's format busting, in a way, because The Pitt is a procedural, and in a procedural you're expecting a nice wrap up of the case by the end of the episode/season, but The Pitt doesn't do that. Maybe I'm used to that from The X-Files, another procedural who'd often end on a final shot that makes you wonder whether the villain is really dead/gone, and rarely going back to exploring that. The truth is out there and whatnot.
In The Pitt, we’re dropped into the story at the beginning of a shift, and fifteen hours later it ends the way real workdays end: abruptly, messily, with things unresolved, and with the assumption that life continues tomorrow. That feeling of “wait, that’s it?” is kind of the point.
We don’t get neat resolution for Dr. Al-Hashimi because the people around her aren’t there anymore either. We'll know what happened to her later on, but not now. The shift is over. People have gone home or gone up to the roof. We don’t know what Samira will choose because that isn’t a decision she can or should make right then, at the end of an exhausting day. We, the viewers, leave when everyone else leaves.
Yes, it’s unsatisfying if you’re expecting a traditional season finale. We’re all trained by now to expect loose ends tied up and emotional conclusions after investing X amount of episodes. But we're not going to get one. We might get a few of them, for some of the regulars, when the show ends; my guess is we probably won't, though. We never do in real life, do we?
If that makes you uncomfortable, you probably won't enjoy the next seasons, either. The creators want you to sit in this discomfort and learn to live with it. They could have tied up EVERYONE's arcs like in any garden-variety procedural (it's something achievable, always, even in short films), but then you'd get a much different show. A boring one, an unimaginative one, in my opinion.
Anyway, when it comes to the format choices, I loved it very much. The show isn't perfect, a lot of it is very on the nose and contrived, but I was on the edge of my seat throughout most of it and I can't wait to see what's next for Robby and the gang.
