did we give up too soon on real time television shows because 24 sucked?
the pitt is the first live-action television show that has been strongly recommended to me in the last five years (that i wasn’t already aware about and planning to watch) by multiple people that did, when i watched it myself, end up being as good as everybody said it was.
The only specific gimmick that the pitt has over any other medical drama is that a) the writing is (mostly)* excellent; b) supposedly it is the most accurate medical drama created, if the fans can be believed; but most importantly c) each season of the pitt represents only a single long shift on an emergency floor, split between an ensemble cast.
this is such great competence porn. so much of this show is watching people do their jobs, patient after patient after patient after patient, boom boom boom boom. i was talking to a friend about what makes sports movies good and a big conclusion i believe is that they usually need (assuming they’re about the sport itself and not about the social mechanics surrounding it, a la moneyball) to have a lot of the actual sport in question shown, and to make all those moments as interesting as possible and distinct from each other; (the sports movie in question we were gassing up was umamusame, and as someone who’d played the game or watched the show i loved it, and so much of that was that the movie did well at having a bunch of different race scenes back to back and having them all feel very memorably unique from each other).
somebody in my family loved house md and i watched a decent amount growing up and by far the best part of the show was those scenes where they’d make house do clinic duty and this entire show is that! and they go out of their way to have so many different cases, some of them which get resolution and some of which end as abruptly as the dude who waits nine hours in the waiting room before storming out in episode 10 and punching a nurse on the way out before dropping his crumpled AMA form in her face or the patients who just disappear because they don’t want to get the bill, or simply because they get transferred to a different part of the hospital (it’s like if there was a cop show where every 2nd guy they chased made it to another jurisdiction and the cops actually acknowledged that and transferred responsibility appropriately instead of pushing back on it and continuing the case anyway).
i love how the show has almost no soundtrack, it perfectly strikes the balance between the viewer understanding that they are watching a hypothetically-maximally interesting day at the ER while still being, in many ways, just a regular day! i say this with both seasons, which take different approaches to solving the 24 problem (and if they keep this format up which i assume they will i wonder if they will resist the temptation to continually raise the stakes to the point of absurdity, hopefully so)
watch the pitt!
*occasionally there will be some bad whedon-esque level lines that slip through, especially during big emotional moments, but contrast it to say any other hospital that has ever aired other than scrubs and compared to the competition it’s killing it. (i’ve heard people try to blame noah wyle, the executive director/writer who also plays the lead, and i can confirm the correlation that most of the episodes he has a writing credit for are also the ones where it seems to dip, so i believe it, though i haven’t examined it closely.)