BURBANK, Calif. — John Wells, a 1979 Carnegie Mellon University grad, watches on a monitor as he directs the last day of filming on the first episode of Pittsburgh-set Max medical drama “The Pitt.”
It’s mid-July 2024 and production is just nine days into the 15-episode first season of a medical drama that, pending its success, will come back annually for a season that’s closer to the once-standard 22-episode broadcast drama than current streaming shows that run as few as six episodes per season and often go 18 months or more between seasons.
Wells, former executive producer of “ER” and “The West Wing,” calls action and watches from outside the set, seeing on a monitor what the camera captures as empathetic second-year resident Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) gently examines the hand of a nervous young woman who claims she burned herself making s’mores over a Sterno flame. McKay seems skeptical of the burn victim’s story but remains professional and upbeat as she types chart notes on a computer keyboard.
Wells nods his approval, calls cut and then makes a request for a slight change in camera angle before they film the scene again. The scene will air about seven minutes into the premiere episode, which streams along with the show’s second episode on Jan. 9 on Max. (Subsequent episodes will release weekly on Thursdays through April 10.)
Wells is dressed in scrubs, as are all production crew members working on “The Pitt” on Warner Bros. stages 21 and 22.
“There’s no place to hide,” explained Michael Hissrich, a Pittsburgh native, CMU grad and a physical production-focused executive producer on “The Pitt” who’s worked with Wells on multiple past series, including “Shameless,” “Third Watch” and “ER.” “With all the glass, you start to see reflections of people. Even when we’re standing at the monitor, the camera could catch us. So we thought, if somebody sees me (and I’m wearing scrubs), it’s no big deal, right? You just think, ‘That’s another doctor.’”
While “The Pitt” setting suggests “ER,” this new series uses a “24”-style real-time conceit where each episode covers one hour in what turns into a 15-hour workday. It also focuses heavily on student doctors, more akin to “Grey’s Anatomy,” but without the same degree of soapy melodrama. It’s all set in the ER; “The Pitt” never goes home with its doctors (although a couple of times family members of staff come into the hospital).
“We wanted to show what’s happening in medicine now, the pressures that the doctors are under,” Wells said of the show’s real-time format. “We also felt like it would be the way to … really get a sense of what these physicians and nurses and all the medical personnel go through on a daily basis, which is a pretty extraordinary thing.”
Hollywood trade publications have written extensively about how “The Pitt” began life as a Chicago-set “ER” reboot with Noah Wyle attached to reprise his role as Dr. John Carter. The estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton sued “ER”/“The Pitt” studio Warner Bros., with Crichton’s widow alleging that, after negotiations broke down for the “ER” reboot, the show was relocated to Pittsburgh but retained the real-time format that was part of the “ER” reboot pitch. Warner Bros. argues “The Pitt” is not a derivative work.
Wyle stars in “The Pitt” as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the chief attending doctor in Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency department. A great doctor and an understanding teacher, Robby comes to work in the season premiere on the fourth anniversary of his mentor’s death during the covid-19 crisis.
Wyle isn’t just the star of “The Pitt”; he’s also an executive producer and wrote the fourth and ninth episodes. Episode 4 reveals that an ER patient worked as a painter and set builder on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” alongside “Neighborhood” art director Jack Guest. (David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely on the “Neighborhood,” confirmed Guest was the “Neighborhood” art director and he had an assistant at one point named David Smith; the fictional character who’s a patient in “The Pitt” is named Joseph Spencer.)
Wyle said the “Neighborhood” reference was pitched by Dr. Joe Sachs, a technical adviser and writer on “The Pitt.”
“I just grabbed onto it,” Wyle said in a Zoom conversation late last month. “It focuses your attention in a way that another profession would (not) have done. The fact that (Mister Rogers) was so integral to the city and, as a man, he spoke so much towards the thesis that we’re trying to communicate that we’re all in this together. … There are no divisions in that (ER) environment that matter other than life and death.”
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Wyle said he suggested the Pittsburgh setting for the show.
“Early on when (showrunner R. Scott Gemmill) and I were talking about the show, John (Wells) came in and asked what city we were thinking about setting it in, and, without a lot of forethought, I threw out Pittsburgh,” Wyle said, not only because Wyle knew of Wells’ connection to the city but also because Wyle’s mother, Marty Speer Wyle-Katz, was from Pittsburgh before moving to Louisville, Ky., as a child. She returned to attend Chatham University. Wyle’s father went to Carnegie Mellon, and his maternal grandfather, Alexander Speer, spent most of his life in Pittsburgh.
Wyle said Pittsburgh also works for the show because it has a good cross-section of the population (ethnically and socioeconomically) and an urban center with industry surrounded by agricultural land, which offers an array of medical cases.
“Then you start to do the research and you come across Dr. Safar, you come across Freedom House, you come across Primanti Bros. sandwiches, and these things suddenly become three-dimensional in your script,” Wyle said. “Sometimes, the more personal you make it, the more universal it becomes, because every city has a (unique eatery like) Primanti Bros. — it’s just called something else.”
The title of “The Pitt” comes from Dr. Robby’s derisive nickname for PTMC’s emergency department, located in the hospital’s basement. The nickname rankles hospital administrator Gloria (Michael Hyatt), who calls it “derogatory and incompatible to the institution’s image.”
“Every ER in the country has a nickname,” Wells said. “ ‘The Pitt’ just seemed like the natural one to do.”
Dr. Robby may butt up against management, but he’s sincerely supportive of his staff. For “ER” fans, Dr. Robby will be more reminiscent of Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) than Wyle’s John Carter.
“It’s not lost on me that I’m 20 years older than Tony was (when he played) the attending 30 years ago on ‘ER,’ ” Wyle said. “(Robby and Carter) are very different men. Once we pivoted away from the old (‘ER’) IP, it became, what didn’t we do (on ‘ER’)? What didn’t we show? And who do you want to be this time around?”
Wyle muses that Robby probably should have left ER duty a few years ago because he’s emotionally damaged from his covid-19 experience.
“Much like an aging athlete, they have lasting damage … layered under ego, layered under expertise, layered under fear,” Wyle said about what he learned when talking to retired ER doctors before making “The Pitt.” “(We’re showing) the fragility of our health care system by bringing it down to the fragility of one health care provider. … If they go down, we all go down. This is not a safety net that’s built out of anything other than the best of intentions.”
While “The Pitt” films predominantly on stages in California, Wyle and other cast members traveled to Pittsburgh in September for several days of location filming for scenes that will be inserted into episodes throughout the first season, mostly at and around the North Side’s Allegheny General Hospital.
Wyle said that, because the show depicts a pressure cooker environment, it rarely leaves the ER. But there are occasional scenes outdoors, some shot in Pittsburgh, including an emotional moment on an AGH rooftop at sunrise between Dr. Robby and another doctor played by Shawn Hatosy (“Animal Kingdom”).
“That was one of the most magical views I’ve ever seen, let alone got to film on,” Wyle said. “The people were terrific, and the crew was top-notch. And we, as a cast, got to really bond.”
“The Pitt” production designer Nina Ruscio and set decorator Matt Callahan were charged with creating the interior of a Pittsburgh hospital in a 30,000-square-foot soundstage about 2,400 miles west of the show’s setting.
Ruscio spent her 2023 Christmas break coming up with the layout of the ER, and Callahan pointed her toward AGH as “a potential hospital that we could resource the aesthetic of.” Ruscio used photographs of AGH as her initial reference before visiting the hospital in 2024.
“The portico on the south side of the building that’s on East North Avenue is incredibly inspiring,” Ruscio said while giving a tour of the show’s sets. “It’s got these marble columns and these cloistered structures. And I thought that if you could create a memorable-looking space by using just a few of those architectural elements, both in the waiting room and in little suggestive spaces that are peppered throughout the main ER, we could anchor the show in a level of realism that had historical accuracy.”
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Viewers will note that the PTMC logo, with primary colors of black and gold, includes cloistered columns. And while the ER has the sleek, modern look of a space that’s been renovated, there are marble columns throughout that echo AGH’s cloister columns.
Ruscio also created a faux burgundy-and-green marble tile floor — made of contact paper on plywood with a resin overlay and brass tape separating the tiles — for “The Pitt” waiting room set in Burbank that’s identical to the old AGH main lobby floor that Wyle walks across in a scene shot in Pittsburgh in the first episode.
“The flooring in that one staircase that comes down and how that matched the floor in AGH, that’s one of the greatest match cuts I’ve ever been a part of,” Wyle said.
Callahan placed copies of Pittsburgh Magazine on a coffee table in the ER waiting room, got photos of historic Pittsburgh from the Library of Congress and suggested that a cartoony painting of rivers that Ruscio designed for the wall of a pediatric room in the ER come to a point like Pittsburgh’s three rivers.
“These things give us great joy,” Ruscio said. “Our job is really background: Create an environment for great writing to be expressed and acting to be performed, a background that feels authentic, that nobody really thinks isn’t a real place.”