The first two episodes of streaming-only series “The Pitt” are now available on Max (new episodes drop in subsequent weeks on Thursdays through April 10), and ultimately this Pittsburgh-set hospital drama proves to be fast-paced with well-developed doctors, med students and sometimes patient characters. It’s a grab-you-by-the-throat drama with each episode occurring over one hour in a 12-hour shift (although the first season is actually 15 episodes, so it’s fair to assume something bad happens that extends the planned workday).
Like “ER,” “The Pitt” is set in an emergency room and “ER” veteran Noah Wyle is the star but his character, chief attending Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, is more like Dr. Mark Greene, the “ER” character played by Anthony Edwards. Robby is certainly no wet-behind-the-ears John Carter as viewers knew him in 1994.
And “The Pitt” tells its story in a real-time format reminiscent of “24” that was never part of the “ER” conceit. In addition, the show’s fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side plays the PTMC exterior) is a teaching hospital, so at least half the main characters and stories are focused on student doctors, which gives “The Pitt” more in common story-wise with “Grey’s Anatomy” than “ER.”
By virtue of airing on Max, “The Pitt” is also more graphic — in several ways — and bloodier than “ER.” Tonally, “The Pitt” is rougher around the edges and only occasionally teeters into schmaltzy territory. (The show has occasional plot clunkers, including an administrator who shows up in the ER way too often to be believable in a single shift; family members of at least two staff members mosey into the ER.)
Executive produced by “ER” veterans John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, “The Pitt” takes its Pittsburgh ties seriously enough to include:
• A reference to “the T” light rail (a woman gets pushed onto the tracks and sustains injuries in episode one).
• Robby wears a Beers of the Burgh festival hoodie through the first 10 episodes made available for review.
• Charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), the beating heart of this ER, uses “yinz” in episode four, although that’s about it for Pittsburghese. A few patients feel realistically Pittsburgh-y; others are more generic out of central casting.
• Episode four reveals a patient once worked on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” at “WQED on Fifth Avenue.”
• Another patient in episode four is a sommelier at Altius on Mt. Washington.
• In episode five, the staff eat a delivered lunch from Primanti Bros.
• In episode six, a patient asks about the score of the Pirates game.
• In episode eight, the arrival of a patient who worked for Freedom House Ambulance Service in the Hill District leads Robby to share the history of the first EMS with the student doctors.
• Locations get name-checked routinely, including Beaver County, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, the Strip District, Monroeville, Rivers Casino, Swissvale, Westmoreland County, Frick Park, Mill Village in Erie County, an alley near the Benedum Center, Presby and Wholey’s.
But “The Pitt” is more superficially Pittsburgh-specific compared to, say, filmed-in-Pittsburgh “One Dollar,” which remains the most accurate representation of the region’s different socio-economic strata, or season two of locally filmed “American Rust.”
Hearing the local references will amuse Pittsburgh viewers, but what makes “The Pitt” worth watching are its characters. Some are more flawed than others, notably over-confident bully Dr. Santos (Isa Briones, “Star Trek: Picard”), but viewers will begin to understand all the characters more as the series goes on. The show doesn’t make it easy to get a grasp on the myriad characters in its first hour, but after the premiere episode their personalities come into better focus.
Most of the characters are varying degrees of likable and relatable, a welcome change from the dark, depressing era of TV anti-heroes.
Second year resident Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) brims with empathy, as does second year resident Dr. King (an excellent Taylor Dearden, daughter of “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston), who has a sister on the Autism spectrum (Dr. King also seems like she may be on the spectrum at times too).
Farm boy fourth-year med student Whitaker (Gerran Howell) becomes the butt of the show’s comedy early on but he’s also sincere to a fault. And third year med student prodigy Javadi (Shabana Azeez) may seem perpetually and naively shocked but viewers will come to understand the pressure she’s under and why.
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With “The Pitt,” Max seeks to make a series with more episodes than most streaming series that returns regularly every year at roughly the same time on a budget closer to a broadcast network drama ($3-4 million per episode) than the break-the-bank “Game of Thrones,” “Star Wars” streaming series ($20 million per episode). Creatively, “The Pitt” succeeds by any measure.
New Romero doc
“George A. Romero’s Resident Evil,” an almost two-hour documentary now available on digital and on demand to rent or buy via Amazon, Apple TV and YouTube, explores the late Pittsburgher’s scrapped 1990s script for a “Resident Evil” movie.
Directed by Brandon Salisbury, the documentary features interviews with several people associated with the George A. Romero Foundation along with Ben Rubin, curator of the Romero Archive at the University of Pittsburgh.
This deep dive is probably too niche for all but the most devoted Romero fans, who might be better served by an article on this topic. It takes an hour of place-setting before the documentary gets to an audio narrative, beat-by-beat review of Romero’s scrapped script.
Perhaps the most interesting segment, thanks to existing video, focuses on Romero directing a commercial for the “Resident Evil 2” video game, which led to Romero getting tapped to take a crack at the “Resident Evil” movie.
Erie case on ‘True FBI’
Paramount streaming series “FBI True” returns for its sixth season Jan. 14 with its first two episodes covering the 2003 Erie pizza delivery driver who said a group of men attacked him and made him rob a bank and wear a collar bomb that exploded and killed him.