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HBO Max’s The Pitt received near universal acclaim and huge viewership since it premiered this January. I was a few weeks late to catch on and immediately binged all four or so available episodes. After that I watched it each week as it premiered, which I haven’t done in years. You feel like you’re on the hospital floor with these incredible flawed characters, in real time, in near impossible life or death situations. It changed my perspective on life-prolonging measures for elderly people, and on my negative ER experiences. Countless doctors and nurses have praised it as the most realistic medical show and it’s received excellent ratings and word of mouth.
As The Pitt is in production for its second season, thankfully coming out in January of next year, they’re under a magnifying glass thanks to all the press and adoration. The show’s creator, R. Scott Gemmill, spoke about this at a Warner Bros. press event this week. People Magazine has the details with quotes from Gemmill and co-executive producer and star Noah Wyle about the increased pressure they’re under.
On Wednesday, May 28, the actors from the hit MAX medical drama participated in a panel at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif., as journalist Emily Longeretta moderated.
Series creator R. Scott Gemmill was first to admit that after the success of the show’s debut, “You don’t want the sophomore curse.”
“We were unusual in our first season in the sense that we shot, we had been shooting before the show aired, so we were just having this little fun in our little bubble over on stage, and we had no idea if anyone was even going to watch the show,” Gemmill said.
He added, “And then it became so much more than what we expected. And so now it’s like, ‘Oh, okay. Now everyone’s looking.’ Sometimes it’s better to be under the radar.”
Noah Wyle, who leads the series as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, said the pressure of season 1’s success is a “good thing to be mindful of” while making new episodes. However, he noted it is “really something you have to shut out completely.”
“You have to almost have it be a non-factor and create the same sense of privacy and same sense of hermetic sealed off, insulated sense of company that we built the first year. I think if we’re successful in that regard, then the storytelling will just roll out,” [Wyle], 53, said.
I could relate to this so much as it’s such a Gen X take! Keep your head down, do the work, don’t get attention. I can’t figure out Gemill’s age based on his wiki profile or IMDB, but he looks like he’s in his 50s like Wyle. If there’s anything our generation values and is good at, it’s staying under the radar. We work hard and want to dip when we get too much attention. That said, we’re also stubborn and are excellent at keeping the same formula for something. I trust that Gemill and Wyle will deliver a solid season two of the same or better quality than the first. The fact that they’re cognizant of the sophmore slump and are trying not to let it affect them speaks to what we can expect.
In related Pitt news, Tracy Ifeachor, who plays Dr. Collins, recently revealed that there was much more to Collins and Dr. Robby’s story that didn’t make it to screen. People has a longer form interview with her where I learned that she’s British(!). Ifeachor said that parts were cut because producers “didn’t want to make it soapy or something… but I thought some of the things that were in the script were so, so wonderful, and I would have loved to have seen more of them together.” Ditto!
This show is so phenomenal, and I wouldn’t want to mess with it at all, but I wonder who made the decision to cut that part. The Pitt has four women writers credited out of a total of seven (that number includes Wyle and Gemill). No wonder the female characters are so realistic. You can also tell that there is strong editing and executive decision-making because every episode is so consistently good. (No offense to the individual writers.) There are way too many recent shows (Paradise and Andor immediately come to mind) that are uneven with inferior episodes. It can be obvious when certain episodes have different writers, but that doesn’t happen with The Pitt. I guess the trade off is that we get less romance but a better overall experience. I’ll take it.
There’s a fantastic interview with Noah Wyle on Fresh Air. He’s so smart and thoughtful interesting, Addresses our current moment. Highly recommend.
Thank you for the recommendation!
As someone who works in healthcare, the major thing that they overlooked was only calling for respiratory once in the entire series. They come to pretty much every trauma and code!
Otherwise, love the show! So well done
I really enjoyed reading Tracy’s interviews the last few days. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next season has in store for her character.
I was curious about the deleted Collins-Robby scenes too. I joked that if The Pitt were Greys Anatomy that during the mass casualty even in the ER, Heather would have crashed through with complications from her miscarriage and Robby would have been declaring his love for her while trying to save her life!
The Pitt brought appointment television back into my life.