Noah Wyle on The Pitt's ode to David Crosby and plans for season two
"It's like how you slow down at an accident site. You don't want to look, but you're curious to know what's going on."
Photo: Warrick Page/Max
[Editor’s note: In the run-up to the Emmys, we’re revisiting interviews we did with some of this year’s nominees. This interview with The Pitt‘s Noah Wyle, who’s up for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama Series, originally published in February.]
Noah Wyle is no stranger to putting on scrubs, a stethoscope, and a commanding stride to take charge of a fictional emergency room. He did it for 12 seasons of NBC’s ER, and now he’s back at it in Max’s The Pitt. While both shows gravitate toward gritty realism (and come from R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells), The Pitt has a well-executed conceit: It takes place during a single shift, with each installment unpacking an hour at the Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Center. And that formatting difference was significant—Wyle tells The A.V. Club that the team’s priority was to not “redo” what they did before.
Here, he plays the prudent senior-attending doctor Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, who copes with COVID-19-related PTSD. Robby is still a wise leader though, guiding his colleagues and patients on tough cases, from a child’s death by drowning to a fentanyl overdose. Wyle also flexes his writing chops on two episodes, including this week’s outing. The A.V. Club spoke to Wyle about whether The Pitt will delve deeper into the doctors’ personal lives, his tribute to David Crosby, and what season two might look like (oh, and why he wanted those rats to take over the trauma center).
The A.V. Club: What was it like to write episodes of The Pitt, especially considering the show’s real-time format and all of the storylines being juggled?
Noah Wyle: Being part of this writing room was extremely gratifying. We had an all-star team of talent. I’m relatively new at television writing. I’ve written on the last couple of series that I’ve done, but The Pitt is a different animal to those kinds of shows. Out of necessity, we had to break the entire season before we committed to the script because the course correction if we were to make any changes later would have been so extreme. We were all pretty familiar with the narrative and the characters before we each attempted our own scripts. The process was relatively simple after that. I did want to pick an early episode so that I would be done with writing before we began physical production. [Series creator] R. Scott Gemmill wrote the first three. I took the next available one. It went over well, and they liked it. So when I said, ‘Hey, I think I would like to do another one,’ nobody said no. The ninth was the next available one, and I grabbed it. I loved thinking about both from the inside out and have enjoyed watching these things come to fruition.
AVC: Was there a storyline that felt particularly challenging or surprising to write?
NW: I found it all incredibly rewarding, but I’m not insensitive or unaware of the climate that we’ve been living in for the last several years. And when I write a female character or a character of color, it’s not lost on me that this is looked at with a different lens than it used to be. But I also didn’t let it inhibit me so much as I just sort of thought about what would be appropriate, what sounds right, and that everybody felt like it sounded authentic. I felt like I was writing, in some cases, a little bit of all the characters’ subtext.
AVC: Episode nine follows what was, for me, the most emotional and tear-jerking episode of The Pitt yet. What was it like to deal with that fallout?
NW: I describe nine as the beach that everybody washes up on after the shipwreck. It was an opportunity to do a bit of a reset. I got to do an emotional check-in as Dr. Robby with the characters about where they were at the midpoint of this shift and after this catastrophic occurrence. It was another well-placed episode dramatically, where it’s the first time that Robby reveals the depth of his damage. In his attempts to give an inspiring speech, he ends up revealing a lot more of his pathology than intended. It ends with this payoff to the storyline of the gentleman who’s been in the waiting room, who punches Nurse Dana [Katherina LaNasa]. It’s something that happens with all too great a frequency in real life, and here it’s to a character that we’ve become invested in. So, it had a lot of great built-in architecture to it.
AVC: I want to ask about the rats because they’re my biggest fear. It’s been an ongoing storyline that finds a wild conclusion with the dog in episode nine. How did you guys come up with that?
