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?
NW: I claim ownership of that one. I decidedto bring the rats back in episode nine, and I decided to have it be a spectacle sport in my final act, to play positive to the negative of the way that we ended the episode. We all imbue as writers little bits of ourselves in our scripts. It’s sort of a talisman to give a texture that feels authentic and also to put our imprimatur on it. I was extremely close friends with David Crosby. And when David died, it was a significant loss for me. Naming the dog in that episode Crosby and having him be the agent of chaos was my homage to my friend. That also felt appropriate. We had real rats and we had stuffed rats to film this episode. We had a terrier that auditioned by shaking a fake rat around in its mouth. That’s what got him the job. [Laughs] Then we filmed it in pieces. Except for Gerran [Howell, who plays medical student Dr. Whitaker] getting bit on the leg by the dog who got a little overexcited. And it did break his skin. Nobody got hurt. No rat got hurt. No animal got hurt. Only Gerran got slightly hurt. It’s okay; I bought him a really good bottle of scotch as compensation battle pay.
AVC: How much of the employees’ personal lives will we see considering this is a show set entirely within the walls of the hospital?
NW: As much as is organically possible. What can you do in 15 hours? Is that enough time to fall in love or out of love? Is that enough time to find faith or lose faith? Is it enough time to find your life’s calling or recognize that you’re a fish out of water? That was the canvas that we got to play with. But ultimately, you can’t do days’ worth of relationships in one 15-hour shift. Everything has to be somewhat grounded to the plausible if not the probable.
AVC: How much will we learn about Robby’s former mentor or his dating history with Dr. Collins?
NW: Enough to give you context for behavior and relationships, but nothing that’s gonna be salacious or inorganic. You find out that they have some history and that he probably wishes there had been some future, but from his limitations with where he’s at emotionally, it wasn’t meant to be. There’s a tragic element to their relationship and a kind of two ships that never quite matched up. To me, it was a relationship that took place several years earlier. So, how present is it in your everyday life when you’re working with someone that you used to date?
AVC: There are also sporadic flashbacks to early COVID-19 days and how Robby loses his mentor. Was it intentional to spend very little time in that period because we all know how horrible it was for doctors?
NW: Yeah, that was never our intention. In fact, we probably leaned heavier on those flashbacks than was our initial intent. And that was at the request of the studio and the network, who really liked the device. This was all supposed to live on a very subliminal level. I remember I used an analogy in the writing room. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the film Harold And Maude, but in it, Ruth Gordon’s Maude is a much, much older woman having a relationship with a much, much younger man, played by Bud Cort. She has this great lust for life, she’s irreverent, and she has no filter and she’s wild. Her behavior is never really explained. She’s just sort of eccentric. But in one moment, the camera pans down her arm, and you see a concentration-camp tattoo. It’s the only explanation for her backstory, but it’s the only explanation that’s necessary. The viewer who picks up on that detail is rewarded for the recognition of it, but it’s not important to the appreciation of the movie. Similarly, we tried with this show to place things there that if you pick up on them will make the experience that much more interesting or gratifying. But it’ll move you regardless.
AVC: It’s probably easy to veer towards melodrama with a TV show like this one. How do you guys work together to ensure it’s gritty and grounded in reality at all times?
NW: It starts at the top. John Wells doesn’t make soapy shows. He makes smart shows, and his taste permeates a lot of this. Scott equally is not, well, a very sentimental man; he has a very cynical voice. When he brings both to bear, it gives you this positive-negative alternating current that is engaging. You’re making something that seems horrific, but then you’re finding a little black humor to soften it. And then you’re coming in with something that seems pretty funny, but then you cut somebody at the knees for laughing at it by showing the tragedy underneath it. It’s such a human thing. We all have these positive and negative traits. In The Pitt, you have a lot of characters who look at the world with a cynical view and some who are optimists. You can have a real back-and-forth depending on who the protagonist of a particular scene is. All that was by design, but we didn’t know it was going to work quite this well.
AVC: You finished filming the season-one finale pretty recently. What can you tease about how it ends and sets up the second season?
NW: We left the window open for season two [before getting renewed] because creatively, we all feel like there’s a lot more gas in this tank. All I can say is it’s sort of interesting how we released two-thirds of the season to the press. The last third is like a different show. So don’t make any assumptions and be prepared for where the ride will take you. I’m really, really proud of it. John Wells directed the first one and he directed the last one. I think it’s a very elegant ending.
AVC: How much have you thought about season two in terms of the format and what specific day or shift it will cover?
NW: Well, we joke that we should stay with the format. Otherwise, it looks like we made a mistake. You don’t want to admit defeat. If we kept with a 15-episode structure, there’s something really hand in glove with having it mirror a work day or a work night. I think for dramatic purposes, it’s more interesting to plot the course a little downstream so there’s a dark period that people don’t know what happened and we can play with that. This was a very impactful day. I don’t know that anybody’s going to have any more perspective the next day than they did on this day. I think we all need a little distance from it.
AVC: Why are you personally drawn to medical dramas and what is it about them, despite their frantic and often sad situations, that makes them an oddly comforting watch for people?
NW: It’s an arena that we all have some familiarity with. Not all of us get to see the inside of The White House or go to outer space or other environments that are off-limits to us. But hospitals are all too accessible to us. There’s a built-in fear and curiosity about what happens. What will happen to me if I get hurt, who will take care of me, and what would it look and feel like if my mom gets sick when she gets old? These are questions that linger in all of our minds because they’re human and universal questions. Medical dramas afford opportunities to sift through those and tell stories about them and oftentimes offer solutions or become the catalyst for conversations to find some solutions. 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.
AVC: Were you mentally prepared for the inevitable comparisons between The Pitt and ER?
NW: I don’t think I was prepared for as many side-by-side photograph comparisons as I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, where I can see the mileage between them. In a lot of ways, the show is benefiting from an audience that has been familiarized over a very long period of time with this arena, these procedures, and these stakes. A lot of our advanced work was done for us, and we’re showing up and benefiting from a sophisticated audience. But that said, once we decided not to redo the old show, actually not redoing the old show became the most important aspect along with trying to figure out how I could play a different character, how we could film the show differently, or present the same world differently but with the same sense of immediacy, intensity, and intimacy. That became an exercise.
AVC: The Pitt feels particularly timely because of how it deals with abortion, masks, and the opioid crisis.
NW: Yeah, there’s been a vacuum of medical information that’s accurate and unassailable on TV. When it’s at its best, it can provide a lot of people, certainly Americans, with accurate health information that you can take to your doctor and have verified. Frighteningly enough, it can become a source of healthcare for a lot of people. But it’s nice to be back on a medical show that has the stamp of credibility from the healthcare community. They feel like what we’re doing not only accurately portrays the medicine, but also their emotional journey. Hopefully, more empathy will be the result.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
