Take the show’s much-hyped connection to “realism.” On the one hand, The Pitt’s commitment to detailing graphic medical procedures and its embrace of the anticlimactic, unfinished nature of life is a huge part of its appeal. One of the show’s best, boldest choices is that, like our central doctors, we often don’t know what happens to their patients once they’re wheeled out of the ER. On the other hand, the show can be as unrealistic as any primetime medical soap too. Just the idea that all but one of the attendings, residents, interns, med students, and nurses we met in season one are working season two’s Fourth Of July shift together is preposterous, as is a legal deposition happening on a holiday weekend or an intern four days into his role being the main instructor for the new med students.
Like any good TV show, The Pitt will happily throw realism out the window in the name of compelling storytelling (or a pointed healthcare inequality PSA). Devoting a large chunk of the season two’s penultimate episode to an emotionally charged ambulance bay conversation between Robby and his old motorcycle pal is a move straight out of the Grey’s Anatomy playbook—which similarly explored the quiet suicidal ideation of its traumatized lead character. That’s a fine choice for a TV melodrama. It’s just that The Pitt can be inconsistent with when and how it deploys that poetic touch and defaults to “realism” as its modus operandi.
For instance, it’s certainly realistic that two co-workers with a charged past might largely try to avoid each other for the first 10 hours of their shift. But it’s not necessarily good TV drama to ignore one of the defining relationship conflicts of the show’s first season until over halfway into its second. That’s part of why the dynamic between recovering addict Dr. Frank Langdon and whistleblower Dr. Trinity Santos felt a little underbaked this year. As The Pitt evolved beyond the compelling introductions of its debut season, its writers have struggled to juggle a massive ensemble filled with so many different relationship dynamics. It was actually Isa Briones and Patrick Ball themselves who asked for a more complex version of Santos and Langdon’s big season-two fight in order to reflect how rocky the road to addiction recovery can be. Before that, it seemed like the show’s writers had largely been thinking of post-rehab Langdon as a fully self-actualized foil for Robby’s refusal to get help.
While ambiguity can be a powerful tool for creators who know their characters inside and out, it can also be the result of writers who don’t make consistent choices about the story they’re telling. The Pitt deploys both kinds. The Langdon/Santos fight is one of the best, most layered scenes of the season, one that makes it possible to empathize with both characters’ conflicting points of view. Yet it’s also genuinely unclear if we’re supposed to take it at face value when Santos claims only three people know about Langdon stealing drugs from the hospital. Should we assume that’s not a “realistic” secret to be able to keep? Or is that a place where the show is prioritizing melodrama over realism? Different actors seem to be playing it in different ways.
In that sense, The Pitt is like the Schrödinger’s cat of TV dramas—simultaneously nuanced and simplistic, intentional and accidental. In fact, part of the reason everyone is so sure everyone else is watching wrong is because the vibe of The Pitt is often at odds with the actual text of the show. The feeling of this season is that Dr. Samira Mohan is considering leaving emergency medicine for an entirely new career in geriatrics sometime soon. What’s actually happening onscreen, however, is that she’s deciding whether she wants to accept an ER attending job or do a specialized fellowship when she graduates from the Pitt’s residency program a full year from now. It’s the same way Langdon feels like a guy who just swiped a few spare vials of benzos here and there, even though the text of the show is that he also actively diluted drugs then put them back into circulation to treat patients. The show rewards a close reading when it comes to its subtly deployed character arcs and yet suffers under one in other ways too.
The truth is, The Pitt wants you to accept what’s happening onscreen without questioning it, except when it wants you to think about what’s not happening onscreen as crucial subtext. It wants to be a mystery-box show built around potential mass shooters, secret drug addictions, and hidden seizure conditions, except when it wants to be an incredibly straightforward series with no clues to find. It wants to embrace the limitations of its one-day premise except when it wants to suggest that characters who have known each other for two days 10 months apart have richer bonds than those who have spent the past four consecutive days working together. And it wants to intentionally explore Robby’s lightly misogynistic biases except when the writers and actors don’t seem to realize that’s what they’ve put onscreen.
Those aren’t the worst contradictions for a new show charting its own path, but they are contradictions nonetheless. The Pitt is wildly compelling but also wildly inconsistent—not because anyone is watching it wrong, but simply because it’s still finding its feet. It’s okay to admit The Pitt is both kind of smart and kind of dumb. In fact, that’s part of its charm.
Caroline Siede is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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