The Pitt

The Pitt is a medical drama series set in the emergency department of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. It follows Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and his team of healthcare professionals as they navigate a grueling 15-hour shift, with each episode covering one hour in real time. The show depicts their struggles with personal crises, workplace politics, and the emotional toll of treating critically ill patients amidst staff shortages and an underfunded healthcare system.

The Pitt Review (S1:E1-15)

Few sub-genres so naturally lend themselves to dramatic tension like that of the Emergency Room drama. Implicit in its name, life-and-death situations can be repeatedly portrayed without feeling forced or contrived. However, these shows can also be limited in scope and run the risk of getting repetitive or melodramatic as they focus on the interpersonal relationships of the characters in an attempt to break the monotony.

The Pitt offers a slightly new spin, at least for a hospital series. One that successfully amps up the tension and keeps things moving at a brisk, sometimes even panicked, pace without feeling gimmicky. It hasn’t done away with office romances or the obligatory drug-addicted doc. Instead, The Pitt adopts the 24 model, with each episode depicting the next consecutive hour in the doctors’ and nurses’ 15-hour shift.

It’s a brilliantly directed piece with exquisite pacing that belies the inherent challenges of its format and setting, giving the audience an occasional breather so that, once the emotion is ramped up again, they aren’t overwhelmed by the intensity. It’s so well done, in fact, with grounded and nuanced performances and a cast who understands not only their own characters but their characters’ relationships with one another and backstories so well that you can almost forgive the Leonid Meteor Storm of radical progressivism that bombards the audience from the opening credits of the first episode until the final fade out of the last.

And that’s where The Pitt falls into eye-rolling contrivance and humdrumary. Conservatives, or just those with common sense, will feel the need to search out a shelter for abused audiences as they quickly come to grips with the showrunners’ cycle of abuse. First, they offer compelling drama. Then, they beat you mercilessly with their insane views on everything from abortion to transgenderism. Next, they try to make amends with some heart-stopping drama, only to blindside you with an ideological back-hand, starting the cycle anew.

If you or a loved one is a victim of The Pitt’s abuse, you’re not alone. Call 1-800-LIBS-SUCKA-BIG1 today.

We’d love to know what you thought. If you’ve watched The Pitt, sound off in the comments below.

WOKE ELEMENTS

White Men Need Not Apply

• There are three major hospital systems in Pittsburgh. Can you guess which of the following three people are the real-life Chief Medical Officers for them, and which is the fictional, tough-as-nails, ball-breaking one for the show?
• Noah Wyle’s obviously a white man, and since his character is both the lead, generally good, and competent, the only other white men who aren’t openly racist, schizophrenic, women abusers, etc, are an itty-bitty student doctor who loses more patients than anyone else in the season, gets regularly splattered with human fluids, and seeks the help of others more than anyone else—including the female student doctors with the same amount of experience. Finally, there is a talented and experienced ER doctor who is also
  Spoiler

  a drug addict
  and a touch douchéy
  • You’ve got your white male teen who listens to “toxic” podcasts and is threatening to “unalive” girls in his class.
    • One of the female doctors refers to him as an incel.
  • A white male schizophrenic homeless man (the show calls them unhoused) rages and pisses all over someone (yup a white male doctor).
  • Big white mysogonist/racist douche is the only one making trouble in the waiting area even though there are people who have been waiting for as long as 10 hours… that is until two white women get into a screaming match because one is upset that the son of the other is coughing but not wearing a mask. Guess which side the show takes? Hint: It’s not the side of the anti-vax/anti-mask couple who scream obscenities at the other couple and even initiate physical violence.
    • Conversely, all of the minority patients are kind, loving, etc.
      • Even a repeat substance abuser is a friendly drunk.
  • Another white man is an incestuous pedophile who’s been molesting his daughter for an undisclosed amount of time.
  • The list goes on.
• The established female doctors have their personal issues (irritating personal traits, etc), but experienced white male doctors suffer from PTSD, with one of the earliest scenes depicting one of them standing on the edge of a rooftop contemplating suicide and the other
  Spoiler

  having a complete huddle-in-the-corner-and-weep-while-repeating-a-childhood-religious-song-even-though-he’s-an-athiest breakdown
  towards the end of the season. I discuss the third one further down.

Killing Your Baby, What a Wonderful Way to Say You Love Yourself

• Contrived teenage abortion
  • Even though the series takes place exclusively in an ER, the 1st episode opens with a doctor who is going off duty telling the doctor taking over about a teen abortion scheduled for later that day.
    • ERs generally don’t set appointments for anything… because they’re ERs.
    • ERs don’t regularly perform abortions because they don’t tend to be emergency procedures, and they are definitely not emergency procedures if they are medical abortions that require multiple pills taken over the course of several days.
    • The aunt pretends to be the mother so that when the real mother shows up and doesn’t want her 16-year-old child to murder her grandchild, she can be the bad guy.
    • The treating doctors have multiple private discussions about the right to choose, and how the child should be murdered so that the 16-year-old’s life won’t be “ruined.”
    • The mother finally comes around, and the show’s tone suggests that she has finally become rational.
    • The only openly Christian character congratulates a doctor on convincing the 16-year-old to murder her unborn child.

Blind Hypocrisy

• In what is a moment that the writers probably thought brilliant, one of the doctors who wanted the girl to have an abortion has a miscarriage seconds after the 16-year-old takes her first dose of baby murder medicine. The doctor is devastated by the loss, but resolute that the abortion was the right decision.
• In a later episode, she reveals that she got pregnant years ago and had an abortion, hinting that it could be the reason that she can’t seem to carry a baby to term now.
  Spoiler

  She confesses this to the man whose baby it was. She tells him that she kept the pregnancy and abortion to herself because she didn’t want him to think she was being selfish.
  He, of course, comforts her and assures her that she wasn’t being selfish.
  • The reason that she murdered her child was that she “didn’t feel ready.” You know… selfishly.

Murder, It’s Not Just For Babies

• The show contrives a situation in which it’s hard not to advocate for letting a very ill elderly man die. It spends more time trying to convince his adult children to kill him than virtually any other subplot.
  • One doctor goes so far as to say that the man’s adult children want to “torture” him by keeping him alive.

All The Boxes

• In one episode, there’s a black lesbian couple, of whom one has sickle cell anemia. The patient’s legitimate need for opioids is understandably mistaken for an addict looking to trick the medical staff into providing a fix, since she was acting belligerent and aggressive while on a bus, thrashes about wildly when admitted to the ER, and is demanding high doses of narcotics. However, after she heaps on a ton of attitude and schools the white male EMT who brought her in, the minority doctor who tends to her just so happens to be an expert in sickle cell (a disease that she says this hospital is bad at diagnosing and treating) and is coincidentally researching the disparity of ER treatment between whites and minorities. What a stroke of luck.
• In a later episode, a calm, clean-cut, and well-spoken white man comes in complaining about back pain, but it turns out that he’s actually addicted to morphine and trying to trick his way into more drugs.

Whitey Be Trippin’

• There’s not a single married white couple that starts out supportive and loving despite the extreme circumstances they find themselves in.
  • Conversely, the black lesbians are caricatures of it.
  • The gay male couple is also loving and nurturing.

Do No Harm Wrong

• The ER is overrun with a backlog of people who have been waiting to be seen for hours and hours. There is a female minority third-year intern who spends what the white male attending physician, with decades of experience, deems to be too much time talking with the patients. He rides her a bit throughout. However, the primary black female doctor (the male’s subordinate) repeatedly undermines him by telling the intern to “keep doing you.” It almost goes without saying that, by the end of the season, the white male comes around and ends up praising the minority female intern for her compassionate and thoughtful ways. Telling her to keep up with what he was telling her earlier was a problem.

Aren’t All Crimes Hate Crimes

• The first major emergency of the entire series is a hate crime in which a white man pushes an asian woman onto train tracks, and is saved by a black man. Never mind all of the real-life black on asian hate crimes that have been reported over the last few years.

Boo Capitalism

• It’s fairly common for hospital dramas to pit the medical staff against the administration as adversaries of care versus finances. This one is no different except that it tosses in some Leftist talking points and is clearly advocating for more government funding over private.

Twice As Hard

• I reserve the right to use this title as a double entendre in a later review. However, here, it refers to a female student doctor of Indian descent making the unchecked claim that she “worked [her] ass off to get here, probably harder than anyone else.” It’s taken as a given with zero pushback.

MSNBC Musta Wrote This

• One doctor asks another, “What’s wrong with kids these days?” To which he replies, “You mean other than

  social media, worldwide pandemic, global climate crisis, gun violence…” I guess 50% accuracy is pretty good.

Dumb Bum Full of Rum

• The show goes out of its way to repeatedly call and even educate newbies to call homeless people “unhoused.”

White Privilege

• In one case, a little boy finds his dad’s pot gummies and eats himself unconscious. Even though it was an accident, CPS must be notified. Two nurses or doctors (I don’t recall) are talking about it, and one asks the other, “How do you know they’ll be alright?” To which she replies, “They’re white. Probably get off with a slap on the wrist. If they weren’t, she’d probably lose her child, and he’d be going to jail.”

Spaghetti Monster

• A doctor sarcastically asks another doctor, “What, are we praying for miracles today?” The response is a knowing smile acknowledging how silly that would be.
• Everybody, except for one or maybe two characters, is an atheist. Even the ex-employee of the Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood show is a non-believer. While it’s not impossible that an atheist worked for the show, Rogers was a minister and a devout Christian. It would have honored the man far more to have had this fictional character converted to Christianity thanks to Rogers.

Boy, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

• A mentally ill man who mistakenly thinks he’s a woman gets 40% of an episode devoted to him, with an injury that totally warrants it—a cut that requires a handful of stitches. We get to learn that he likes wine and that expensive wine is expensive. It’s riveting.
  • He also gets referred to by his actual name when in the waiting room, which, you know, is the same as kicking him in the mangina.
  • At his story’s conclusion, the student doctor says to him, “I couldn’t help but notice that there was a misgendering error on your chart, so I took care of it.” He gets all teary-eyed, and the scene comes to a touching end.
    • The entire sequence is contrived to bring about this moment, showing all you intolerant jerks how easy and meaningful it is to indulge and encourage the delusions of the deeply disturbed.

If You Think She’s Spunky, Wrap Your Monkey

• The 17-year-old quasi-stepson of Noah Wylie’s character is well-known by the ER staff, so of course, multiple adults provide him with unsolicited condoms for his upcoming date.
  • One of these adults tells this child to “Wrap it before you tap it.”
  • Another adult tells this child the details of a time when she had sex in public.

Did Pete Buttigieg Write This

• One episode devotes a significant amount of time to a gay couple whose surrogate gives birth to “their” son. You can let your imagination run wild on how celebrated they are in it.

Toxic Masculinity

• The last few episodes center on the aftermath of a mass shooting. Who’s behind it? A toxically masculine young man with an AR-15.
  • Wylie’s character says, “We don’t teach men how to deal with their emotions. We tell them to suck it up and they listen to toxic podcasts.”

Honestly, I Probably Missed A Few

• After binge-watching almost 15 hours of this relentless progressivism, you’ll have to forgive me if I missed something. But, don’t hold it all in, or you might be driven to toxically masculine behavior. Let us know what we missed in the comments below.