A Medical Drama So Real That It Aggravates Your Heartbeat

It is  very difficult to  evaluate what goes on in The Pitt for fifteen episodes. It is a world of  medical care so dense and intense, it feels like a reality show, without of course the artificial realism of the genre. Everything here is so real , it feels fake. Set in real time, each hour-long episode captures fifteen real hours in fifteen episodes.

Fortunately the episodes are not all done in one shot. That  would be  a very….ummm….’Adolescence’  thing to do, if you know what I mean. Once in a while  a series is so shorn of gimmicks, so sure of its genuine intentions, that it feels  artificial. How can  anything  fictional be  so  authentic?!

The Pitt reminds us of how traumatic hospitalisation can be to the patient and the family even if it is a posh place. In the series we are constantly reminded of death’s presence at the door, as patients  of all kinds storm in. Some leave soon, some never. All this happens within fifteen hours of one day.

Real time, real medical problems, real pain, and not just for the actors who don’t look like they are faking it, but also for us the audience, as every patient crammed into an impatient crisis, comes with his or her own problem.

 This is the series’ weakness and strength. While  we are unable to know any patient or  doctor up close and personal, this breathless running through lives locked in a fight to finish, also reminds us that  the blur of the sick and bleeding is indicative of the impersonal non-intimate nature  of mortality.

 I didn’t come away with any specific medical  crisis only a mob of nervous  tired faces. The larger picture  is certainly the issue here. We are taken from one  scene of–if we could  be slightly flippant– action to the next with not even the minimum pause for breath. The pacing of each episode is synchronized with work pressures of the doctors. They are  barely  out of  one life-or-death crisis when another one  shows up, demanding their attention.

Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael Robinavitch is the only anchorable presence in an otherwise decentralized narration. He sort of takes us  along for the trauma travel warning us,  not in so many words, that we are  in this at  our own risk.

The  Pitt is  a journey through  fifteen hours of a medical facility where doctors  and  patients are wedded  to a  crisis point so critical, nothing else matters. That the series, created by R. Scott Gemmill succeeds in sucking us into its vibrant anxious world, is an exceptional achievement .

On the minus side, to be watching medical  challenged  people for fifteen  hours , no matter how skilfully the deed is done, is not easy.  Many viewers  would be gasping for a breather, or just giving up, not  for the lack of watchability  but simply because, life is  unpredictable, and  where  else  are we better reminded of this than in  a hospital? In this one we  can almost smell the  anxiety.