Star Noah Wyle and producer John wells combat high expectations with the return of acclaimed medical drama The Pitt
When a television series becomes a phenomenon right out of the gate, it can feel like everyone braces for a crash in the second season. “The proverbial sophomore slump is real,” says Noah Wyle, star and executive producer of The Pitt, which in its first season was named Outstanding Drama Series at the Emmy Awards, receiving four other awards for its cast and casting. “When you have something that’s as impactful and as successful as our first season was, it’s inevitable that you’re gonna be combating expectation.”
What the hospital show, set during a 15-hour shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, also has on its side is entertainment industry veteran John Wells, who created and ran hospital series ER for its first six seasons, while producing all 15. “John alleviated us from a lot of that pressure early on by saying, ‘You don’t have to do it bigger, better, faster, stronger — you just have to do it again,’” says Wyle. “’Remember what you did the first time, stay true to the characters, be honest and go from there.’”
We return to The Pitt 10 months later, on Dr. Frank Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) first day back after completing his rehabilitation for drug abuse. Although the action still takes place around the cases in the medical bays, it is impossible not to sense the tension between Langdon and his former mentor Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Wyle). Leaning into these character moments was a key take-away from the first season. “We learned that it’s a really delicate balance between the cases and the characters, and that a lot of people respond to the medicine, for sure, but a lot of people responded more to the internal journey of our characters,” says Wyle. “So, coming back, it was less about coming up with sexy cases and more about being really faithful to the interior architecture of the characters.”
That doesn’t mean that the medicine gets put on the backburner. “One of the things we do at the beginning of the season is sit down and talk to health care experts, whether it’s anesthesiology or cardiologists or specialists in mental health therapy,” says show creator R. Scott Gemmill. “We ask them, what’s going on in your world? What stories aren’t being told? What stories do you think should be told? That’s how we get the nuggets of the medical stories that we do. Ultimately, the stories are told through our characters and what’s going on with them, but we’re trying to keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in medicine.”
It was also, ironically, the medical community that first embraced the drama. “And they embraced it loudly,” says Wyle. “Since that was the audience we were really aiming for, and hoping to get the stamp of approval from, that was extremely gratifying. I feel like their stamp of approval gave other people the confidence to watch it, like this wasn’t gonna be a waste of their time. Word began to spread from there.” For Wyle, the feedback loop is a somewhat different experience from his time on ER when his mother was his harshest critic. “I used to joke that at 11:01 my mother, who was a nurse, would call me and say, ‘You never touch your face with bloody gloves, and you never do this, and I have to go to work tomorrow and I’m gonna have to answer that,’” laughs Wyle. “Now, thanks to the internet, I’ve got, like, eight million mothers who tell me, ‘I think your stethoscope was backwards, jackass.’”
But the truth is that the cast is getting so comfortable in their soundstage emergency room, that Wells had to tell them to be less good at their jobs. “Well, it’s specific because our actors, they literally, physically didn’t know what they were doing at the beginning. Then, doing it for seven months, you get better at it, but the character is one or two hours farther along in their training, not seven months farther along in their training,” explains Wells. “And our camera crew started to get too good. Part of the rawness is bumping into things and not knowing exactly where you are and trying to keep up, because we’re really trying with the camera to say, you are someone who’s trailing behind these physicians, so you’re gonna be in the way and you’re not gonna see everything all the time. We had to remind ourselves to not get too good at it.”
Although they are far from medical professionals, the cast’s expertise comes, in part, from visiting real emergency rooms, and from a bootcamp they all attend for the show. “The performers all went through various exercises, where we tried to stay on our feet for 15 hours and note where we were holding tension, note which [part of us] got tired first, when did you feel hungry, when did you feel like you had to go to the bathroom,” says Wyle. “[You’d] write those things in your scripts and as those hours in the shift come up, you’ll have your appropriate body language. So, it was a good exercise to let everybody know that this [job] wears itself physically on you as well as emotionally.”
What makes Wyle particularly proud of The Pitt is that the medicine on the show is so accurate that it might even be of help in real life. “We try to be so faithful to the medicine and the accuracy that you could take this back to your physician and open up that dialogue and have it be a way of triangulating your own health journey,” he says. This, of course, is aided by the fact that when it comes to real-life medical crises, there is no shortage of material to tackle. “There’s lot of story to talk about in American health care,” says Wells. “It’s in a crisis that is not getting better by pushing eight to 10 million people off of the insurance rolls. It means that they’re not gonna be getting the primary care, which keeps them from showing up in the emergency room with far more significant problems. Sadly, there are a lot of stories to tell.”
The Pitt, airing on Sunday, January 18, on Crave1