The Pitt Season 1 Review

The Pitt (2025-)

Season 1 - 15 episodes
Rent The Pitt on Amazon Video (paid link)
Created by: R. Scott Gemmill
Starring: Noah Wyle, Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Kristin Villanueva
Rated: TV-MA
Watch the trailer

Plot
The daily lives of healthcare professionals in a Pittsburgh hospital as they juggle personal crises, workplace politics, and the emotional toll of treating critically ill patients, revealing the resilience required in their noble calling.

Verdict
Each episode depicts one hour in the emergency room with the entire season comprising a shift. It's frenetic, dramatic, and so much fun. It starts out fine but keeps getting better with each episode, and by the end becomes something more impressive. Part of that is that this throws so much at you that it takes a while to get a sense of everything. This has a range of cases from mundane to devastating. As much as I was enjoying this, I didn't think it could reach another level but later in the season it does just that. It's a tragedy, but it raises the intensity of the show as the entire ER staff scramble to save people that are arriving quicker than they can treat them. It can be graphic, this doesn't hold back what you might see in the emergency room, but that along with the format of the show lends it a strong sense of credibility.
Watch It.

Review
The first episode sets the foundation. It's an overworked staff in a crowded Pittsburgh hospital. They're busy from the start. There's a lot of medical jargon, but it's easy enough to understand what's wrong with patients and fill in the gaps. This gets graphic as the camera doesn't shy away from operations. Our thread is attending physician Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle). He's running between patients, trying to save people while administration hassles him about satisfaction scores. Admin ignores his response that the hospital doesn't have enough staff because the hospital isn't willing to pay fair wages.

Noah Wyle plays  Dr. "Robby" Rabinavitch

This is intense with so many patients facing life or death. The show never slows down. There's conflict between everyone; staff, patients, and administration. The stinger at the end of the first episode is that Dr. Robbie had a difficult time during Covid, watching a colleague die.

The following episodes build on the first, revealing more about the staff and the ongoing plight of patients. Dr. Robby does a great job at defusing situations, and there are plenty of intense interactions. An intern loses a patient, having a difficult time coping. The staff face difficult cases and patients. In episode four, patients in the waiting room reach a breaking point. They're mad at waiting hours on end, but we've seen that the staff is racing to see the patients already admitted and even then they're aren't enough beds.

This just keeps getting better with every episode as numerous smaller plot lines create the overall plot. At just five episodes in, this covered so much ground. With so many personalities we get a range of people and emotions; a confidant intern, an overwhelmed student doctor, the understanding and charismatic Dr. Robby just to name a few. There's also admin worried more about image than medicine. The show always feels like a sprint, and that's the point as the hospital is overworked.

There are so many cases from mild to serious. There's one patient that argues about masks in the waiting room. Dr. Langdon asks if she wants the surgeons to wear masks. It puts her on the spot, and she sheepishly states she wants  them to wear masks. People in the waiting room are understandably frustrated, but patients are seen based on condition. We even see a birth, a lot of it.

This was a show I liked from the start and at half way in I hoped it doesn't end. Each episode is better than the last. I didn't expect it could get more intense, but episode twelve proves it can with a devastating event at a local festival. While there are small victories and saves, the overall trauma of the situation stresses everyone. The final episode is the end of shift, calming down from the previous episodes. It's a fitting end, and I can't wait for another season.