Leading up to Thursday’s season finale of The Pitt, I’d heard through the grapevine that it was “anticlimactic.” That might sound like a bummer, but it sounded like relief to me. The previous few episodes of Max’s breakout medical drama had dealt with a mass shooting event, which sent more than 100 people to the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital’s emergency room, flooding an already stressed, chronically understaffed hospital with gunshot victims and raising the adrenaline level of doctors and viewers to an unsustainable high. I didn’t want them to up the ante in the final episode. I wanted them to wrap up the shift, which was far into overtime, and send people home.
Ultimately they did—or, rather, the doctors and nurses went across the street to the public park to drink some beers—but the episode wasn’t without drama, even if it was of a quieter sort. Over the last hour of this 15-hour workday—each episode captures one hour in a single day at the ER—nearly everyone starts to lose it in one way or another. Noah Wyle’s eminently steady and soulful Dr. Robby flips out on an anti-vax dad whose kid is at risk of dying from measles, taking him to a makeshift morgue full of gunshot victims to illustrate the gravity of the boy’s situation. (This scare tactic is potentially effective—the kid gets the spinal tap that will save his life—but extremely uncool.) Charge nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa), who had been punched in the face by an angry patient a few episodes back, quietly packs up her personal items at her nursing station, intimating she’s done, like, for good. Extremely efficient Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) soars on adrenaline and predictably crashes, escaping for a cry in the bathroom, blood from the day still on the floor. The new interns—yes, that long day was their first shift ever in the ER—are shuffling, dark circles under their eyes. It’s a limp to the finish.
I hadn’t heard the phrase “competence porn” until I read James Poniewozik’s piece about The Pitt in the New York Times on Friday morning. That’s certainly part of the show’s allure: The Pitt is about doctors and nurses and hospital staff doing the best they can in a resource-constrained environment, saving as many lives as they can, being as kind as they can, seeing patients through, either to another floor of the hospital for more help or to discharge. Together, they are a single organism, processing problems and people over and over again. I described Noah Wyle’s performance to my ex-husband as “ballet” early on in the season; he glides from one trauma room to another, tailoring his wonderful, expressive eye crinkles and worry lines to the crisis at hand. Over the episodes, the ensemble comes together, a troupe dancing around and with Dr. Robby. Even with mistakes (never fatal) and human failure (substance abuse, overstepping), this is a team that does right and does good, even when the outcomes aren’t perfect.
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But more powerful than the allure of watching people do things competently is the overall sense of realism that has infused the whole season. Doctors have loved the show for its accuracy. But it resonates more broadly beyond the hospital walls. A newsroom is not an ER, and The Pitt is a fictional television show, not a real place. But I related to it, and I’m sure people in other industries, working and living during this absolutely bizarre, scary, and unpredictable time, did too. So many of us wish we had more—more people, more money to spend, more room—but we do everything we can with what we have.
And then we get tired. Sometimes we get fed up. We might think about quitting, like Dana. Sometimes we crumble, like Dr. Robby, felled—however briefly—by overwhelming grief. Or we undercut ourselves by snapping at other people—even people we care about and respect. We are human, and more than anything I’ve watched in a while, The Pitt is about what that means, and how sometimes it feels incredibly hard to be so these days.
The Pitt season finale captures what makes the Max show so good.
