This post contains spoilers for the latest episode ofThe Pitt, now streaming on Max.
A few days after this interview, Max announced thatThe Pittwas renewed for a second season.
Medicine is one of them.
“You kind of get off on being good at this stuff,” says Noah Wyle of TV-doctoring.Warrick Page/Max
You get familiar enough with the terminology and the procedures that you gain a lot of theoretical knowledge.
A lot of the medicines have changed.
A lot of the procedures have updated.
When this new character of Dr. Robby was being crafted for Noah, what were the goals?R.
And thats not a good idea.
I dont think any one of us wanted to go back to doing what wed done in the past.
We need to be challenged, and we need to challenge ourselves.
No one makes an appointment, no one wakes up thinking theyre going to go to the ER.
So, we leaned into that and said, Lets just stay with them for the whole shift.
Lets hang out to see whats going on.
They never know whats coming through that door.
What kind of horror are you going to see in the next 10 minutes?
Were there certain aspects of doing it this way that proved especially challenging versus how youd structured this before?
[Wyle and Wells both begin to laugh, while beckoning Gemill to answer.
We had them design the sets first, so we had something to write to.
And then it was like a giant game of Risk.
Theres no cutting away, no act breaks, and youre going to follow through the next day.
Theres a lot of logistics involved.
So the logistics of the whole thing were challenging, exciting, frustrating, depending on the day.
NW:Appealing if you have massive OCD.
And with every restriction or limitation, there was another kind of discovery and possibility.
And that has been proven to be not the case.
I think people found it really refreshing to be able to watch these characters evolve over each subsequent episode.
Its averybusy day for the staff of this hospital.
A season ofERcould be this eventful, but that was playing out over months in the characters lives.
Did you have any concern about that?RSG:I didnt really.
Thats what we do.
Thats what the audience comes for: to be surprised, and challenged.
The compression in one day is a conceit, but I think it worked.
What was really amazing is how quickly the cast and crew adapted to it.
The first day was a little crazy.
We had all this background, and two script supervisors, and people just in charge of background.
It was really, really impressive how quickly everyone fell into that rhythm.
Thats whats nice about the format; we dont have to fake anything [in terms of timing].
Why am I waiting here?
RSG:A lot of choreography is involved as a writer on this show.
You have to know the set really well to do all the movement through it.
Was it a coincidence that so many huge emotional moments got packed into the same hour?
Once you start the process, theres a natural progression of these characters.
That was a story that Joe Sachs wanted to tell.
NW:Its an interesting example of the balance we wanted to strike.
That required a lot of care and time and thought.
JW:Hes a practicing emergency room physician, and has been for many years.
Its a medical ride-along, for lack of a better term.
You are on the shoulder of these physicians and nurses, and watching what they go through.
Because we forget, you know we get frustrated.
Were in the emergency room waiting a long time.
What takes so long?
What do we actually ask these physicians and health professionals to shoulder for us?
I think that was very important to all the medical professionals who are involved in the show.
Joe wrote both that episode and this one.
JW:Its also important to remember that emergency medicine as a specialty is still relatively new.
Its 45 or 50 years old.
So its, how do you tell these stories?
We used to joke onERthat they are really only about seven or eight ER stories.
Literally, the things that come in are pretty common.
So its a rearranging of how the characters actually interact with each other.
Who are the characters?
What do they do?
What is different for them?
Which was a big thing for me, directorally.
Theres nudity in the show.
Theres a lot of medical procedures in the show that we could never show before.
The nudity and those medical procedures is not gratuitous.
Its actually what the physicians see and what you would see if you were with them.
Were attempting to show you exactly what it is.
Some people tell me, Oh, its bloody.
RSG:I did two episodes ofERwithout any score.
So I knew it could work.
They had to be specific.
The stories have to move.
I have nothing against composers, and Ive relied on them heavily on other shows.
Especially when a scene isnt working, they can salvage it.
I think this show benefits from not having it, and I will continue to fight for that.
And I think it is enough.
Music, weve all used it.
John, when you directed the first episode, how did you want the trauma scenes to look?
Theyre quite a bit different from how you used to shoot them.JW:We made a lot of choices.
One was to go into a lot of emergency rooms and see what things look like now.
Which seems sort of silly, but the reality is, nobody wears scrubs in the same way anymore.
Nobody has a bunch of blue scrubs on in the emergency rooms.
Theres just a very different color palette.
And so we wanted the piece to be starker.
The sets are basically white, the doctors are all in black.
The medical rehearsals are very accurate.
Then we come in with the cameras afterwards and shoot what they are doing.
They just do it.
One is always on set, oftentimes there are two.
Many of the nurses you see, male and female, are practicing ER nurses.
They actually just set it up and do it.
NW:We found that its actually most efficient to rehearse those scenes 24 hours in advance.
Theres no dolly track.
We photograph everything with two cameras.
Youre also being asked to give a performance in the midst of this level of choreography, Noah.
]There are a lot of degrees of complication.
You have medical students who dont know anything and are terrified and trying to impress the R1s.
The R1s are trying to impress the R2s.
So the rehearsal is not just technical, and can I pronounce the words right?
Am I appropriately conveying the level of tension and anxiety with my medical education at this moment?
Those are the things that actually go into building the performance, more than the technical rehearsals.
Its trying to figure out, what is my thought process here?
What am I most worried about?
Who am I most worried about?
Who am I most confident about?
After Noah, who was the best at the medical procedures?
Who was the worst?JW:Its like learning a dance, like any complicated piece of choreography.
There are some who had more training literally in dance, or who picked it up faster.
But by the end of one, people had started to get there.
I came back and did the last one, and I saw marked improvement in the medical skills.
NW:It becomes a point of pride to do it correctly.
It becomes a bit of a badge of shame to blow a take.
