The Pitt: ‘prestige’ medical drama in the mould of ER

“The medical drama that took its native US by storm last year has finally crossed the pond,” said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, and it’s well worth the wait.

“The Pitt” is made by some of the same team that created the gritty Chicago-set drama “ER” – and it stars one of its biggest talents. Noah Wyle appeared in the pilot episode of “ER” as fresh-faced intern John Carter, in 1994, and bowed out in the season finale, in 2009.

Here he plays Dr Robby, a Carter-like senior physician working in an emergency room in Pittsburgh known to its staff as the Pitt. Each of the first season’s 15 episodes (on HBO Max) covers a single hour of a brutal 15-hour shift.

It takes “supreme confidence to drill down into this level of minutiae”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. “It could get boring, yet never does.” And I’m not surprised that the show has been praised for its accuracy, because as well as being thrillingly immersive, “The Pitt” is incredibly naturalistic. Watching it is like being dropped into “an emergency department in real time with all its blood, gore and chaotic urgency”.

As in “ER”, “there are moments that are heartbreaking, there are moments that are shocking, there are moments that are amusing”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. (There are also dashes of heavy-handed social commentary.) In other words, it all feels designed “to hit its beats”. It is good TV. But I wouldn’t call it great.

Well, you’ll have to go a long way to find better, said India Block in London’s The Standard. Written and directed with aplomb, “The Pitt” is “prestige” drama for an audience not distracted by their phones. It deserves to be seen.