Last year, after watching Severance lose Best Drama at the Emmys to The Pitt, I decided that I was never going to watch another medical show ever again. Last Friday, I woke up at six am to watch the new episode of The Pitt with my friends. I have a weekly alarm set so I don’t miss new episodes. I message my best friends every Thursday, the day before new episodes drop, with some variation of ‘we finna be in da pitt’. And I can’t quite help but wonder how I got here because I swear, I don’t even like medical dramas.
Part of it might be genetic. My dad is a doctor, and growing up, our living room doubled as a semi-medical lecture hall. I would ask him about the shows I watched, if it was accurate, if it looked fake to him. I think I learned two things from his answers: one: I could never do his job, and two: I would absolutely die if anyone tried to operate on me while staring longingly across a hospital corridor.
The Original Offender
I can’t talk about medical shows without starting with Grey’s Anatomy, because I genuinely think an entire generation learnt what a hospital corridor looks like from that show.
Every year like clockwork, I see a new post celebrating Grey’s Anatomy’s renewal. What season are we on now? 21? 22? I lost count a while back. Incredibly, it’s still on and it’s still dramatic. And even more incredibly, people still care.
It might not be the most realistic show in the world (my dad says it’s questionable at best, so it must be true), but who needs realism when you have longing eye contact across operating tables?
Grey’s Anatomy, love it or hate it, established the core grammar of hospital TV: crisis, competence, emotional confession, repeat. Once you’ve internalised that rhythm, every new medical show feels oddly familiar, even when it pretends to be different.
I am a surgeon
Grey’s was followed by an era of what I like to call hyper-competence. I’m talking about shows like House, or The Good Doctor: the doctor is brilliant, the cases are bizarre, the patients are doomed… or are they?
But somewhere in between season three and four, you start to notice a pattern. There’s an impossible diagnosis, a morally questionable decision, a moving monologue, and suddenly everyone is either better or dead — not because of the medicine, but because it serves the doctor’s character arc.
We saw it happen with The Good Doctor. ‘I am a surgeon’ was never meant to become a meme. You’ll see it everywhere, though, if you search it up on Tiktok: people using it as an audio over separating cookies that have bled together while baking; over putting on fake eyelashes; over taking out a splinter.
It’s the risk that you take with a hyper-competent medical show. You stretch brilliance most people will never have, myself included, and it stops being inspiring and starts becoming absurd.
It’s happened to more shows than I can count. It will happen to anything if you leave it long enough.
Enter The Pitt
So, by the time The Pitt rolled around, I was convinced that I had seen every possible medical show ever. But here’s what surprised me about The Pitt:
1. Each season is one shift. Episodes are broken up into hour sections of the fifteen-hour shift.
2. The characters are all flawed. Sometimes I love them. Sometimes I hate them. I empathise with them all.
3. The writing is incredible. I don’t feel like anyone exists purely to deliver a speech or die for shock value.
4. It has a realistic approach to medicine. People fail, people survive, people die. But it doesn’t happen just to twist the knife.
5. Seasons are released yearly. We don’t have to wait two years minimum in between each one to remember who’s alive, who’s dead, or who’s broken your heart this week.
I ended up watching season one in two days over Christmas break, and then spent another two days liking edits of the show on TikTok. Then I messaged my friend (whom I told I would never watch The Pitt ever, so stop asking) and asked when season two was coming out.
Troye Sivan is also in The Pitt
But it’s not just me; about a week ago, Troye Sivan posted this on his story: “Today i have watched so much of The Pitt that i am losing touch with reality – i can’t leave the house because i work in an ER. I know how to fix these patients (intubation). The medical community (of which I am a part) is incredible”.
This medical community surrounding The Pitt (that Troye is a part of) isn’t just a joke, either: a new survey of Pitt viewers by the USC Normal Lear Center shows that 27% of people said they were more likely to consider organ donation, and around 40% were encouraged look deeper into end of life planning, which were both major plot points of the first season.
Not every Pitt watcher is suddenly enrolling in med school, of course, but it’s doing something more interesting than most medical dramas manage: it treats medicine as a system people survive inside of, not a stage for individual genius.
We are all in the pitt
I’m still not quite sure how I got here.
Maybe because I got FOMO. Maybe because of all the edits of Shawn Hatosy as Dr. Jack Abbot.
Regardless, I’ll still be setting my alarm for six for the next eight weeks.
I’ll see you back in da Pitt next Friday.
