Final “The Pitt”: a medical drama returning to the past with a message of the moment

Have you ever had one of those infinite days at work? For 15 hours in Pitt, the emergency room that lends its name to the medical drama of Max, a team of doctors and nurses, led by Dr. Michael Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), faced all pain that human fragility and the city of Pittsburgh can launch them.

What do they treat? Call it. Mass injuries. Overdose. Problematic pregnancies. Heart attacks. Measles.

What they do Truly deal with? Despair. The flood of opioids. The lack of insurance. The lack of support networks. Male anger. Rage, in general. THE Deduction of the public health system. The breakdown of the public.

During a first long, stressful, but reassuring and fun season, which ended Thursday, “The Pitt” generated melodrama of the old school for a simple understanding: the ER is where people end when something goes wrong, with the individual body or with the political body.

And what’s wrong with the American corpus? Friend, take a number; The waiting room is full.

If the concerns of “The Pitt” are of the moment, his appeal It is as old as the rabbit ear antennas. It is a great exhibition in the Grasso hospital, rubbing the suspense and snatching tears from weekly life and death. It is a successor, almost a crypto-sequel, for a specific show for the great Grasso-“Eh” hospital, Wyle’s Alma Mater; The creator of “Pitt”, R. Scott Gemmill; and the producer John Wells. (The estate of Michael Crichton, the creator of “Er”, intended a cause accusing “The Pitt” of being an unauthorized restart. Warner Bros. Television, the study that produces “The Pitt”, defined the “foundation -free” statements).

Three decades ago, “Er” was a new ride on a genre Hoary and “The Pitt” he shares some of the distinctive signs of his predecessor. There is the rhythm of adrenaline, with the camera chases doctors and nurses around a completely built Hospital set. There is dedication to technical realism. (“Show) gets (factual detail) right?” It is my least favorite standard to judge art, but if this is your thing, medical professionals From the high votes.) The season also books its beginning and the end with scenes on the roof, recalling the site of several High drama “It’s” moments.

Above all, there is the cast of idiosyncratic characters whose personality are revealed under pressure. We met Wyle on “Er” in the role of John Carter, a medical student on his first day in the trenches. While the brizzled and loaded Dr. Robinavitch, known as Robby, supervises a new blood infusion: Mel (Taylor Dearden), a resident and intuitive resident who the show suggests is neurodicing; Whitaker (Gerran Howell), a Nebraska sweet medicine student with an unfortunate propensity to be spraying body fluids; And many others, from the neophytes eager to the old pungent hands. “The Pitt” does nothing small, including his call sheet.

In the end, the show clarifies that you are not looking at the NBC in 1994. There is much more curse. Gore is more graphic, the most close and personal prostheses. The story almost in real-time-where “episodic” in the sense that patients will scratch inside and out of the serial in a way that suits streaming. (While I dropped the entire season at the same time to reduce the atmosphere from the back to the past, I don’t think it would be a bad way to look at the show.)

What most makes “The Pitt” a TV series of his moment, however, is his diagnosis: he identifies the widespread feeling that everything is now sick and broken, from systems to people to social compacts.

A great precipitative factor is Covid and the consequences of the pandemic on health, the tension of the system and trust. This was born more directly in the history of Robby: it is the four -year anniversary of the death of his mentor in the middle of the covid assault, for which Robby still blames himself.

There is a trauma later. There are personal problems, especially among nurses. There is an abuse of drugs, between patients and staff. There is distrust, both personal and social, personified by a couple who did their searches about vaccines and are now refusing a spinal tap necessary for the son hit at measles. (That plot has become even darker since the series was previewed in January, with Morbillo outbreaks in different states and the High of the vaccine skeptics in the government.)

And the pervasive chronic condition is anger. The accusation nurse Dana (Katherine Lanasa) is punched by a frustrated patient; The assaults, we are told, are common here. A mother arrives in the emergency room under a pretext because she wants help with her teenage son, who held a list of killings of classmates. Cassie (Fiona Dourif), the resident who intercesses in that case, herself wears an ankle monitor and has a restrictive order against her connected to her acrimonial divorce.

Robby is also full of anger, which makes it an engaging protagonist-it is satisfactory to see it tell the anti-vaxxer parents to stop consulting “Dr. Google”. Wyle, like Alan Alda on “m*a*s*h”, balances the spigolosity of the character with great tiredness. But “The Pitt” leaves the question if that anger makes Robby a better doctor, much less a happier person.

Regardless of this, this is not a job suitable for self -care. The staff is mutually support, horriblely, but the work is relentless: there is too much, and there is another thing and then there is a mass shooting in a festival in the center and the doors open. The latter event – the type of very special crisis that has sometimes sent “Er” at sea but feels like another day in the office here – in the end brings Robby to break, crossing on the floor in a pediatric room transformed into temporary piers, the cornerstones with a sheet metal supervised by cheerful painted animals.

If I make it look intense “The Pitt”, well, it is. But it is not miraculously a sin. It has a bite sense of humor and irony. Among the mass victims of mass there is an bloody clown that performed at the Festival. “You really have to love children,” Whitaker says to him. A perfect pace passes: “Not really.” Every now and then, the ER is visited by rats, small symbols of ruin and instigators of crazy slaps.

It is when the chaos gives off and “The Pitt” embraces his seriousness and lessons that perceive the legacy of the show network network and his disadvantages. The series often does not trust the audience to obtain its serious points without a line of dialogues the ham-“I doubt that it will return, but unfortunately there will be many, many others like her” -o a didactic lesson.

Even that corniness of the TV of the old times is a form of nostalgic imagination. It recalls a time when medicine was implicitly enhanced instead of contested, when the small liberal belief in the institutions that served a collective public good was so widely accepted that it was the melodrama cliché in the early evening.

There is a downside, however, in all these stories of heroism. If the message of “The Pitt” is that the ingenious and self-transferent healers will still do the work-not the cuts and the anti-science and the breakdown of the social fabric-because they worry about solving these major systemic problems? We will go well, right? If you think too much about how this imagination connects to real life, it starts to seem palliative care for a terminal patient.

However, when those DOC-Drama oppose Whosh in your bloodstream, they feel good. I saw “The Pitt” described as “Porn of competence”, And that’s that; There is something satisfactory to see that the professionals winds on the march to resolve the human body. But it is also porn cure, offering reassurance that when the most important machine breaks, even if it is your fault, your human companions will fight through exhaustion and trauma to repair it.

Above all, it is the porn of Resilienza, a history of 15 episodes of a racking network in shreds that captures the body after the body, which extends and strive but somehow detained. For now, however. As Robby says to close the season, “tomorrow is another day”. Probably long.