Why Doctors Love “The Pitt”

Still from “The Pitt” of three doctors in the hospital treating a patient and looking at a monitor.

Photograph by Warrick Page / Courtesy HBO Max

Noah Wyle is America’s doctor. From his first days playing the hapless medical student John Carter on “E.R.” to his current role of elder emergency-room statesman on “The Pitt,” he has represented our ideal physician: compassionate, wry, and soulfully dreamy. But what do real doctors think of him—and of his hit series, which returned last night for its second season? In a new piece today, the physician and New Yorker contributing writer Dhruv Khullar shares what the show has taught him about his job. We spoke recently about what he looks for in a TV show about medicine.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Everyone seems to love “The Pitt.” Is that especially true for doctors?

I certainly enjoyed it. “The Pitt” is one of the more realistic medical shows I’ve seen, but where it really excels is in capturing what it feels like to practice medicine today. There’s this ever-present awareness that the system is broken and the work is endless, and yet there are moments of deep humanity to be found. Those moments are why many of us went into medicine.

When you are watching a show like this do you care at all about technical verisimilitude, or are you more interested in something that captures what a hospital really feels like?

The best medical dramas give viewers a sense of what makes caregiving such a uniquely rewarding and difficult endeavor. I’m less concerned with whether a show is technically accurate than whether it captures the human aspects of medicine.

I don’t think you can watch a season of “The Pitt” without coming away with a greater appreciation for the emotional and logistical challenges that patients face, or the great lengths to which health-care workers must go to keep the system running. That, in itself, is an achievement.

What is in your pantheon of best doctor shows? And do emergency rooms get too much love?

It could be recency bias, but I’d put “The Pitt” near the top. It’s not surprising to me that emergency departments dominate medical shows—the pace, drama, and personalities are all so conducive to television. It’s partly why “E.R.” was so compelling and propulsive, too. But as Noah Wyle has pointed out, “The Pitt” is, fundamentally, a “provider-centric” show, while “E.R.” leaned a bit more “patient-centric.” Personally, I also loved “Scrubs” for the way it captured the camaraderie and absurdity of medical training. “Eeeagle!”

Is there a show that regular viewers might think is super accurate but which is notoriously absurd if you know about medicine? Journalists joke that every reporter on TV has an impossible two-million-dollar apartment. What errors make you wince?

I’m annoyed when I see what you might call the great-man theory of medicine—the idea that good care is mostly about cowboy surgeons and diagnostic whiz kids cracking cases and saving the day. “The Pitt” has a touch of that, but, more often, it tells a truer story: medicine is a team sport. Helping a patient get better almost always requires the hard (often unglamorous) work of many people over many days.

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Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.

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