Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This message is brought to you by the official White Lotus podcast from HBO. Join host Evan Ross Katz as he looks back at the first two seasons of the show with Jennifer Coolidge, Murray Bartlett, Megan Fahey, and more. Listen before the new season starts February 16th on Max. ♪
Thank you.
Where conventionally constructed hospital dramas bring in a new load of patients every week and follow long stretches of the lives of doctors and other staff, The Pit does something different. Each episode follows one hour in the ER over the course of a very long day, so the layout is less Grey's Anatomy and more 24. I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about The Pit on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. ♪
This message is brought to you by the official White Lotus podcast from HBO. Join host Evan Roskatz as he looks back at the first two seasons of the show with Jennifer Coolidge, Murray Bartlett, Megan Fahey, and more. Listen before the new season starts February 16th on Max.
This message comes from Charles Schwab. When it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices, like full-service wealth management and advice when you need it. You can also invest on your own and trade on Thinkorswim. Visit Schwab.com to learn more.
This message comes from NPR sponsor, IKEA. IKEA is hitting the snooze button on everything but rest and sleep. Why not turn your bedroom into the space to decompress? Shop the IKEA range of comfy beds, pillows, mood lighting, and so much more. Every time you step in there, it's nothing but me time. Sounds like a dream, right? IKEA has what you need to design a bedroom you'll never want to leave. Create your comfy, blissful bedroom today with the IKEA 6 Sleep Essentials.
Shop in-store or go to ikea-usa.com slash sleep.
This message comes from Redfin. With the Redfin app, you'll know the moment your next place hits the market, whether you're looking to buy your dream home or rent a sweet apartment. Give Redfin your gotta-have-it-wish list of property features, and you'll receive real-time notifications tailored just for you. Ready to see it up close and personal? Scheduling a tour is just a tap away. Don't wait to find your perfect match. Download the Redfin app and start searching today.
This message comes from CarMax. CarMax knows that finding the right car is all about exploring your options, like the option to shop your way on your schedule. At CarMax, you can browse, compare, and pre-qualify online, then finish up at the store, or simply start on the lot. The choice is yours, because at CarMax, you're in the driver's seat. Start the search for your next car today at CarMax, the way car buying should be.
Joining me today is Andrew Limbaugh. He's the host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and a reporter for The Culture Desk. Hey, Andrew. Always good to see you. Hey, Linda. What's going on? You know, the pit, Andrew. That is what is going on. Also...
Also with us is journalist and author of We See Each Other, A Black Trans Journey Through TV and Film, Travelle Anderson. Welcome back, Travelle. Hello, hello. So excited to see you both. The Pit is set in a Pittsburgh emergency room run by Dr. Rabinovich, known to colleagues and patients alike as Dr. Robbie. He's played by Noah Wiley, who for years played Dr. John Carter on ER.
There are young doctors who are on their first day in the hospital. There are highly skilled nurses, one of whom pretty much runs the place. And there are patients sitting in the waiting room or waiting for beds in the main part of the hospital as the hours drag on. As you can see, our house is always packed and our department is mostly clogged up with boarders. Those are admitted patients waiting for a room upstairs, sometimes for days. Beds are a very precious commodity around here. So please be quick and efficient with your workups.
For everybody who looks at Noah Wiley and thinks about ER, the show also shares some behind-the-scenes DNA with ER, including the Pitt creator R. Scott Gemmel and the Pitt executive producer John Wells, both of whom worked on ER.
Michael Crichton was also involved in creating ER, and his estate has sued, claiming that the pit is an unauthorized reboot of ER. I don't think we're going to get into the merits of that lawsuit, but it's worth at least knowing about. The pit is streaming now on Max. Andrew, I am going to start with you. Did you fall into the pit?
I can't get out. Listen, the ER-ness of it all is still like in my head. Has this escaped the shadow of ER? And I think so. And I think I generally like it. I think there are a couple things about the 24-esque structure that give it
interesting to say about the state of hospitals today, the state of healthcare. I was thinking though sometimes it kind of drags it down because it doesn't have the thing that 24 had where at like minute 53, Jack Bauer found out that someone like a bomb is set off inside of a cougar and they need to go fix that problem or whatever. Sure.
But generally, I think it successfully steps into its own like towards episode four or so as a pretty enjoyable procedural like plus with like a hint of elevation to it, you know? All right, Travelle, how about you? The pit?
through your eyes. Yeah, I'm very middle of the road on this one, okay? Because I love a procedural. I actually love getting to know all of the personal details about all the many, many characters. And because of the structure of the pit...
you really are forced to learn about the characters as they are being nurses and doctors. You know, you don't get to go home with any of them, for example, which is a little different and something to get used to. That's the thing about emergency medicine. You never know what you're going to get. And we get everything. Is that why you chose it?
Maybe a little. I also get to pick my shifts, which for a single mother is amazing. But it's super fast-paced. I like most of the characters. It was a good watch, but is it appointment television? I'm not sure. Mm-hmm. When I watched this, so there are eventually going to be 15 episodes of this. We got 10. Mm-hmm.
I watched, I think, all 10 of these on the same day. Sheesh. And I just got into it. And I, you know, like Travelle, I am a procedural person as well as a hospital show person. And it was interesting because I agree with Andrew that the initial question is obviously you're looking at Noah Wiley in an ER. Are you just thinking the whole time about ER? Yeah.
But I think, you know, it's stylistically different enough. It's not as frenetic as ER. It's not intended to be as frenetic as ER. They don't have all of the kind of
Everybody comes in and screams at the same time. It's a little more like if you've actually ever been in an ER while having an emergency, which unfortunately I have, it feels a little more like that than other hospital shows that I've seen. But I don't know that it owes a lot more to ER creatively than it owes to Grey's Anatomy and Chicago Hope. And what I did really appreciate about it, I think the most is that
It does seem to be trying to operate with some realism about what these doctors are actually dealing with, including, you know, these things where Dr. Robbie is being kind of followed around by somebody who is telling him how important it is to get numbers up and patient satisfaction surveys. Do you know how likely patients are to recommend this hospital? This is an emergency department, not a Taco Bell.
11%. Well, if you want people to be happier, don't make them wait for 12 hours. So I do like that. And I like the fact that there's a discussion of like what happens when hospitals or parts of hospitals are taken over by management companies of different kinds. I think those things are all really valuable. And I appreciated the presence of those kinds of considerations, you know? Yeah, I think, you know, Linda, what you said about
the tone of the show how like you know er does that thing where it would bounce back between trauma one and trauma two like back and forth right that doesn't really happen on this show there's a couple moments but there's one like in episode two where the dude who who like smashes his face on the ground riding on a scooter and he comes in and they have to first off shout out to like what they can do on max they like lift the guy's nose up from the inside it's
Oh, man. There is some gory stuff going on on this show, which I kind of appreciate. But like in ER, right, that would be underscored by like, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun,
It manages to do that without sacrificing interest. Like, it's not boring, right? It's not like a slower, like, it still feels, has that energy. It's also still very chaotic, right? Right, exactly. It's still going from issue to issue in the hospital. I think for me, I was actually more taken by the form, by the chaos, than I was...
any particular acting performance or anything. By the end of every single episode, I was surprised that we were at the end because the episode just moved so quickly. We were dealing with seven different major cases that people might have to deal with in the ER. In addition to personal things that are coming up for these folks while they're on this shift,
But I did appreciate the fact that while it maintains some of that chaos that you might have felt in ER, it's done in a different way that still, like I think, keeps you on the edge of your seat. So that when the end of the episode comes, you're actually not expecting that to be the end of the episode. Right, right, right. Which makes you, Linda, want to continue watching if you have 10 of them to watch. I think that's what happened with me. And, you know...
One of the other interesting things, you know, you talk about the pacing of it and
I found that when I rewatched ER not that long ago, I rewatched a bunch of ER. All of it? Did you make it through to the end? I did not make it through the season. But I watched, you know, when a reasonable amount of the original cast was around, you know. Right. And one of the things I noticed was how in this ER, the doctors have nothing but time to sit around and talk to people about their lives and meet them and discover what interesting characters they are and all that stuff. I think there's much less of that illusion. Yeah.
In this show, the way that you get to know the people who are in this hospital is because the doctor talks to them a little bit at a time all day. And that felt to me more like what more happens in a hospital as opposed to the doctor being able to just like sit around and have a long chat with you about like what you're like and what your kids are like. And, you know, it would be great if they did, but I think they usually don't. Right.
relatively close in time to my viewing of this show, I sort of experienced a thing in my own life where somebody that I knew, you know, was having some care issues that were pretty, it was pretty like complicated. And you feel like the communication's not what you wish it was, right? They're not communicating with us enough. They're not telling us enough about what's going on. I think they do a good job with this show of explaining how, you know,
you can understand how each of these patients wants more of the doctor's time than they're getting. But you can also understand that Dr. Robbie in particular is giving as much time as he can to each of the people. And so it felt compassionate toward the staff to me in the sense that it really kind of gets across that idea that they are dealing with a whole bunch of things at the same time. And when they're not talking to you or they're not updating you,
It's not because they're like talking at the nurse's station, which is what it would be on ER, right? They're not making out in the break room. Right. It's because they're off talking to another family, right? That plus the fact that, you know, there's even a recognition at one point of the fact that patients get angry these days at staff and can lash out at them.
So it did feel to me like maybe it's a little more understanding about the challenges of being in that kind of job in this particular moment in all of our lives. And then it also brings up, right, a variety of, I feel like, of the moment topics that should be showing up in a medical show, whether that's abortion, whether that is how trans people are treated in, you know, medical facilities, whether that is, you know. Opiates and.
Busted BBLs. You know, there's everything here, which I think also keeps you as a viewer interested in the many, many ways that people experience emergencies and then how the staff of these hospitals are, you know, trying their best to save people's lives. Well, you know, when I was watching it, I kind of rolled my eyes at how much from like headlines of the day that they were trying to cram in there. But like, you know, this has inspired my own ER rewatch, you know, and I was like, oh,
They've always been doing this. This is just like part of the DNA. Grey's Anatomy has also been like that. You know, the medical challenges that people have are very much part of the zeitgeist or whatever. Yeah. I think it's so interesting though, Linda, what you were saying about how getting to know a character bit by bit is that because every episode is an hour, right?
If you have like a plot that you don't like or is boring to you, it's like, oh, I'm going to be stuck with these guys for a couple more episodes. It's true. It's true. The brother and sister of the older man who is dying. I don't know why. I just could not. I thought they were so. I was like, I did not have any time for that storyline. I thought that their energy was weirdly like Folgers ad. You know, I thought they were a little too close. I didn't like it.
And I was like, oh, we're just, we're going to be stuck with these guys for a little bit. Okay, I guess so. What would you do? I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose. But he's not your father and he can't recover from it.
What my sister means is that we're still deciding the best thing to do. Interestingly, that's one of the stories where I told a couple people, if you have aging parents, watch out for this socking you right in the aging parents, you know? And I think you're probably right that different people are going to take different levels of interest in different stories. But, you know, we heard that clip in the intro where he was talking about the fact that they have all of these people who are only in the ER because they're waiting for
for beds upstairs in the hospital. And there's a lot of really, to me, really interesting kind of territorial departmental warring going on about, you know, you're just, you have beds, you're just pretending you don't have beds because you don't want to give up the beds that you have, which I think is interesting because that kind of bureaucratic business is always going on everywhere. One thing I did feel was missing, perhaps,
for me is, you know, I really wanted a meaty piece of like
for somebody just to give me a really good, you know, scene, you know, where they were deeply feeling something or challenging something. My favorite, you know, medical drama as of late is The Good Doctor. I was looking for a good doctor-esque scene where somebody stares into the camera and a single tear falls down their face like Denzel Washington in Glory. Yes.
Denzel Washington in St. Elsewhere. I did not get that. And that is something that I just felt like I was expecting. But that might just be, you know, more of a comment on me as a viewer, less on, you know, the show itself. Well, it's perhaps a comment on some of the advantages and disadvantages of perhaps a more realistic way of approaching how these people are working. Yeah.
Because, and I would say too, it's possible that more of that is going to come up in those last episodes that we haven't seen where they're kind of building to kind of the doctor loses it over, you know, something. But I do think that the way that they approach that is that even the doctors who are having serious personal crises, they just sort of have to go back to work.
And so that's one of the reasons that you don't get those big emotional scenes is that, listen, you may have something happen to you, but you have to go back to work. Now, is it realistic necessarily that everybody on this show would have major personal things going on on the same day? Maybe not. I think all these things could happen. But it's interesting because I think you're right. There's not a lot of time for these folks to sit around and have deep emotional discussions about their lives because...
running around trying to deal with so many emergencies. Yeah. And I just feel like it just requires you as a viewer to like, you got to pay a little bit more attention because a lot of the acting is, for me at least, was internal. Yeah.
You know, you could see it on people's faces, but they're not necessarily saying anything. As a viewer, it requires you to like actually pay attention to what's happening. Or you might miss something if you're just, you know, playing the pit in the background while you're cooking dinner. I was scared in the first episode where we get that first COVID ER flashback from Robbie. I thought we were going to get one of those like in an episode. I was like, yeah.
Do we need to be – but they're really tasteful. It's like they let you know like when he's like dealing with it in his head just enough and they don't like – they trust that you're watching it not making dinner ice soup, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I think they do a good job acknowledging that at least for some people, it continues to be something that they think about all the time.
Yeah.
Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? I didn't realize that they were still making like cocky students, like at the at the med student factory. I didn't realize that that model of the archetype was still was still being made. I was like, oh, OK, we're still we're still cranking these guys out. OK. I thought you were some kind of kid genius. I'm like any other third year med student, clearly.
I like the medical students. It's fascinating to me that, like you say, they have a lot of the same, they make a lot of the same errors that young doctors used to make for a long time, not just on ER, but on other medical shows. It's the balance of like, you have to have confidence and you have to
You have to be humble. But I think they deploy them smartly. They spread them out across. They're spread out, yeah. There's no canoodling in this show, right? No, not really. There's some hints of past canoodles that have happened. Yes. But there's no active...
Yeah. Which I think is interesting and refreshing almost. That's the sense in which it's not Grey's Anatomy, certainly. Like it's not all about the doctors all sneaking off to make out with each other and all that kind of stuff. I mean, ER had a fair share. Absolutely. Absolutely. ER did too. All right. Well, The Pit is streaming on Macs.
We want to know what you think about The Pit. Find us at facebook.com slash pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Trayvon Anderson, Andrew Limbong, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happyhour or visit the link in our show notes.
This episode is produced by Liz Metzger and Lennon Sherburn and edited by Mike Katzeff. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.
This message comes from NPR sponsor, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the largest recipients of NIH funding. Dana-Farber scientists played a substantial role in developing more than half the cancer drugs approved by the FDA. They've made one advanced cancer discovery after another for over 75 years. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is changing lives everywhere. More at danafarber.org slash everywhere. Data from 2018 to 2022.
This message comes from NPR sponsor, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. AI needs lots of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling? Upgrade to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI workloads.
Now, till the end of March 31st, 2025, new U.S. customers with a minimum financial commitment can cut their current cloud bill in half. See if your company qualifies at oracle.com slash NPR.