THE PITT Creative Team on the Show’s Unconventional Production Approach and the On-Screen Building Pressure in Season 1

Max’s THE PITT is breaking new ground for the streamer, with the medical drama having a more network-traditional 15-episode first season—and production on season 1 continuing while episodes are being released weekly. (The series was filming the season finale as episode 5 dropped.)

While being able to produce episodes after the show has debuted can occasionally lead to tweaks as the creative team sees what’s resonating—or not—with an audience, THE PITT’s unconventional production on the season (which takes place in real-time during a 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh ER) has made that impossible.

“Truthfully, there hasn’t been time to make any adjustments,” THE PITT executive producer John Wells told reporters during a panel on the show’s Burbank set. “The adjustments that you make [are] as you’re ongoing and you see the episodes, which is very helpful in the way that we’re shooting it because we shoot in continuity—literally in continuity from the first day to today, we have been minute by minute, moving through this shift. So we literally have for each minute what every patient in the hospital is doing, what every doctor is doing, and we move through in that continuity.”

“I think the real advantage is that in learning the cast, and all of us learning each other, has been to integrate that into what’s happening between the characters,” he continued. “So it’s one of the great advantages [to shooting this way]…a lot of shows are shot, particularly streaming shows, six, eight episodes, in blocks—meaning you’re oftentimes shooting the final episode at the same time as you’re shooting the second episode. And for the actors, you’re constantly trying to understand exactly what the arc of that character is out of sequence. So this has allowed us, I think, to grow organically through the day…that’s what’s been the huge difference in the way it was shot.”

“It spoiled me,” THE PITT star/executive producer Noah Wyle added. “I don’t want to work any other way. I love it.”

For Wyle, who spent more than a decade playing Dr. John Carter on ER, stepping into the new role of Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, in a different (fictional) emergency room, now, made it clear how far he’s come in the past few decades.

“We showed up two weeks early to start medical boot camp on Stage 16 [at Warner Bros., where ER filmed and THE PITT films now]…which looks out across at Stage 11 where we’d spent 15 years of our life, and that 200 feet felt like 200 years,” Wyle quipped. (Wells and THE PITT creator R. Scott Gemmill also wrote on ER.) “It felt like 20 pounds. It felt like a thousand miles. It’s really heady. You know, it’s really been rewarding to come back and get to play in this arena again. But one of the most gratifying aspects has been working with this ensemble…and watching them go through this for the first time and to not be going through it for the first time again, but to be able to be available to them as a resource if they want. But to also enjoy watching them on their roads and be sort of a Trojan horse that is allowing everybody to meet this invading army of talent behind me.”

As for the difference between playing THE PITT’s Robby and ER’s Carter? “This is a totally different acting exercise,” Wyle said. “This is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient; playing with levels of fatigue and an ability to compartmentalize things that need to be compartmentalized. This has been a wonderful sort of psychological examination of one guy having one of the worst days of his life and the presence required in just that exercise. I haven’t even thought about similarities or differences to the other character.”

One of the ways THE PITT has kept that pressure alive is by confining its storytelling to the hospital.

“The thing that makes the emergency department unique is that, a lot of time, time is of the essence,” Gemmill pointed out. “Time is such an important role in the ER because everything sometimes is an emergency. So trying to capture what it’s like to be in the emergency department, that’s the best way that we could come up with in terms of really being in there. When you go home with the characters…there’s a sort of an artifice to that. But when you are in the ER, you’re there sometimes for eight hours, 12 hours. And the average ER doctor gets pulled away every two…or three minutes to something else. So it was really the best way for us to capture that real visceral feeling of being there with them.”

To do that, “we’re trying to make it feel as if you’re right on the shoulder of someone; it’s the version of a ride along but with emergency room personnel,” Wells added. “I have spent a lot of time in and around emergency departments over the years, and you can’t really get across just the sacrifice of doing 12 hours where, day after day, moment after moment, you are experiencing what is for most everyone else one of the worst moments of their lives.”

“What we’re trying to do is to gain more respect in the public,” he continued. “When you’re sitting in an emergency room waiting room for eight hours and you don’t understand why you’re still there, why can’t this be better? We’re trying to say this is what these people are doing back there. We’re trying to give you that sense. And we can do that on streaming because we can show the procedures…here are these people who are dealing all day long with these very traumatic experiences…This always sounds cliche, but they really are heroes, what they do every day, and the difference they make in our lives.”

THE PITT, Thursdays, Max

RELATED:

• THE PITT: Max Sets January Premiere Date
• THE PITT: Max Releases Teaser for New Noah Wyle-Led Medical Drama
• THE PITT: Max Orders Noah Wyle-Led Medical Drama

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