It was just about a year ago when we mused quixotically about HBO MAX’s THE PITT. When S1E1 dropped it drew plenty of comparisons to ER due to its pedigree and casting. Over the course of that season and beyond it began to mirror the former show more and more in terms of accolade and acceptance. ER was an instant hit and along with FRIENDS reinvigorated NBC’s most popular and profitable night of television when they were scrambling to replace the components that got them there in first place, in their case the demise of LA LAW. In today’s world of live-plus-infinity where viewers tend to discover shows on their timetables and not those set by schedule-makers, it’s a much more extended journey to becoming what qualifies as a hit. We learned that from DEADLINE’s Katie Campione last fall:
The Pitt is still on quite a roll post-Emmys. After taking home five golden statuettes this year, the freshman medical drama has now set a record with the largest post-season viewership growth for the debut season of any HBO or HBO Max show, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery tells Deadline. Since the April 10 finale, The Pitt has seen its average audience spike 80% to amass more than 18M global viewers per episode, per WBD…According to WBD, global viewing in the last week was nearly triple that of the week prior, marking the series’ best week of viewing since April.
Which means that the drumroll to last night’s S2E1 drop had a lot more buzz and excitement attached to it, enough so that it actually became a must-see Thursday night for me once again even with the competition of a thrilling Fiesta Bowl head-to-head. Unlike all of those johnny-come-latelys in 2025, I only delayed my consumption by a few hours. And it did not disappoint me nor more influential pundits one whit.
TOWN AND COUNTRY’s Emily Burack provided a blueprint for what to expect at literally the first moment she legally could–exactly one hour after the platform refreshed to include it:
Like last season, this new set of episodes will follow hour-by-hour the day shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (PTMC).
There was around a ten month time jump between seasons one and two: It’s now the Fourth of July. In the hospital’s timeline, that means it’s a new year for residents and medical students. So, for example, Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) is now Dr. Whitaker, while Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) is a senior resident trying to decide where she wants to do her fellowship year… There are some new faces: attending Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who will be covering for Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), who is set to take a three-month sabbatical at UNESCO World Heritage Site Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Dr. Al-Hashimi comes from the Veteran’s Affairs Hospital, so has previously worked with Dr. Mohan and Dr. King a.k.a. Dr. Mel (Taylor Dearden). Two new medical students also join the crew, third-year Joy Kwon (Irene Choi) and fourth-year James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson), as does a new nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard).
And THE NEW YORK TIMES’ Sean T. Collins artfully captured the frenzied number of plots and subplots (several emergency podcasts counted 13; I’ll take them at face value) that are being teed up for this meld:
Cases on “The Pitt” are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: The doctors and nurses here never know what they’re going to get. Perhaps it’s an adorable little girl (Annabelle Toomey) with unexplained bruises and injuries, which sets off Santos’s abuse alarm bells. It could be a month-old baby, dropped off safely — or abandoned, a tricky legal question — in the restroom. This appears to trigger a painful memory for the newcomer Al-Hashimi, a.k.a. Dr. Al, who freezes while looking at the infant.
Elsewhere, an unhoused man (Charles Baker) with a dramatic lack of personal hygiene raises a literal and proverbial stink in the overcrowded waiting room until Dana and Emma help him get cleaned up. Dana notes that a little soap and hot water can help make anyone feel better; sure enough, the guy’s asking if they have any conditioner before long. Whitaker delivers a speech about respecting the dead that he once heard Robby give. McKay struggles to treat an alternately polite and brusque businessman (Derek Cecil) whose busted nose and broken wrist appear to be the tip of an undiagnosed cognitive-impairment iceberg.
It’s a lot more than can be played out in a typical streaming series’ season and that’s with good reason: THE PITT is a de facto throwback to the ER era as a medical procedural that will roll out new originals at precisely 9 PM ET on a Thursday night. Which means for the next 14 weeks we will be guaranteed a quality hour of TV on a weeknight and HBO MAX will be guaranteed to be in conversations beyond those of who or what winds up owning them. You can’t see it on “regular” HBO and in fact was strategically deployed this past fall to air “off-streaming” on its soon-to-be-divorced stepbrother TNT, a network that once overpaid its own brother distributor more than one million dollars for exclusive rights to its reruns. Whomever is left within that division obviously forgot how procedural reruns perform–they were far below estimates for TNT who eventually burned off their rights in daytime while new originals continued to thrive on NBC in prime time for several yeats. The fact that you can’t find even a single mention of how that much-ballyhooed TNT window–which even included nudity and language!–performed would strongly suggest the results Channing Dungey–who’s seasoned enough to potentially remember how ER repeats crashed and burned in a far less fractionalized environment–either forgot or chose to be ignorant. Probably not helping Netflix’s appetite to reunite with her or her portfolio, either.
A bit more successful are the fine folks at FOX who have doubled down on medical dramas at a time when their own top management is otherwise obsessed with unscripted and live sports fodder. Earlier this week they debuted their own attempt to recapture past medical drama glory with a quirky tour de force called BEST MEDICINE, which the scaled-down version of their in-house entertainment division that is attempting to replace 20th CENTURY FOX ordered after some surprising success last year from SONY’s DOC, one of the few linear success stories that any independent supplier can point to these days. BEST MEDICINE borrows the path of translating an international series to American tastes which DOC did from an Italian hit but does so with a far more enduring British series. TV INSIDER’s Damien Holbrook pretty much summed up my feelings in his review:
Based on Doc Martin, the U.K. hit about a churlish London medic (Martin Clunes) dealing with the quaint residents of his new seaside practice, Best Medicine was championed here in the U.S. by producer Ben Silverman (The Office, Ugly Betty). The show is an instantly likable fish-out-of-water tale, brimming with snarky humor and 100cc of sentiment. Think more Northern Exposure and Ed than House or Fox’s other medical series, Doc, starring Molly Parker.
“That kind of tone is a really tricky balance,” says Josh Charles, an Emmy nominee for The Good Wife, who affably grouses into the leading-man department as Martin Best. He’s a prickly Boston surgeon who finds himself surrounded by overly friendly small-town types. After a childhood trauma resurfaces to emotionally derail his ability to operate, the buttoned-up Best hits reset by moving to the coastal hamlet of Port Wenn, Maine, where he reluctantly reconnects with his beloved and sassy Aunt Sarah (Annie Potts), whom he hasn’t seen since med school.
Throw in my old TIMELESS crush Abigail Spencer, thankfully rescued from the sitcom world and now back in an environment more befitting her versality and drop-dead gorgeous looks, and there’s more than enough comfort food reason here to give this a shot. I did, and I was about as satisfied as I typically am after grabbing a bite at a drive-through when I’m famished. I’m filled, but I’m not satisfied, and I’m in no rush to come back.
But in an era where the most-viewed prime time series on its regular night is delivering a high 0.3 18-49 demo rating, the fact that BEST MEDICINE opened with an NFL lead-in to a rounded 0.5 is how “must-see” is defined nowadays, and the fact that an encore of that premiere delivered more than 90 per cent of DOC’s audience would seem to suggest that at least for FOX they know what’s good for what ails them. Some old school remedies actually do work.
Until next time…