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For anyone who’s tuned into The Pitt on Max, it doesn’t take long to realize that Noah Wyle‘s Dr. Michael Robinavitch is having a very bad day.
In a press conference with reporters Thursday, Wyle joined fellow executive producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, as well as most of the cast, to talk about the series that remains in the Top 5 of Max’s most watched originals, both globally and domestically. Since he’s playing another harried emergency room doctor like he did for many years on NBC’s ER, Wyle was asked if he finds himself consciously trying to avoid any similarities to Dr. John Carter.
“This is a totally different acting exercise,” said Wyle. “This is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient, playing with levels of fatigue and the inability 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. The presence required in just that exercise, I haven’t even thought about similarities or differences [to ER].”
Thursday’s press conference on the Warner Bros. soundstage where The Pitt shoots came hours after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued a “soft tentative” against Warner Bros, which tried to block a lawsuit by Michael Crichton’s widow claiming The Pitt is an updated version of ER. Wyle and Wells didn’t comment about the court outcome; rather, they spent time touting the unique features about their series and how it can be wish fulfillment for people who’ve had negative experiences in an emergency room.
“We’re all concerned about what happens to us. We all have to intersect with the medical world and we’ve all done it with our own families,” Wells told reporters. “There’s a feeling of wanting to know what actually is going to happen. It allows us, in advance, to kind of live out our concerns. You want to see people like these wonderful characters that Scott has created and Noah is playing. You want these people to be the people you get in the emergency room, who are actually going to take care of you and your family. I think people really want to have that experience.”
For those who haven’t tuned in, each episode of The Pitt is set up as one hour in the day of life of a Pittsburgh hospital, so by the time the 10-episode first season has been completed, viewers will have experienced an entire shift in the ER. The cameras rarely leave the unit, except to maybe capture what’s happening outside where the ambulances arrive.
“The thing that makes the emergency department unique is that time is of the essence,” said Gemmill. “Time is such an important role in the ER. 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 … 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.”
One of the notable aspects of The Pitt is how the writers don’t rely on a soundtrack to jack up the intensity of a scene.
“I knew it could be done because I did at least one or two episodes of ER when I didn’t use any music, no score whatsoever,” said Gemmill, who was an EP on the NBC drama from 1999 to 2007. “You just have to write it in a certain way, and trust that your scenes and your actors are going to be emotional. You’re going to get that from what you’re seeing, with not having to be told how to feel. Or you know, whether it’s a funny moment. I mean, trust me, I’ve had shows where I begged the composer to save a scene, to please make this better. But I think, if you’re honest, and because of what it is in the ER, there’s no music when you get bad news. Nobody’s in there with violins. That makes it more real. As soon as you put a score underneath it, it pushes you back in the chair. Now you’re watching something that not as real. I think having the lack of score has a huge impact on the reality of what you are trying to get.”
