Yahoo Lifestyle 'The Pitt' Creators Reveal Season 2 Would Come with a Sizable Time Jump (Exclusive)
The Pitt runs through ER. Not just in the form of the titular department, as the Max medical drama focuses on the real-time action of a trauma ward during a 15-hour shift. But the series shares a lot of DNA with the hit NBC show. The Pitt is created by R. Scott Gemmill, who worked extensively on the series, writing 32 episodes. ER creator John Wells is an executive producer on the series, as is Noah Wyle, pulling double duty as both an EP and scrubbing in once more in a new role, Dr. Robby. And, according to Gemmill, the spark for The Pitt itself even came out of an eventually abandoned idea for an ER reboot.
"I was just excited that I would have all the access to the original footage and do flashbacks with Noah to when he was in his 20s," Gemmill said about the project in an exclusive interview with Parade. "And no one in the history of television has ever been able to do that. Whether he was teaching or whatever, we'd be able to go back and see him learning the process. But it didn't come to fruition, and so we had to come up with something new. And in the end, I'm glad, in some ways. Because what we ended up with was completely different and challenging for us. And I think the audience has definitely responded in kind."
Indeed, to say The Pitt is different from ER would be an understatement. While it sports a similar lead actor and creative team, the pace is much more frantic. Gemmill has a map on his wall of the set, with notes dedicated to which person is in each room to make sure nobody gets lost in the fray. We follow the doctors as they juggle from patient to patient, barely having time to eat or even go to the bathroom. So far, through six episodes, The Pitt has run the gamut of medical issues. The newest arc seems to be focused on a disagreement between a young woman and her mother over whether to get an abortion. And, while some fans may feel this is a sign The Pitt will filter issues of today through the trauma ward, according to Wells, everything they cover still has a root in medicine above all.
"We will now start to hear from lots of advocacy groups who feel like, 'Can you tell a story about our issue?' And we'll get these packets, which have a lot of stuff in it," he admits. "All of it's useful in a certain way. But we'll basically say, 'Have you, as a physician, dealt with this?' Because we have all these nurses and doctors who work with us. And they'll say, 'No, this never comes up,' or 'This is way too esoteric,' or 'This happens three times a week.' And the 'this happens three times a week' stories are the ones that end up in the show.
Read on for our full interview with John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. New episodes of The Pitt drop at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on Thursdays on Max.
Related: Everything to Know About The Pitt
Scott, I know that you and Noah apparently had an idea to do a new medical show, coincidentally, at the same time. For you, was it because you were inspired by something you were seeing in the world?
R. Scott Gemmill: No, it actually came out of a conversation I had with another writer who I was developing two projects with. [We were] lamenting that one of the places we thought we would take, one of them, was having just as much trouble as we were getting anything off the ground. And my friend said, "Why doesn't John reboot ER?" And I went on a tangent about how all the reasons I would never do ER again. And then I thought, "Maybe if there was one version..." And that sort of became something we were eventually going to do. And then it went away. And it was so fun to be with John and Noah again. And then Max said they wanted to do another medical show regardless. And so, at that point, we had a blank slate. And then we started to see what is going on in emergency medicine today. How has it changed.?We went to the ERs. We reached out to as many emergency department physicians as we could and nurses, and just went from there in terms of what's changed. And a lot of things had changed. Plus, we had had COVID. So that was a huge impact on medicine. So it was a worthwhile place to go back to.
You just mentioned all the reasons you wouldn't make ER today. Were those reasons brought into The Pitt?
Gemmill: Well, the whole concept for the ER reboot was I was just excited that I would have all the access to the original footage and do flashbacks with Noah to when he was in his 20s. And no one in the history of television has ever been able to do that. Whether he was teaching or whatever, we'd be able to go back and see him learning the process. But it didn't come to fruition, and so we had to come up with something new. And in the end, I'm glad, in some ways. Because what we ended up with was completely different and challenging for us. And I think the audience has definitely responded in kind.
What's the biggest similarity and difference to making a medical drama pre- and post-COVID?
John Wells: Well, I think the pandemic changed so many things in our society. We had reached sort of a point where we really were able to pretend that we weren't mortal, and the pandemic put that into stark relief. And the physicians, the healthcare professionals, particularly emergency people, were on the front lines of it. Many of them died, keeping others alive, and were under tremendous pressure to make terrible decisions. And so I think that sense of them being heroes, which we always sort of talked about in a little bit of a cliche way, is now really, really clear and present. And we wanted to bring forward a reminder of what they have to go through, and what they did for us, and how it's impacted everything in the healthcare system. So they're just very different. I think we have a different attitude as a nation towards healthcare, and I think we have a different attitude towards the people who provide that healthcare.
Gemmill: I think it's just a lot to put a ton of stress on not just the system, but the people who are responsible. And I think the PTSD of it all is very, very real. And a lot of people left because of it; they couldn't take the stress. So now you have even fewer individuals in the in the field, which causes the backup that you see in the ER. They don't have the nursing staff or the support staff, so it's sort of a vicious circle.
To the point about how The Pitt differs from ER, it never truly stops. Unlike other medical dramas, we're not really taking time for characters to sit down and reflect on their personal lives. For example, there's a lot of utilization of the "walk and talk," which is a hallmark of a show that worked on, John, in The West Wing. Talk to me about developing that tone, especially with the modern-day audience in mind.
Wells: Well, it really came from what the premise of the show, which is "what's a day like for emergency room physicians? What is a 12-hour shift?" In this case, it spreads out to be 15 hours. But what is that shift? What are the pressures that it puts on you? And so the intent from the beginning was to just show that. I think the statistic that some of the doctors on the show have shared with us is that the average emergency room physician is drawn to a new patient every three to four minutes. So we were trying to get across that pace of what the responsibilities are. Nobody's eating lunch; you can barely get to the bathroom. The crowd in the emergency room waiting room never goes down. You're drinking out of a firehose all day long. And so the pace of the show was really built around the stories and the needs of the actual providing the care that they have to care to provide. And the kind of walk and talks that we started doing on ER, and then we transferred over to West Wing, are actually what their days are like. It's not just a directorial convention. It is actually how you get from one place to another and get as much work done as you possibly can.
Related: ER Through the Years
I know we like to talk about TV shows nowadays as an "X-hour movie." But the action in The Pitt bleeds from episode to episode. Some patients are in and out in an hour, while others get whole arcs dedicated to them. And I know the show had an entire writers' room of people working on different episodes. So talk to me about the process of keeping all the balls in the air to make sure you know what's happening at all times.
Gemmill: I'll show you my map. [Displays map of the ER, covered in sticky notes.] That's what the episodes look like. It's a piece of modern art. It's just a lot of organization. And it takes a lot of people, you know, a lot of the writers' assistants and my script supervisor or coordinator were really great at helping us track. Because some of these patients are there for one episode, some are there for eight episodes. If someone's there for eight episodes, when are they getting fed? When are they getting changed? So, trying to just stay on top of that took a lot of people. But we also have a 3D model in the conference room, so that we'll be in there with the art director standing over top, taking photos and then moving things for the next hour, so that we know where everything goes. So it's just a lot of lot of prep work, but it's fun. It was a challenge, that's for sure. [Laughs.]
Well, on top of balancing patients, you also occasionally will reveal personal information about the staff that slowly unravels throughout the season. What's your process for seeding that in conjunction with everything else happening?
Gemmill: I'm not a big planner. When I actually write a lot of times, I let the characters take me, rather than me pushing them. So a lot of that was we would figure out what sort of things we wanted. We're going to start in the writers room pretty soon, what we'll focus on first is just the characters. Where are they? What do we want? What's happening in their lives? And so then you have some placeholders of things that you want to come out. And then it's, how do those things come out? Do they come out through a patient? Do they come out through interaction with another doctor? And then we just figure out where to drop them in based on what's going on. Sometimes, things get moved because you don't have time to give it justice. I don't know how exactly it works, but it works.
Through the first half of the series, The Pitt has occasionally dealt with issues around modern-day topics. One patient, for example, is trans. One of the bigger and newer storylines is around a young woman trying to get an abortion. Talk to me about how you choose to take on those issues through the lens of a medical show.
Wells: We talked to a lot of physicians and nurses and medical professionals, and they tell us a lot of the stories. So we don't come at it from the point of view of, "Here's an issue that we want to address." We come at it from "here is something that they experienced, that that we think has dramatic value." These aren't just billboards. These are people's lives and what they're actually going through. These things are happening to our characters or to other medical professionals that we want to translate into our characters.
So we really don't start with a board full of "we should do something about this." It is literally what's happening. And to pretend that these issues–and there are lots of them–don't exist in the real world is to allow them to separate from the real consequences. So they kind of come that way, rather than an advocacy, which is why we're not very responsive to what always happens when you're doing shows. We certainly had this on West Wing, ER, Southland. We will now start to hear from lots of advocacy groups who feel like, "Can you tell a story about our issue?" And we'll get these packets, which have a lot of stuff for all of it's useful in a certain way. But we'll basically say, "Have you, as a physician, dealt with this?" Because we have all these nurses and doctors who work with us. And they'll say, "No, this never comes up," or "This is way too esoteric," or "This happens three times a week." And the "this happens three times a week" stories are the ones that end up in the show.
I know you had mentioned a few weeks ago that it was too early to discern whether The Pitt would be renewed for Season 2. Are you already planning out stories if that ends up happening?
Gemmill: As you've watched the full 15 [episodes], there are some questions up in the air at the end. I would like to answer those and basically follow our characters through the next day that we are with them, and what's progressed in their lives and what hasn't. And I think once you create characters, and then they get personified. We have an amazing cast; they take on a life of their own. And then it sort of becomes following them. In terms of their journey, what is that going to be? And trying to just be honest about it.
Do you expect Season 2 to just continue on with the next day? Or would you want there to be a time jump?
Gemmill: For some story elements that you'll see later, I would want it to be a little bit later. We haven't decided whether it be three months, two months. But it wouldn't be the next day. That would put too much on storytelling.
Wells: And one of the things that happens is it's not that we rip things from the headlines. But because we're hearing what's happening in the emergency rooms from the people who work in the emergency rooms, many things that are happening in the in the overall society make their way into those stories. So it's premature to say, because you don't know what we're going to hear in six weeks or eight weeks or six months. You really don't know, and you don't want to foreclose it by just making all these decisions that then mean you can't take a good story that shows up.
