It has been the great discovery of this year’s television fiction. Who was going to think that a medical drama that hit TV of the 90s and seemed suspiciously a reboot of the most spent ’emergencies’, was it going to become one of the best 2025 series? I had the eyebrow raised since I heard about the project: Another series of emergency doctors starring Noah “Doctor John Carter” Wyle and with a medium scriptwriter team out of the famous creation of Michael Crichton? Perezón
However, an episode was enough to throw my skepticism into the cube of the used syringes. Yes, ‘The Pitt’ (HBO Max) looks like ‘Emergencies’, it is clear: both in its visual grammar and in the dramatic treatment of themes, atmosphere and characters. But I don’t know if it looks enough for Crichton’s widow to end up winning the demand she has filed to Warner. As with judicial or journalistic dramas, the narrative space determines much of the dramaturgy and conditions creative freedom. We would have to spin very fine to demonstrate plagiarism in those circumstances.
The main difference between both series is the format. ‘The Pitt’ does not tell the day to day of a hospital, but focuses on a single shift. His fifteen episodes correspond to the fifteen hours that take place in the emergency room of a University Hospital of Pittsburgh. The most obvious reference is another hit of the first 2000: the adrenalithic thriller ’24’. This structure provides an added voltage to the narrative that works extraordinarily well.
Its creator, R. Scott Gemmill, has more silent writing procedural dramas than Dr. Cavadas making impossible transplants. Between ‘Emergencies’, ‘Jag: red alert’ and ‘ncis: Los Angeles’ has signed more than one hundred episodes. Those “flight hours” in traditional open television products may explain the most striking feature of ‘The Pitt’: it is a series with dramatic density, psychological depth, visual invoice and discursive ambition that we associate with an HBO product, but served with narrative lightness, rhythm agility, efficacy in staging and the ability to hook all kinds of spectators Generalist television. Gemmill does not want to cut for the healthy, but to sew where always although with another stitch.
In that sense, ‘The Pitt’ is the opposite of ‘separation’ (‘Severance’). His duel for the Emmy for the best dramatic series (although Apple’s remains the great favorite) illustrates very well the two paths that seem to be currently following the platforms: betting on prestige series or prestigeing the series of a lifetime.
