It’s here at last. The medical drama that took its native US by storm last year has finally crossed the pond. All 15 episodes of The Pitt’s first season, set in almost real time over a single shift in the overstretched emergency department of a busy Pittsburgh hospital, are being offered to tempt us all into subscribing to yet another streaming service – HBO Max, which also promises other baubles, such as the new Harry Potter series and the adaptation of DC Comics’ Lanterns plus rich pickings from its prestigious back catalogue, such as The Sopranos, Succession, Game of Thrones and Friends (which departed Netflix last year, giving many viewers the first insight into the true transience of life).
But The Pitt is the one that we older viewers, perhaps, have been waiting for. For it comes from much the same team that produced the then-groundbreakingly gritty ER, and it stars one of its most enduring talents, Noah Wyle. He arrived in the 1994 pilot episode as third-year medical student John Carter, and we followed him as he endured, then thrived under Dr Benton’s tough-love training, qualified in emergency medicine and moved up the ranks at Cook County before bowing out as a main character in the season finale in 2009. With many a literally heart-stopping moment in between, let me tell you. The show made a megastar out of George Clooney (as womanising paediatrician Doug Ross) but Wyle was never less than brilliant.
