The Pitt: Noon to Five

Here’s the stupidest claim I can make about The Pitt, given that I can neither prove it nor call it particularly surprising: everything about the presentation of modern medicine feels like the real thing. There is a scary level of verisimilitude vibe to the entire construction of Pittsburgh General, both from the way the (relatively modern) medical centre looks and sounds (gone are E.R.‘s shadowy pot lights and primary-coloured rooms; hello, omni-lighting, which I bet saves a lot of day-to-day hassle for the electrical department), to the way each of the emergency physicians behaves with their patients.

They’re all carrying multiple cases and transitioning between them on mental switch-tracks as they move from room to room or curtain to curtain; among other things, The Pitt as a workplace drama is a 15-hour scene study in compartmentalization and multi-tasking. And back to the lighting strategy: there’s something really cunning, and unnerving, about everyone — patients, family, doctors, staff — facing all this death under such bright, even light. There’s nowhere to hide in the Pitt. Aside from being dramatically enhancile, it all passes the sniff test for me, based on any of the handful of times recently I’ve had to visit a busy urban trauma centre. It all feels very now.

I’m monkeying around with the tools in ghost.io for this one. It’s supposed to be a paid-only post (with a preview for the freebies). So who knows: maybe everyone gets a freebie if it doesn’t work; or maybe all the free subscribers are once again compelled to hit me with their five bucks. We’ll see!

12pm — Trinity impales Garcia’s foot with a god damned scalpel and Garcia just… walks it off

Resident chaos goblin Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) is my favourite Pitt character, not least because she spends the first half of the season being flirted with relentlessly by a senior surgical resident — which Trinity is totally fine with, because she needs an ally on the tenured staff — and then Trinity drops a scalpel, vertically, straight into that resident’s foot, where it sticks like a quivering lawn dart, after which everything goes to shit.