Compare & Contrast: The Pitt vs Other Medical Shows

[CM-BlueButterfly]

Your topic to compare and contrast to your heart's desire. 

[circumvent]

I will start.

I like the show a lot, and it reminds me of Code Black. I already mentioned it somewhere. The show was super realistic, some glimpses on personal lives and based on a real ER, and on a documentary about it. The first season is like anything else I have ever seen, but then they completely lost it in seasons 2 and 3. I blame Rob Lowe coming into the show as an executive director and playing the hero she believes he is, completely tanking the premise of the show.

They decided to dive into the heroism of yet another war veteran (lowe) and in characters personal lives. Rob Lowe was solving crimes and all that, which made the show pure crap once he joined in

I hope The Pitt can avoid the trap of caving to egocentric actors with executive production power.

[heatherchandler]

On 3/10/2025 at 7:54 PM, marceline said:

People keep debating whether Langdon’s addiction is good or bad writing. I think it’s excellent writing for all the reasons cited above. I think a rewatch will show that the signs were there and we just missed them. That’s what happens in real life. 

 

Carter and Benton should be studied by writers in all genres for decades.

And I’m crying!

ER is just soooo good, so real and we know all the characters so well.  The storylines were developed well.  The Pitt pales in comparison.

[b4pjoe]

7 hours ago, heatherchandler said:

And I’m crying!

ER is just soooo good, so real and we know all the characters so well.  The storylines were developed well.  The Pitt pales in comparison.

I am in the process of watching both shows for the first time right now. I just finished S4E15, the one where the ER is contaminated by some chemical (benzene I think it was). Carter really came through in that episode. I can’t stop watching it. And finished S1E10 of The Pitt where the new Carter, ie….Dr. Robbie completely mishandled the situation. Still amazes me that is the same actor that played Carter in ER.

[AheadofStraight]

16 hours ago, heatherchandler said:

And I’m crying!

ER is just soooo good, so real and we know all the characters so well.  The storylines were developed well.  The Pitt pales in comparison.

Wasn't the drug addiction story for Carter around season 6 or so? We had a lot of time to get to know and bond with the characters. (Plus the seasons were like 22 episodes!) The Pitt just started. 

[heatherchandler]

48 minutes ago, AheadofStraight said:

Wasn't the drug addiction story for Carter around season 6 or so? We had a lot of time to get to know and bond with the characters. (Plus the seasons were like 22 episodes!) The Pitt just started. 

Yes of course but the first episode of ER, if memory serves was

Spoiler

Carole’s suicide attempt

and we were already emotionally invested in her, the writing was that good where they got us to where it felt like a gut punch.  I’m not feeling anything except occasional annoyance for these people and it’s many episodes in.  

Edited March 18 by heatherchandler

[circumvent]

1 hour ago, AheadofStraight said:

Wasn't the drug addiction story for Carter around season 6 or so? We had a lot of time to get to know and bond with the characters. (Plus the seasons were like 22 episodes!) The Pitt just started. 

I think one contrast is that ER was character centered and The Pitt is plot centered, at least for the most part.

ER had all the jargons used in medicine - maybe older shows had it too but I never watched the older medical shows. It had the back stories and family relationships of the main characters. It touched on the problems of the system but that was part of a plot but not the main issue. It had al the exaggerations like helicopters falling off the roof to hit the villain of the show, or explosions. The cases were there, many of them well developed, but the focus was on characters.

The Pitt has is the reverse. The focus so far has been on the procedures, the cases, how a student (supposedly) learns, how a day is in a public ER. I am not in the medical field but like I mentioned, compared to Code Black, The Pitt is pretty close to reality. Code Back was directly taken from a documentary about a real ER.

It is not a matter of which one is better or which one pales in comparison. It is a matter of preference, of contrasting them.

[AheadofStraight]

1 hour ago, heatherchandler said:

Yes of course but the first episode of ER, if memory serves was

and we were already emotionally invested in her, the writing was that good where they got us to where it felt like a gut punch.  I’m not feeling anything except occasional annoyance for these people and it’s many episodes in.  

 

1 hour ago, circumvent said:

I think one contrast is that ER was character centered and The Pitt is plot centered, at least for the most part.

 

 

Both fair points! It will be interesting to see how The Pitt progresses. 

[Notabug]

3 hours ago, heatherchandler said:

Yes of course but the first episode of ER, if memory serves was

  Hide contents

Carole’s suicide attempt

and we were already emotionally invested in her, the writing was that good where they got us to where it felt like a gut punch.  I’m not feeling anything except occasional annoyance for these people and it’s many episodes in.  

People were so invested in her that her character, who was supposed to die in the pilot, survived and became a main cast member on the series.  TPTB said that the actress and storyline played so well with audiences that they re-thought her plot.

It's true that ER was around longer and that, by Season 6, regular viewers felt like they knew Carter and Benson and were invested in their friendship; but, ER set the stage for that way back in the pilot as evidenced by the audience reaction to the pilot.

The Pitt is a different show in that it is more focused on the medicine and we only see glimpses of the characters framed by the context of the workplace.  Time will tell if the audience becomes as invested in the show when the characters are secondary to the story.