Recently, when I tried to tally how many hours of my life I’d sunk into watching reruns of hospital shows, I realized (to my slight horror) that it might be on a par with the amount of time the average applicant spends studying to actually get into medical school. This is not entirely my fault—I was raised with E.R. reruns as background noise thanks to my mom, a fellow med-TV devotee—but by age 11, I was fully bought into the froth, fun, and occasionally frantic energy that accompanied our culture’s collective obsession with Grey’s Anatomy.
I was by no means singular in my teen-TV affections, also devoting plenty of time to rewatching episodes of Scrubs and House when I should have been doing my Earth Science homework. But it was Grey’s Anatomy that really hooked me. Not only did I pick up some medical lingo from the show (go ahead, ask me what a DNR is), but the show’s “endless sexual and romantic drama occasionally interrupted by medicine” vibe was what consistently made me tune in to see who Meredith was kissing in on-call rooms and, later, what on earth would happen with Denny’s…ghost? Sorry, but I’m still not over that particular plotline.
My TV-watching tastes may have evolved a little over the last two decades, but when it comes to hospital shows, I’ve long thought the soapier they are, the better. That is, until I watched the first episode of The Pitt, Max’s new emergency room drama, which has drawn praise from real-life doctors for hewing spookily close to their lived experience. While a grizzled, older Noah Wyle is obviously the hottest man alive, I don’t think that’s quite what’s drawing me to the show. Instead, I’m finding myself obsessed with the way The Pitt spotlights real—and, in far too many cases, life-threatening—gaps within the health-care industry.
