Max tries its hand at procedural in first teaser for medical drama The Pitt

Beeping medical machinery… gurneys rushing to and fro… blood and guts everywhere… helicopters touching down on the rooftop with emergency patients. There’s something comfortingly familiar about Max’s The Pitt teaser, which is consciously positioning itself within the pantheon of beloved medical shows. The new crop of interns learning the ropes will remind you of Grey’s Anatomy. The talent involved (star Noah Wyle and creator John Wells) will remind you of ER. But The Pitt has its own unique twist on the genre: the series is 15 episodes, 15 hours, all covering one single shift in the hospital emergency room. 

Unlike some other medical dramas you could name, The Pitt‘s synopsis advertises itself as “a realistic examination of the challenges facing healthcare workers in today’s America as seen through the lens of the frontline heroes working in a modern-day hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” (Yep, Pitt here stands for both the docs’ shorthand for the ER and the city in which that ER can be found.) That realism extends to our docs’ backstories. According to a profile for TV Insider, Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch “is still carrying heavy post-COVID PTSD, he just won’t acknowledge it.” And his colleague Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) “transitioned from a career in finance to medicine after the 2008 recession.”

The Pitt teaser is a ticking clock through this one fateful emergency room shift—as if we need to be reminded of the seriously high stakes. “Being here means no matter how good you are or how hard you try, someone might die,” Robby reminds one of his residents. “That’s called being an emergency medicine doctor.”

The 15-episode series is remarkable not only for being the streaming service’s first foray into procedural territory, it also has more episodes in its first season than some Max shows ever get. (Can we all band together and pray this show is successful, if only to put an end to the anemic eight-episode season?) In addition to Wyle and Ifeachor, The Pitt also stars Patrick Marron Ball, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez, and Katherine LaNasa. The show is set to premiere in January.