After “The Pitt,” a medical drama that takes place in “real time” across a 15-hour shift at a fictional Pittsburgh hospital (albeit with filming locations that include the exterior of a real Pittsburgh hospital), premiered on Max in January 2025, the series became an immediate hit … and you might be surprised that, compared to other HBO juggernauts, it’s relatively cheap to produce.
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In a feature about the series’ success by IndieWire, executive producer and director John Wells — who came up with the idea for the series with his fellow “ER” veterans and friends R. Scott Gemmill (who serves as showrunner) and Noah Wyle (who stars as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch) — revealed that the series costs about $4 or $5 million per episode. For context, the first season of “The Last of Us” worked with a total budget of around $100 million, which came out to around $10 million per episode. (Also, just to clarify — even though Wells, Gemmill, and Wyle all worked together on “ER,” this show is, for legal reasons, not a spin-off or a reboot.)
Wells explained to the outlet that the series’ creatives were able to keep costs pretty low thanks to the show’s primary practical hospital set. “We weren’t trying to create a tremendous amount of CGI or anything,” Wells noted. “We had to do a certain amount of it for some of the wound work. We weren’t shooting in open spaces surrounded by 300 yards of blue screen.”
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It’s also important to note here that most HBO and Max shows run for around 10 episodes, though this isn’t set in stone; season 2 of “The Last of Us” is spread across only seven episodes, while the third season of “The White Lotus” ran for eight chapters. Plus, as Wells pointed out, most doctors work 12-hour shifts. However, for both storytelling purposes and to appease a request from Max, the show’s creators bumped season 1’s episode count to 15, and it was still cost-effective for Max.
“But for the physicians and nurses, there is a tremendous amount of time it takes to hand off all your patients to the next shift that’s coming,” Wells mused. “But the 15 ended up being because Max said to us, ‘Can you do 15 hours?’ And we said, ‘Sure.’ That’s big. But a lot of the shows that were on HBO, like ‘The Sopranos,’ were 12 episodes. The reduced episodes has been in large part attached to the cost of making these shows where you have these big world-building, difficult shows. There aren’t that many places that are going to spend or can afford to do 10, 12, or 15 hours of that because they’re so expensive. So, when you get a ‘House of the Dragon’ or ‘The Last of Us’ or ‘Severance,’ shows that are so expensive to make, you’re not going to make 15 of them. It’s just not an economic reality.”
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