[Editor’s note: The following review contains spoilers for “The Pitt” finale — Season 1, Episode 15, “9:00 p.m.”]
At the end of a backbreaking, soul-shaking hospital shift, it’s only fitting for Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) to rally the troops. “Today should never have happened,” he says, as the weary doctors, nurses, and medical staffers gather around. “Such a horrific act is the worst of humanity. But it brought out the best in the rest of us.”
During his two-minute tribute, Dr. Robby — who’s suffering from acute existential exhaustion on top of the day’s extra-fine grind — falls back on a handful of cliches. He peppers his pick-me-up with terms like “better angels” and shares his pride in each of them for “rising to the occasion.” Near the end, he can’t hold back his tears and encourages the rest of them to do the same. “It’s just grief,” he says, “leaving the body.”
Dr. Robby’s words mean a lot. Seeing a leader actually step up and lead is a rarity these days, and Wyle’s blend of inspiration and vulnerability prove potent. They may even end up bringing Dana (Katherine LaNasa) back to Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, as the charge nurse considers if this should be her last tour of duty.
But they’re not the defining words of “The Pitt” finale.
Those belong to Robby’s friend and colleague, Dr. Jack Abbott (Shawn Hatosy). While he isn’t around for the bulk of his buddy’s 15-hour day, Jack shows up when it counts, in more ways than one. The night attending clocks in during the mass casualty situation (set off by a shooter at Pitt Fest), and then steps up on the roof, next to Dr. Robby, when the bedraggled doc can’t stop blaming himself for falling short of his own impossible expectations.
“I broke,” Robby says. “I shut down. The moment everybody needed me the most, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t do it. I choked.”
The grace he gives to his coworkers is notably absent from Robby’s brutal self-assessment. He doesn’t believe he rose to the occasion. He doesn’t feel proud of all the lives he saved. He only remembers the ones he didn’t. The same drive and vision that allowed him to successfully lead the treatment of 106 out of 112 patients won’t allow for a few minutes of personal human frailty.
But that’s all they were — a few minutes, in a shift that stretched on for more than 15 hours. With a little distance, Robby might be able to see the utility he offered during 95 percent of his shift vastly outweighs the 5 percent when he felt useless. It’s just hard to step back when you’ve been in the middle of it for so long, a perspective “The Pitt” excels at crafting throughout its unrelenting, real-time first season.
But that’s not really what’s bugging him. What’s bugging him is that it happened before, during COVID, it happened today, in the aftermath of a mass shooting, and that means it will likely happen again. How long will it last then? Who will he lose next time? What’s he supposed to do, living with the belief that he’s destined to disappoint himself?
Well, he’s supposed to recognize his own limitations, as one man in a world of billions, and when he can’t do that — for all the reasons outlined above — Jack does it for him. When Robby says he broke, he choked, he failed, Jack is there to tell him, in no uncertain terms, “So fucking what?”
“That is what happens when you’re in a war and nothing makes sense,” Jack says. “We survived as a species because we learned how to cooperate and communicate. So when we’re in the middle of killing each other, it defies the very logic of our existence. Your brain starts to short-circuit. All you can do is focus on the medicine. The medicine is the only thing that saves the patient — and your sanity.”
The medicine is the only thing that saves the patient, and the medicine is the only thing that saves the doctor. It sounds so simple, and for as blunt as Dr. Abbott is in that moment, he still knows it’s not an easy idea to accept. He knows from experience.
At the start of Robby’s shift, Jack talks about spending two hours trying to resuscitate a dying veteran. When he couldn’t do it, he wrote a note to his family. Clearly, veterans are a personal priority for him. Later, in the park, Jack removes his prosthetic leg, and the implication is that he’s been to war — actual war — and it’s given him the perspective needed to know what Robby is going through.
Despite Robby’s ball-busting complaints about his speechifying, Jack doesn’t just bullshit his way through his friend’s crisis. Always the doctor, he speaks directly to what’s ailing him.
In doing so, he also speaks directly to what’s made “The Pitt” a minor streaming sensation. Beyond playing spot the nepo baby and guessing “How’d they do that?” during graphic operations, beyond the nostalgia for well-mounted broadcast-style medical dramas and the nostalgia for “E.R.” specifically (which Wyle wearing scrubs can’t help but evoke), what the first season of R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells’ Max drama offers is medicine — medicine for the broken, burned-out mind.
What Jack describes to Robby is a situation they both lived through. It’s what happened to them, that day, at the hospital. But it’s also what’s happening all around us, every day, especially in 2025. We are surrounded by war and genocide, environmental catastrophes and unlawful deportations, economic collapse and more mass shootings. Most of us aren’t witnessing these events first-hand, in the way these doctors did with the Pitt Fest victims, but we are still witnesses to unfathomable attacks on humanity. If you try to take it all in, all at once or one tragedy after the next, your brain will short-circuit, too. The only way to survive is focus on one single thing that makes sense.
“The Pitt” offers its viewers that one single thing. After a long day of work, school, childcare, volunteering, organizing, protesting, and everything else you do to engage with the world you want to make better, “The Pitt” is an utterly absorbing experience that commands your full attention. It’s the break your brain needs from the things that are breaking your brain. It’s the medicine, and you’re the patient.
Other TV shows, movies, and various forms of entertainment can offer the same physic remedy, and there’s also the risk that distracting yourself from reality becomes so addictive that you get permanently lost. But that’s part of makes “The Pitt” such a smart choice. It’s a show that appreciates a strong work ethic. It respects the commitment its characters are making, as well as the actual dedication of the doctors they represent. It makes it hard to detach completely — what with all the talk about real-world issues like health insurance, vaccines, and, oh yeah, mass shootings — but it beckons you so smoothly into its world that your time there still feels like time off.
That’s not a feeling you can get from second-screen TV. You’re not going to feel like you’ve escaped our current hellscape after spending two hours doom-scrolling with one eye and tracking plot-points with the other. “The Pitt,” despite persistent flaws (that could mostly be fixed before Season 2), knows how to earn your attention. It knows it needs to earn your attention, and it knows you need it to earn your attention.
Maybe that’s a little convoluted. Maybe it’s lending a TV show a little too much control over my mental health. Maybe I should take Dr. Robby’s advice and stop talking.
…you get what I’m saying, though, right?
“The Pitt” Season 1 is available on Max. The series has already been renewed for Season 2.
