“My day is not exactly working out the way I expected it to,” said Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch with a frown. It was only 10:55 a.m. at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, according to the board over the central hub of the emergency room, and Robby was in the fourth hour of his shift, standing in the middle of the room while patients occupied nearly every bed in the surrounding hallways, bays and trauma rooms. By all appearances, Dr. Robby was likely to have a very stressful next 11 hours or so.
Of course, this wasn’t really a hospital in Pittsburgh; it was a soundstage in Burbank, where HBO Max’s “The Pitt” was filming the fourth episode of its second season after scoring tremendous ratings and 13 Emmy nominations for Season 1. Dr. Robby was actor Noah Wyle, the star and a producer of the show, and the dozens of patients, doctors and nurses around him were actors cluttering this 18,000-square-foot stage that seemed just like a real hospital — minus, perhaps, a few noises and smells.
There were no removable walls, studio lights, cast chairs, craft service tables or video villages where crew members could cluster to watch; people got out of the way the best they could, hiding in temporarily unused examination rooms or ducking into hallways and hoping that they wouldn’t be caught on camera in a reflection or through one of the many interior windows. And if they were caught, that’s OK, because everybody inside this soundstage was required to wear medical scrub tops, just in case.
Located one Warner Bros. stage away from the stage where Wyle got his big break on NBC’s ER about 30 years ago, “The Pitt” is unlike any other production on the lot. The set took up every inch of the stage apart from the fire lanes around its perimeter; every drawer was filled with real equipment; the lead actors moonlighted as background players when the camera was aimed at others; and the crew used rehearsals to work out the lighting, not by setting up the usual lighting rigs but by carefully adjusting each of the overhead lights built into the ceiling of the set.
In one trauma room, a “patient” was reading “Station Eleven”; in the hallway outside the room, another perused a screenplay. In an unusual practice, background actors were hired for the entire season, because the 15 episodes take place over 15 consecutive hours of a single day, and it’s entirely possible that a patient would spend that long in the ER.
“It’s a fully immersive environment, 360 degrees,” Wyle said, “which makes it a lot easier to drop into as a performer, for sure.” In this space, he wandered around, rested his elbows on the central counter as he chatted with castmates, and tried a few variations on his “My day is not working out” line. For a 54-year-old L.A. native who helped create the show with the ER team of executive producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, it’s safe to say that “The Pitt” hasn’t worked out the way he expected, either, because it’s so much bigger and more culturally resonant than anything he’s done since the last time he was on TV wearing scrubs.
Wyle, who is planning to write and direct one or two episodes in the second season, spoke to TheWrap a few days after our set visit.
When I told you that we should take a photo together for the Editor’s Letter page of this issue, you immediately walked over to the wall in the pediatric room where an overwhelmed Dr. Robby broke down sobbing in the second-to-last episode of Season 1. Is that a special place for you?
Well, that whole room is electrically charged. Even when that room was under construction and was just bare plywood walls, I spent time in there thinking, This is the room where all of Robby’s demons are born, where his pathology gets embedded. It was an emotionally charged room to play in last year. [Laughs] And now it’s become a good photo-op spot.
It did feel as if the entire season had to lead to that particular scene.
Indeed it did.
This is a very different time from the early 1990s, when “ER“ came on the air. Is it harder these days to realize how a show is catching on?
It’s relatively difficult to gauge because I live in a bubble and I’ve been working so much. But it infiltrated my news feeds. I knew it was becoming a talked-about thing, but the community we were trying to win over the most was the medical community. We wanted the first responders to really feel seen and heard by it, and to give it their stamp of approval. And from there, the word of mouth bled out to everybody else.
With “ER,” it felt instantaneous. You walk down the street and suddenly it’s a different world. I was also going from total anonymity to being on one of the most popular shows in the world. This time, it just felt remarkably rewarding and validating. I had gotten my anonymity back and was comfortable with it. And now it just feels lovely to have people shout out, “Hey Robby, love the show!”
It’s maybe less in volume and a bit more in earnest, if that makes sense. People don’t just want to tell me that they enjoy it. They want to tell me that it affected them and resonated with them in a way that was very personal. Maybe it was a storyline involving losing a loved one or a parent, or maybe they knew somebody who had experienced the tragedy of a fentanyl overdose. These storylines were very contemporary and they seemed to affect a lot of people who are identifying with wanting to fall on the floor and cry and have a breakdown post-COVID. We’ve all been carrying a load that we haven’t quite been able to put down.
Would this show have existed if the pandemic hadn’t happened?
No, definitely not. Because I would never have wanted to do it, and neither would John or Scott. That was the catalyst for all of this — that post-COVID, there might be another story to tell about American healthcare that shined a light on the two different healthcare systems that exist in this country, the disparity between the two and the toll that it was taking psychologically, emotionally and financially on the frontline workers. Without COVID, there would’ve been no need for me to put a stethoscope on my neck ever again.
How were you affected as an actor, being unable to work because of COVID and then because of the strikes?
A lot of what I drew from for Robby’s breakdown was the frustration that I experienced at both those moments you just mentioned. I’d spent so much of my adult life working that I didn’t realize how much I need that, not just for financial stability but mental stability. And when I didn’t have that outlet for creativity, it really rattled me. And with the strike, suddenly my career felt vulnerable again, and work no longer seemed like a guarantee. A lot of what “The Pitt” came out of was the thought, If I ever get the chance to do it again, who would I want to do it with and what would I want it to feel like? I thought back to those early days on “ER” and that sense of camaraderie, ownership, commitment. Those were the sensibilities I brought into the formation of this show.
Was the the idea from the beginning to deal with healthcare but also use it as a way to explore other issues?
Yes and no. To be honest, it began with, “What didn’t we do on “ER”? What are some of the things we never touched on that we could now?” That list began with fentanyl overdoses, mass shootings, trans rights, healthcare cuts, nursing shortages, COVID burnouts. It didn’t take long before we had 30 or 40 things on the board that weren’t even in our lexicon 15 years ago.
And then we spoke to many amazing experts from every vector of healthcare, and we’d finish those interviews by saying, “What would you like to see on TV? What isn’t on TV that should be? And what would be bad and counterproductive for us to put on TV?” When we spoke to people that deal with vaccination rates and infectious diseases, that pushed us toward looking at diseases that had been eradicated but might come back because people weren’t vaccinating their kids. We guessed right with measles, because the outbreak in the Southwest was the same week the episode aired.
You’re now shooting a season that will air its first episodes next January. Are you trying to figure out what’s going to feel current in six months?
Yeah. But the hard part now is that events on the ground are moving so quickly that it’s a scary thing to predict. We’ve planted a flag that we are trying to be an accurate representation of a major-city trauma center. And major-city trauma centers are going to become even more crowded when rural hospitals start closing. A lot of people are gonna lose their health insurance, and they’re gonna make enough to not qualify for one plan and too little to qualify for another, and they’ll find themselves in this growing group of people who need assistance and can’t find it through the normal channels.
In one way, that gives you rich material for drama. And on the other hand, it probably pisses you off that you’re getting that much rich material for drama.
Exactly. Well put, well put. But also, the challenge is, let’s find the levity here.
How tricky is it to find that when the storylines are dealing with literal life and death?
It’s prescriptive for the practitioners to find a sense of humor in it all. So we model ours on theirs. It’s gallows humor, it’s black humor, it’s foxhole humor. It’s an attempt to not become cynical or jaded.
The show also examines ideas like toxic masculinity, from the teenager who’s suspected of being a mass shooter because he fell into the incel subculture to Robby himself, who is a different kind of male role model.
I wasn’t there, but I heard that [“Breaking Bad” creator] Vince Gilligan gave a speech to the Writer’s Guild where he basically laid a lot of society’s ills at the feet of television writers. [Laughs] He said that for the last 20 years, they’ve written bad guys too well. The Tony Sopranos and the Walter Whites that have populated our televisions went from being cautionary tales or morality tales to aspirational tales. And that skewed our balance and values a little bit.
So I look at Robby as a little bit antidotal to that trend. He’s just trying to do the best he can and not let his demons get in the way. I think there are a lot more guys like Robby out there than there are Tony Sopranos. So it’s not a bad example to put back on TV.
You have said that your advice to younger actors is that lightning only strikes once or maybe twice. Coming out of “ER,“ did you expect it to strike again, and were you surprised when it didn’t?
Totally. [Laughs] I mean, how do you have perspective until you have perspective? “ER” was such a dominating period of time in my life and career, I knew that there was going to be a fallow period after it where I needed to be in some kind of proverbial wilderness to come back as a different person and be accepted again. What I didn’t appreciate was how big that show was and how singular that show’s popularity was, and how hard it would be to find the feeling that I had on that set again. I figured that in my life and career I would have experiences that were less successful but would still feel creatively satisfying the same way. And I had degrees of that, but never quite the same.
Does “The Pitt“ feel like lightning has struck for the second time?
For me, it does. I mean, I’m speaking to you from Warner Brothers, where I began all this 30 years ago. I drive through the same gate I drove through for the first 15 years of my career, and I’m working 300 feet from where we made all those wonderful shows. And I’m working with some of the same people again. So it feels extremely synchronistic and it has a sense of closure to it. And the fact that the show is resonating and I’m working with so many top-notch artists on this, it feels similar enough. I could call it a lightning strike.
Based on the reaction to Season 1, did you start thinking about what you might want to do differently in Season 2?
I’ll be perfectly candid: This is gonna be an interesting season. In the first season, we had a mass casualty event and a character who had a nervous breakdown. We built to those things over the course of the season. If we’d stopped at Episode 10, it would’ve been a very satisfying season of television, I believe. But then we gave everybody another half of a show that was explosive in its nature.
I maintain that if we had the sort of “day in the life” of an average shift, checking in on all these people’s lives, some of whom are having big epiphanies and big lows, it would have been satisfying. But that’s yet to be seen. You don’t want to always have this sort of stunt embedded in your season, because it goes against the thesis of our show, which is that it’s the aggregate that is the problem, not the exceptional.
There’s an implication in what you just said that perhaps the second season is not going to have another major event.
It has definite things that will cause our characters to have to be there beyond the 12 hours of their normal shift, to fulfill our 15-episode order. And it is going to be dynamic and very dramatic. But it’s going to be different. We’re not replicating a model, and if this show is going to be successful, I don’t think that it can. It’s an organic animal that keeps unfolding in real time.
Do you allow yourself to hope that that some politicians are paying attention?
Sure. I mean, this isn’t a red or blue thing. This is a human thing. Everybody is related to somebody who’s gonna go to the hospital. And when you go to the hospital, it doesn’t matter what your political or religious beliefs are. You’re going to be very happy that that Haitian nurse or that gay respiratory therapist or that Jewish doctor is working to save your life. That is just a reality that everybody experiences. And yeah, if everybody needs to remember that, I’m all for it.
https://view.flipdocs.com/?ID=10004691_723875This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
