We all fell in 'The Pitt'

Noah Wyle gets his doctor on again, plus a plea on behalf of 'Sesame Street'

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I finally refer to Dr. Benton as Peter…

Real medical drama in real time

Happy New Year, everyone! Due to the strangeness of yet another week with a national holiday smack dab in the middle, we’ve only got two columns to talk about. But the first of those is one I’ve been eager to write ever since I learned of the show’s existence: The Pitt, the new Max hospital drama that reunites ER star Noah Wyle with ER producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. This could not be more in my wheelhouse for a variety of reasons. First, you may recall that I spent much of the past year bingeing the entirety of ER while walking on the treadmill, and that I consider it one of the great dramas ever made. Second, it is part of a push to get back to some core TV values that we’ve lost in the rush to make seasons of only six or eight episodes that are structured like long, tedious movies. There are a whopping 15 episodes in this first season — depending on how you qualify things where a “season” among the longest ever for a straight-to-streaming show — and the goal is to focus more on episodes, albeit with serialization. The entire season is told more or less in real time, covering 15 consecutive hours in the same shift — just another grind for Wyle’s character, and the first day for several docs and med students.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that I loved this show, even though I think the format is a mixed bag with some benefits and some big distractions. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Gemmill and the others chose the real time approach as the easiest way to distinguish this show from the last one they made with Wyle, and to deal with the lawsuit filed by the Michael Crichton estate, which couldn’t come to terms with Warner Bros. over a plan to make an official ER sequel with Wyle playing an older John Carter. I certainly would have enjoyed that version — especially because ER ended with a “life goes on” finale that suggested we could return to County General at any point with minimal difficulty — but this works well, too. And while I’m not a lawyer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, if both shows didn’t feature Wyle, I doubt anyone would even be making the comparison. The Pitt is no more stealing the intellectual property of ER than ER was doing the same with St. Elsewhere, you know?

Ultimately, it was incredibly satisfying to watch Wyle back in this kind of environment(*), and to see a TV show made by people who understand and like how TV used to work. This is one I will probably be checking in on a lot in upcoming newsletters, if not necessarily every week.

(*) Next Thursday is going to be a surprisingly busy one for throwback television produced by Nineties stalwarts and featuring former ER stars, since Prime Video is debuting On Call, a new Dick Wolf cop show that has Wyle’s old scene partner Eriq La Salle in a recurring role, and one of the secondary cops is played by an actor who appears in multiple Pitt episodes as the father of a patient.

Not-so-sunny days ahead?

Meanwhile, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about how this new year may go. Among them is the possibility that the upcoming 55th season of Sesame Street will be the final one for the children’s TV institution, since Max opted not to renew the deal that has kept the show going for nearly a decade. I suspect Apple or another streamer will pick it up, simply because the brand is still so big, but even the idea that it could go away makes me very unhappy. So I wrote a column about it, which talks about all the ways the series is still essential — if not more in some cases — and also why it’s important to keep making new episodes, rather than letting children watch any of the 4700+ ones that have been produced since 1969. My own kids have long since outgrown Sesame Street, so I haven’t watched in years. But going through the most recent season, I was struck by all the ways it continues to smartly evolve, to reflect the world that preschoolers live in now, rather than the one that I or my offspring grew up in.

Odds and/or ends

• New this week but not reviewed by me: Going Dutch, a new Fox sitcom starring Denis Leary as a military officer who gets demoted to command “the least important U.S. Army base in the world” in the Netherlands. It’s from Brockmire creator Joel Church Cooper, and has a solid supporting cast, including Danny Pudi as Leary’s top aide, Taylor Misiak from Dave as Leary’s estranged daughter (and now subordinate), and, in a recurring role, Catherine Tate as the owner of a local brothel. As Fienberg discusses at greater length, it feels like the foundation is in place for a good ensemble comedy, given some time to develop and find itself, but it’s not quite there in the three episodes I’ve seen. Also? The third of those has a guest appearance by Parker Young, who was one of the stars of Fox’s previous attempt at a military comedy, the wonderful Enlisted, which seemed to be loved by everyone but the then-head of the network. The casting is either trolling, or a tip of the cap to a show that was gone too soon.

• Cunk on Earth — the latest in an ongoing piece of comedy performance art where Diane Morgan plays the dumbest television personality of all time — was one of my favorite shows of 2023, and I was excited to see its follow-up, the special Cunk on Life, which touches on religion, philosophy, and science. Unfortunately, I came away hugely disappointed by it. There’s a very narrow tightrope Morgan and her collaborators have to walk so that Philomena Cunk comes across as ignorant but reasonably well-intentioned. Here, she comes across as mean much more often than she should. I laughed in spots, but not nearly as often as at Cunk on Earth, and I cringed a lot. Oh, well.

• Apple TV is offering a free preview this weekend, which is a good opportunity for non-subscribers to binge one or two of the shows they’ve heard us raving about. Among my suggestions (with links to my reviews): Slow Horses, Severance, Pachinko, the first two seasons (and maybe the third) of For All Mankind, Shrinking, the first two seasons of Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest, Little America, the first season of The Afterparty, Bad Monkey, Shining Girls, and Hijack, among others.

• Finally, we are one month and one day away from the publication of Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGil: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul. The 50% off sale at the Abrams Books website ended with the holiday season, but it’s still available for preorder wherever books are sold, including from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and more. I’ll have more Saul book content in upcoming newsletters. But as a reminder, it contains essays on every episode — many of them substantially rewritten from the original online recaps (and some were started over from scratch) — which are safe to be read for first-time viewers as they binge, but are meant to be deep enough to add new thoughts to even someone watching for the fifteenth time. It has a lot of other archival interview material from various outlets where I worked during the show’s run. And there’s a new and meaty interview with Saul co-creator Peter Gould that told me a lot of things I never knew about the series, from the original development of Saul Goodman as a character, to what went on behind the scenes after Bob Odenkirk’s heart attack while filming the final season.

That’s it for this week! What does everybody else think?