Ever since “The Pitt” hit Max in early January, medical professionals all over the Internet have been praising the show — crafted by “ER” veterans Noah Wyle, R. Scott Gemmill, and John Wells, though it is not a spin-off of that series — for its realism. In fact, one real-life nurse worked on the series as a featured performer and personally ensured that the show represented the process as accurately as possible. One little detail about the filming process, which Wyle revealed to Entertainment Weekly in a video interview, makes it clear that the entire world of the show was incredibly immersive, making it feel real for everyone on set as well as everyone watching at home.
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“Everybody on the crew had to wear scrubs,” Wyle said in a clip posted to the social media platform X. “Everybody was issued three pairs of scrubs to basically wear as their uniform. In case we caught them in the shot. They would just be another … or in a reflection. But it also kind of fostered an esprit de corps. Everybody was in it together.” He continued:
And film crews generally wear dark clothing and wear a lot of cargo shorts and hoodies. They kind of dress in uniform anyway. That wasn’t a huge leap. But it also made us all feel like there wasn’t any division between cast and crew or foreground or background. We all became company. And the spirit of camaraderie that that fostered, I think, has a lot to do with the kind of texture and energy that comes across.”
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This is, to put it bluntly, so cool. You can imagine, I’m sure, that as an actor on the set of “The Pitt,” you feel like you’re functioning in a real emergency room — and while this was done to avoid bloopers, it also just made the world of “The Pitt” that much more complete. As of this writing, we haven’t heard directly from scrub-wearing crew members on “The Pitt,” but guest and background actors have talked about their experience … and the crew donning scrubs is, apparently, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the show’s neat and fully immersive tricks.
Everything on the set of The Pitt is there to help build its world as fully as possible
In a Vulture feature that ran the day after the season 1 finale of “The Pitt” — ending the “real-time” chaotic 15-hour shift that puts a focus on Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch — a handful of guest actors who worked on the series spoke to Jen Chaney about precisely how intense and immersive their experience was. One actor named Brandon Keener, who plays the father of a boy who inadvertently overdosed on fentanyl, specifically mentioned the scrubs adorning the crew, saying that “even in your peripheral vision, everybody’s in character.” His onscreen wife Samantha Sloyan — who you might know from “Grey’s Anatomy” and a handful of Mike Flanagan projects — also noted that there aren’t traditional lights or “marks” for the performers: “You’re never hitting a mark. They are never moving lights. Everything is the space.”
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Not only that, but while some sequences were being filmed, other sequences continued as normal in the background, which helps “The Pitt’s” fictional emergency room look exactly as chaotic as a real ER would in the aftermath of, say, a shooting (a mass casualty event that helps define the back half of the show’s first season). “In trauma one, they’re doing an entire surgery that’s choreographed and accurate and they’re doing it just to be in the background in case we see a slight piece of them,” Devon Gummersall, who plays another father — one whose child is suffering from a potentially deadly case of measles — told Chaney. “Then the next day it switches; suddenly we’re in the background, and they’re doing their scene of the surgery with the dialogue. It’s just amazing.”
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Ultimately, guest actors like Jennifer Christopher said that all of this enhanced their performances. Christopher, who plays a woman so shocked by the shooting that she’s temporarily unable to speak, shared that the set’s intense attention to detail made her job that much easier. “What I’m visually looking at as I’m sitting there in this wheelchair with everything going by, it just became very simple: seeing a drop of blood on the floor and really feeling the life in it,” Christopher said of a scene where her character Tricia is too stunned to talk. All of these touches have helped “The Pitt” earn its reputation for specific medical accuracy, and the amount of thought that went into all of this is nothing short of remarkable.
“The Pitt” is streaming on Max now, and season 2 is already confirmed (with a time jump to boot).
