Welcome to 'The Pitt’
You don’t need me to tell you about The Pitt, the Pittsburgh-based medical drama that swept recent Emmy nominations and features not one but three Filipino characters, but it’s worth talking about anyway.
Created by the team behind the ‘90s hit show ER and bringing back Noah Wyle to a completely new medical drama (this time playing attending physician “Robby” Robinavitch), it’s like a snapshot of America at the beginning of 2025, when the show premiered and (not incidentally) when Donald Trump began his second term as president.
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Things are a mess at The Pitt, the wry nickname for Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, where people are parked for hours in the E.R. waiting area and the trainee doctors are beset by crisis after crisis, some semi-comical, some deeply, well, traumatizing.
Drop into this environment nurses Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) and Princess (Kristin Villanueva), often shown in the background, offering a kind of Filipina Greek chorus to the proceedings in Tagalog, and you have one of the most authentic US medical dramas in memory. Sample dialogue: Perlah and Princess eavesdrop on the drama brewing between two female doctors as the shift commences. Perlah: “Sinasabi ng 20 bucks na isa sa kanila ay masampal bago matapos ang shift (20 bucks says one of them gets slapped before the shift is over).” Princess: “Ang maliit ay mas matigas kaysa sa kanyang hitsura (The little one is tougher than she looks).” That these two Fil-Am nurses get more than just “comic relief” status in this drama says a lot about the nuts and bolts of The Pitt: there’s plenty of detail that rings true, and its depiction of Filipino nurses, happily slipping into Tagalog around English speakers whenever they want to pick up some hot goss, definitely checks out.
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It's equally important that the cultural signifiers in this show—in this case, Tagalog spoken casually, not to mention hilariously—are allowed to shine through. It is a show that is obsessed, at times, with getting the zeitgeist of America circa 2025 just right. (Sometimes they go too far, and the writing can slip into something like an NPR Radio segment, informing us about incel males being raised by right-wing podcasters. You’re better than that, The Pitt.)
Because, in 2025, what could be a better lens for looking at the difficulties facing America than a medical setting, with all its issues of health care (or lack of), insufficient funding and staffing, immigration, race, “morning after” pills and COVID masking, vaccines and anti-vaxxers, the opioid crisis, measles outbreaks, IVF costs, elderly neglect, child abuse, sex trafficking (paging Jeffrey Epstein!), and the spiraling threat of mass shootings, which has transformed some American emergency rooms into instant M.A.S.H. units, forced to use “triage” diagnoses to treat the flood of patients whenever an active shooter lets loose in public?
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This is America on the front lines, and The Pitt makes a very good case that those crisis points are increasingly being driven to the edge by a government that cares less and less about everyday people’s problems. (You can look at the recent US cuts in FEMA disaster funds, hotline assistance to veterans, cuts in medical university research funding, not to mention slashed Medicare, Medicaid and USAID funds for proof of a callous disregard for the actual needs of everyday people.)
The Pitt does sometimes wear its message on its sleeve, but over the course of 15 hours in its first season, covering an endless shift on a single day, it says a lot about how much human beings can actually handle, and still do their job. More than any other medical show I can think of (except maybe the BBC drama This is Going to Hurt starring Ben Whishaw set in a budget-crunched National Health Service hospital), The Pitt manages to telescope almost every American crisis into one season, and more importantly, allows you to understand and care about each character in the process.
Which brings us to the third Fil-Am in this drama, Isa Briones, who plays Dr. Trinity Santos, an ambitious first-year resident who is itching to score points in the operating room—muscling her way into procedures and, famously, dropping a scalpel into the foot of the surgeon she hopes to impress—and move her way up the hospital ladder. She’s caustic, bullying, a snitch—and yet as human as everyone else in this well-paced, well-written show. Also on the floor is second-year resident Dr. Melissa “Mel” King (played by Taylor Dearden, who is Bryan Cranston’s daughter), who represents the “neurodivergent” approach to patient care. Dr. King, who has an autistic sister, often feels the strain of this bugged-out E.R. atmosphere (at one point she zones out looking at a lava lamp app on her phone), but her slower approach also yields better patient relations. Diversity, indeed.
Circling amongst all this, moving from examination room to examination room, is the traumatized Dr. Robby, who oversees all this melee with a seemingly infinite reserve of patience (though this is stretched many, many times this season) and medical wisdom. To its credit, Dr. Robby is not depicted as some kind of white savior doctor, but as someone who is frequently at the breaking point, just trying to hold on.
And that is the final takeaway one has of The Pitt: it depicts a system that is pushed to the brink every day, just barely managing to hold on, in a world seemingly determined to make its job all that much harder with each new crisis.
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The Pitt is shown on HBO Max.
