The Pitt Show Review: Balancing Realism and Drama in Medical TV. #444 Part 3.

Let us know what you like , what you don't like about the show and , ultimately , let us know who's winning these arguments , because I need to know that I'm beating Rene in these debates . Run the tape what I've been watching and what I think is one of the best medical shows in a long time .

Now I'm only two episodes in , but I got my bootleg HBO Max account going . Nobody's going to know how I got a bootleg , but I got a bootleg HBO account , you know . You got one too , kiara .

This is basically an ER replica , a more realistic version of the TV show ER that was from the early nineties into the early two thousands that everybody loved . That's the show that inspired me to go into medicine . It's so close to that .

It has Noah Wiley you know he's heading the show , but basically what this show is is let's talk about what happens in the ER doctor's shift , and every episode is an hour of his shift . I'm only two episodes in , so his shift started at seven in the morning , I think .

So hour two , we're like from eight o'clock to 9 PM or 9 AM and you're basically watching everything that occurs . And in his , in the show , he is an ER physician . That is obviously he's got to be at least 10 , 15 years in . But he's interacting with colleagues . He's interacting with medical students , residents . So this is obviously a teaching hospital .

So there's residences , residents there . Excuse me , excuse me , and it's a hospital that appears to be , you know , one of those hospitals . That's a public hospital where there's like just a lot of people with insurance , without insurance . You know there's so many different things that are going on .

But what striked me big on this show is there's a lot of just like frank , realistic things that occur in medicine that I think a lot of people would be shocked to find out . There's a scene in there where he just talks about end of life issues with a patient's family . You know there's a guy who comes in .

He's in his late 80s , he lives in a nursing home and he's coming in with pneumonia and now he has sepsis because of it , a really bad infection , and he has a advanced directive that says that he doesn't want to be intubated , he doesn't want to be on a ventilator , he doesn't want dialysis or anything like that .

But you know , if he needed some IV antibiotics or some IV fluids , that's okay with that . So like that's actually very , very vague what I just told you . It sounds like it's very clear but it's actually very vague .

He comes in where he obviously needs antibiotics and he also needs fluids , but it's very clear that he doesn't want to be intubated , he doesn't want to be on a ventilator . So what happens when he comes in and you can give him antibiotics , but it looks like ready for him to go , please put him on a ventilator .

And that's always the hard part of medicine , which is what do you mean ? You're not ready for him to go , like your dad has already said that he wants to go under these circumstances , if they arise , they have arisen , right , we understand that you were supposed to help him make these decisions when he can't , but he's already made the decision .

So now this is almost like a push-pull type thing . Now it's like well , I get what you want , which is you don't want to see your dad go , but dad has already said what you know in what capacity he wants to go . So that conversation is very clearly laid out in the show .

They spend a good like 10 minutes on that and it's it's very like black and white , you know , and there's some gray areas in there , but it's very like upfront in front of you . That I found very fascinating and I think the public would be very interested to be like , or shocked to know , like , damn , like you guys just have conversations about that .

Like someone lives , dies , that's it .

But it's purely , at this point , the first two episodes , purely medical , purely like the interrelations that occur in a hospital how people interact with each other , surgeons interact with ER docs , how administration deals with , you know , er . These things are very interesting also .

But that's my biggest concern is just what's going to happen if it continues like this . Will the public find it interesting after a while , or will they get tuned ? Will they tune out ?

And the TV show has a job to do , which is we want to make money . So you got to make something that the public wants , right , and public likes to see sex lies , you know , and videotape so you got to make it .

You got to make it salacious and it's extremely boring in a medical , you know , in a hospital , I'll be very honest with you , I think it's boring . So they got to make it so that it's entertaining to people .

So the fact that they're making this show very realistic , like I talked about in a previous episode , like when they , for example , someone's heart stops , you know , like you do chest compressions and sometimes you may have to shock the heart , depending on what type of rhythm that you see .

On ER it was notorious Like they would shock people on asystole and on this show , like they went out of their way , kind of going through like the fourth wall right , of just saying , hey , like we recognize that you guys used to kill us on ER for shocking people in asystole , right , but yeah , we don't shock on asystole .

So they're making things very realistic on the show so that doctors and other medical professionals be like , yep , that's exactly what happens , you know , but but it's still very realistic , I think .

I recommend it guys . Let's see how it goes . I'm not going to do like an episode by episode review , but I think it's something that's worth . You know people watching right now . Let's see .