Cher Thompson is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, where she covers everything from explosive reality TV moments to cast interviews about the twists and turns of scripted dramas. With a background in creative writing, marketing, and teaching, Cher knows how to spot both the storytelling genius and the guilty pleasures in pop culture. Her work blends wit with insight, making readers feel like they’re chatting with a friend who just happens to know way too much about TV.
While The Pitt has become one of the most celebrated medical dramas of the modern era, its spiritual predecessor, ER, will always be the superior series. No, this is not a hit job on The Pitt – in fact, the HBO Max series from former ER producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill along with former ER star Noah Wyle is one of the best medical dramas of our time. Though the current series is a more modern look at healthcare from a whole different perspective, NBC’s classic medical drama revolutionized the genre in ways that its successor simply can’t compete with.
Over the years, medical dramas have taken their turns at building something similar to ER. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy, which has overtaken the 1994 series as the longest-running medical drama of all time, and The Pitt, which has been praised for its gritty realism and modern storytelling structure, have all been showered with praise. Still, no other medical drama can manage to find the meteoric popularity that ER had in its time. Hitting NBC at exactly the right time with exactly the right cast, ER became the blueprint for medical dramas, and there are fundamental ways it still manages to edge out The Pitt to this day.
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ER’s Characters Have More Depth & History
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James Stenson / © NBC / Courtesy Everett Collection</figure>
One of the biggest advantages ER has as a series over The Pitt is its structure. ER, which aired a whopping 331 episodes from 1994 through 2009, is a traditional network TV show of its era, boasting an average of 22 episodes per season throughout its run. With so many episodes, the series had room to explore its characters in different ways, deepening their stories far beyond the scope of their jobs in the emergency department. While their stories weren’t typically woven throughout the run of the series, many characters ebbed and flowed, leaving and returning to the show throughout.
With so many characters and so much time to branch out, the stories of the doctors and nurses of County General were often deeper and more wide-ranging than those viewers see today on The Pitt. While The Pitt’s characters are fully dimensional and deep, the fact that viewers see them through a single shift throughout each season limits how much can really be shared about their lives. Despite the characters being compelling, ER was able to flesh things out more thoroughly.
6
ER Balances Its Medical Drama With A Warmer Human Touch
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Despite the fact that The Pitt does have moments of humor, it’s a fairly dark show that doesn’t lend itself to lighter moments or filler episodes. Depicting the average shift of someone working in a high-volume hospital in the middle of Pittsburgh allows the series to have its moments, but ER’s ability to lean into lighter stories is a bright spot for the series. While ER itself is a drama at heart, often choosing the darker story to tell for its characters, the show also featured some C-stories that were purposefully light, playful, or funny, even if they were minimal.
Country General is chaotic, and even the one-liners by some of its finest are able to capture the lightness of that chaos. Outside of the funnier moments, ER also left moments for the series to be genuinely warm with its characters. Relationships, like the friendship that nearly turned more between Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) and Susan Lewis (Sherri Stringfield), are a piece of ER’s fabric that we don’t see nearly as frequently in The Pitt. While there is always a human touch to the HBO Max series, it often feels like a darker one than ER’s.
5
ER Doesn’t Lose Sight Of Its Patients
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To be clear: The Pitt doesn’t lose sight of its patients in the way you’re probably thinking, either. Patients are the life blood of a medical drama – while the doctors, nurses, and staff all matter tremendously, there would be nothing to do without the patients, and both shows are able to utilize them to their storytelling advantages. While both shows focus heavily on their patients, ER does so fairly differently than The Pitt in a way that leans into both shows’ identities.
The Pitt explores its patients from a place of urgency that ER doesn’t always get to, but one that can be detrimental for the larger story. While The Pitt’s patients may span throughout the entirety of a season, their cases aren’t long-form in the way that ER’s can be. ER’s patient stories may only exist within a singular episode, but they can have ramifications throughout a season, or can see someone recur throughout a season to make a larger impact. Generally, ER’s patient stories are more relevant to their character arcs, while The Pitt uses their patients to propel the story forward.
4
ER’s Cases Can Span Longer Than A Shift
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One of The Pitt’s defining qualities is the fact that each season covers a singular shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, spanning the course of an hour per episode as it gives viewers a look into the gritty realities of its staff. That structure, however, limits the show in a lot of ways – specifically in the fact that only looking at a single shift doesn’t allow for as rich a narrative as looking at a larger amount of time. While telling the story of Dr. Robby’s darkest hours is compelling, it doesn’t always branch out enough to anchor the series.
Throughout ER’s run, the series covered years of time, which allowed the show to shift and grow its characters over the course of months, if not years. While most of ER’s doctors, nurses, and staff members were part of the show for more than a season, even the shortest-spanning cast members got to move beyond a single season. Expanding the scope of the show beyond a shift allowed for deeper storytelling and more growth overall, which is rewarding for viewers as they watch season after season.
3
ER Gives Its Interpersonal Relationships Room To Grow
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One of the best parts of ER beyond its medicine was the fact that it took the interpersonal connections made at County General into account. While The Pitt doesn’t neglect those connections by far, they also aren’t a huge part of the show’s overall story. ER, for all that it brought to the table as a medical drama, was also a drama at its core. The series wouldn’t have been what it was without its relationships, and without the connections that the characters made throughout their intense, difficult, sometimes life-threatening shifts at County General together.
While The Pitt excels at alluding to the interpersonal relationships that its staff share outside the walls of PTMC, there have yet to be many relationships brought into the picture that feel like those of a typical medical drama. When thinking about ER’s lasting impact, relationships like the sprawling romance between George Clooney’s Dr. Doug Ross and Julianna Margulies’ nurse Carol Hathaway come to mind almost instantly. The Pitt doesn’t share distinct relationships in its fabric, and while that’s likely by design, it impacts the resonance of the show as it moves forward.
2
ER Makes Its Hospital Feel Like A Living, Breathing Community
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County General is one of ER’s most important characters, despite being the central setting of the series. While not everything happens at County, with many of ER’s characters bringing their stories back to their own homes and other places, the hospital itself is a huge part of the story of the show, and the community it builds is even more important. Everyone within the scope of County feels accessible enough to anchor or assist in some sort of narrative, even characters we as viewers only see for moments within an episode.
Though this may be more of a byproduct of the fact that ER spans decades while The Pitt has only just started, the HBO Max series doesn’t have the same community feel from season to season. While PTMC jumps off the page, it’s a more hostile environment than County General’s ER in many ways, and the fact that we as viewers are so heavily focused on singular shifts in the ER often disconnects us from the larger community of the hospital staff. Ultimately, ER has more of a community feel to its team, while The Pitt focuses on hierarchy more consistently.
1
ER’s Long-Form Storytelling Can’t Be Beat
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While no one expects The Pitt to have the same impact entering its third season as ER did with its impressive 15-season run, the fact of the matter is that the long-form storytelling of the NBC hit is unmatched. ER had stories that spanned over the course of seasons, running themselves through years before finding a resolution. From early seasons spent developing John Carter (Wyle) from the young med student into an experienced doctor, to the later seasons bringing him back into the fold for life-saving medical care, ER wove narratives that reached far and beyond a single season or episode.
The show’s structure and impact allowed for broader storytelling throughout its run, and while The Pitt is still in a much earlier phase, the structure of the HBO Max series doesn’t lend itself to the same style of story. While Dr. Robby’s mental health and Dr. Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) addiction issues have run through each of The Pitt’s seasons thus far, they haven’t anchored the shows narratively as much as added to the character’s mental states. Though altering their decision-making is a part of the story, The Pitt’s stories longevity won’t be able to compete with ER’s freedom to continue stories over the years.
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In Cook County General Hospital’s emergency department, the doctors and nurses tackle every patient’s medical puzzles, all while dealing with the challenges in their personal and professional lives.Expand
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The Pitt is a gripping drama set in Pittsburgh’s Trauma Medical Center, where dedicated staff tirelessly work to save lives in a busy and underfunded emergency department.Expand
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In Cook County General Hospital’s emergency department, the doctors and nurses tackle every patient’s medical puzzles, all while dealing with the challenges in their personal and professional lives.
Your Rating
The Pitt is a gripping drama set in Pittsburgh’s Trauma Medical Center, where dedicated staff tirelessly work to save lives in a busy and underfunded emergency department.
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