Everyone’s New Favorite Medical Drama Is Not Like ER in One Important Way

On last week's episode of The Pitt , Max's hit hospital show about a single day in a crowded Pittsburgh emergency room, a young medical student, Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez), awkwardly asks Nurse Mateo (the bedimpled cutie Jalen Thomas Brooks) if he wants to have coffee. They're stitching up a patient, Earl, who watches their interaction avidly, eating a sandwich. "I don't date people in the workplace," Mateo says, gently. "Nothing personal, it's just never a good idea." The beloved Nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) rescues Javadi from her embarrassment by coming in and asking Earl if he's being treated right. "Feel like I'm watching a rom-com," Earl says.

This encounter shows off one of the best things about The Pitt : its extremely light touch when it comes to workplace romance. On Reddit, the show's fans split their posting between two genres: dissecting the accuracy of the medical practices depicted on the show and debating whether any of the maybe-couples will actually get together. Will we see Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) and Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) , flagged in Episode 5 as having a romantic history, kiss again? (Maybe Dr. Collins' secret pregnancy is actually Dr. Robby's?) Will the workplace friendship between Dr. King (Taylor Dearden) and the very TV-handsome Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) develop into something more? What about Dr. Garcia (Alexandra Metz) and the preferential treatment she's been giving Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) ? Did that scalpel Santos dropped on Garcia's foot in Episode 6 end that flirtation for good, or no?

The show drops a little bit of grist for this mill in almost every episode. In Episode 10, which aired on Thursday, the ex of Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) comes into the ER for treatment, and gets jealous of Nurse Mateo, who's gotten close to McKay's kid. Might the ex have a point? More fuel for the posting fire! But: "A large part of me thinks y'all are trying too hard to 'Grey's'-ify this show," wrote one Reddit poster, referring to the long-running Grey's Anatomy , king of the hospital dramas when it comes to romantic plotlines.

I like to see romance on my TV as much as—and probably more than—the next person. But I'm happy to say, I think The Pitt is un- Grey's -ifiable, and that's fine. First, and most importantly, the structure forbids it. Sure, TV writers do love to take some liberties in the name of drama, and it's not like the day depicted on The Pitt is totally typical, even when it comes to non-romantic events. But the beats of the slow burn that another type of show would develop for a will-they-won't-they couple in a workplace drama—say, for example, George Clooney's Doug and Julianna Margulies' Carol on ER —are impossible to deliver in the "one day, one shift" format. Those couples need years to come close, then spring apart, then, in the course of events, come close again. That's where the longest-running ships come from.

Secondly, The Pitt is not about lust, but about a different range of feelings—exhaustion, hunger, overstimulation. Just take a look at the difference between how Noah Wyle looked when he played Dr. Carter on ER —what a gorgeous baby, the Mateo of his time!—and the haggard, exhausted, fully adult Dr. Robby . (Comparing the two is a real "looks like I, too, am mortal" moment for people who watched ER in real time back in the 1990s.) Most people on The Pitt, especially as the day wears on, have the worn-out look of Dr. Robby—like they've been wearing the same clothes for hours, eating only turkey sandwiches, failing again and again to find the time to pee.

Dr. Robby's central internal struggle gets established in flashbacks to his experiences during the COVID pandemic, when he treated his own mentor, who ended up dying right there in the ER's brightly painted pediatrics room. His day-to-day problems, as we hear mentioned in multiple conversations with the hospital's chief medical officer (Michael Hyatt), are material: long wait times, low patient satisfaction, the hospital's practice of " boarding ," a guy who just hit Nurse Dana in the parking lot at the end of Episode 8 because he got mad about the wait. Sex, and romance, get crowded out in the face of all that.

I went back to watch some ER, while thinking about the lack of sex on The Pitt, and picked an episode randomly from a list of best ER eps . It didn't take long for me to remember how ER used to be. In Season 5, Episode 14, young Wyle's Dr. Carter goes into an X-ray room with Kellie Martin's Dr. Knight, and they get it on. Martin comes out with her cardigan backwards; Wyle has a hickey. On The Pitt , this would not happen, because there would not be an empty room available, and if there were, colleagues would be knocking on the door of that room almost immediately, to find the missing hands that are necessary to keep the ER running.

The people on The Pitt aren't robots, of course. In Episode 9, right after she fails to make a coffee date with Nurse Mateo, Dr. Javadi tells Nurse Dana that being around him makes her feel the way she did when her parents took her to Utah to ski and the altitude put her off-balance the entire time. "He's a human Utah," she says. "I've worked with a few Utahs," Dana says. "I wish you many Utahs in your life." As so often happens on The Pitt , Dana gets the best last word: Workplace attraction happens, but that doesn't mean it's fated to turn into romance.

The creators of The Pitt ar e engaged in a legal battle with the estate of Michael Crichton, the creator of ER, which is arguing that this show is an "unauthorized reboot." A humble suggestion from me, who is far from a lawyer? The Pitt' s team should just point out a simple difference: The people on this show keep their clothes on. And those clothes get dirty .