The Pitt Is Basically a Musical

You’ve heard about TV shows that are really ten-hour movies, but what about one that’s a 15-hour play? Or maybe more of an immersive art experience, à la Sleep No More? Everyone working on The Pitt — from star Noah Wyle to producer John Wells to the show’s best boy — was in scrubs for Warner Bros.’ TV press day. According to Wells, this is a necessity. “Everybody on the set wears scrubs,” he said. “The set … is so big and open that you’re constantly getting caught in the back of shots. The crew members are constantly getting caught.”

A lot about The Pitt is geared toward verisimilitude. The show’s set copies Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Hospital to a T, including the weird mix of Egyptian, Corinthian, and Celtic columns in the waiting room. And it’s massive, with bay after bay open for whatever yucky medical drama is befalling the show’s hapless patients. For Isa Briones, who went from Hadestown to playing Dr. Trinity Santos on the show, it made the transition from stage to screen easier. “A lot of us have done theater before; it’s kind of the perfect TV show to go into from that,” she said. And unlike many TV shows, The Pitt shoots sequentially. It all happens in order, which is good because there’s a lot of blood spatter on the floor that would be hard for continuity to replicate. Like, a lot of blood.

“Everything feels like one big rehearsal,” said Briones. “We’re always on stage. It’s like you never leave the stage because we’re often background acting in other people’s scenes. And the way we do trauma scenes is like so intensely rehearsed. It is a dance, it is choreography. And we run it, run it, run it until it’s in our bones. And then we do it and there’s like no time in between rehearsing and then shooting. So it feels like theater.” So the show a musical, and its trauma scenes are the big dance numbers where everyone is covered in blood at the end à la Sunset Boulevard.

And like the set on a long-running Broadway show, the actors have started to personalize their spaces on The Pitt. “I have my desk; I have my actual things inside there,” said Katherine LaNasa, who plays charge nurse Dana Evans. “The fact that we work in a big set that’s like an open ER, and the fact that we work in order, it really leads to the naturalism of the work. Because we become so relaxed.” Glad someone can be chill when a foot is getting degloved!

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