Written from a trailer in Tribeca, while filming a movie and writing an episode of a show I’m working on. Multitasking is my skill.
I’m writing this at 1:02am in my trailer, post-wrap, somewhere in Tribeca. My brain is mush, I’ve got 13 tabs open—some of them actual scripts—and my voice memo app has at least six different theme songs playing because. But here’s the thing: I need to talk about The Pitt. Because The Pitt just changed the game. And more personally? It made me feel something again. It reminded me why I do all of this.
Full disclosure: I vote in award shows. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve also tuned a lot of it out lately—burnout, bad writing, and an industry that sometimes feels like it’s allergic to sincerity. But The Pitt? It broke through the noise. It’s not just my #1 show of the year—it’s the reason I believe in TV again.
My top 10 list (which I already know in April, because I’m built different) is currently:
1. The Pitt
2. The Last of Us Season 2
3. Paradise
4. Adolescence
5. Stranger Things Season 5
6. The Bear Season 4
7. The White Lotus Season 3
8. Severance Season 2
9. Black Mirror Season 7
10. Landman season 2
Two things to note about this list:
• The Pitt is in a league of its own.
• Adolescence and The Pitt are the only ones that feel like they’re speaking to us, not at us. These shows feel real. Not real as in based-on-a-true-story real—real as in “you can talk to your friends about this at 1am and it might save your life” real.
Let’s talk about The Pitt.
It’s the best hospital show since the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, and I say that as someone who once ran a full-on CW religion. I cried when Oliver died on Arrow. I felt peace when Hope saw her dad one last time on Legacies. The Flash used to emotionally destroy me on a weekly basis. The amount of times he had to see his mother die. But when Nexstar bought the CW and turned it into something unrecognizable, they killed every show I loved. Eight hours a week—gone. A part of me left with them.
But The Pitt brought that part back.
This show is built like 24—in real time, fifteen gritty, lived-in hours in an underfunded ER on its first day running solo after the city pulls its funding. A ragtag group of brand-new residents, played by mostly fresh faces, thrown into chaos. The camera doesn’t blink. The walk to and from the hospital is the only quiet, scored moment we get, and even those are emotionally loaded. After hearing Noah talk about it on The Watch, I got obsessed with how this thing is structured. It’s a throwback to how TV used to be made—with actors actually on set together 5–7 days a week, building chemistry, breathing life into their characters.
And the characters? I care more about them than I care about real people.
Let’s start with Robby. Over 15 hours, we watch him evolve into someone completely different. There’s no big speech. It’s just life, happening fast. OD after OD. A secret relationship with Dr. Collins (played devastatingly by Tracey Ifeachor) that implodes under the weight of a miscarriage Robby didn’t even know he was part of. Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) battling his own addiction while mentoring the newbies. Then the music festival mass shooting flips the whole series upside down—blood shortages, trauma patients flooding in, and the one kid Robby really tries to save? Jake’s girlfriend? She dies anyway.
We barely recover before a measles outbreak hits. The incel storyline made me physically uncomfortable, in a good way. The little sister drowning episode wrecked me. I’m still mad the guy who hit Dana is out there. These characters feel real. Their pain hits harder than any prestige drama with $15 million per episode and no soul.
And then came Pulse. Dropped right in the middle of The Pitt’s run like a metacommentary—basically a #MeToo version of Grey’s Anatomy, built to mock what Grey’s has become. But The Pitt is doing laps around it. It’s not flashy. It’s just honest. And honesty is rare on TV now.
Robby is not the same guy who walked into the ER that morning. Neither am I.
This show reminded me what it felt like to be hooked—to care. It gave me back that CW spark I thought was dead. And if this is what TV can look like in 2025? I’m back in.
Podcast recap drops when I wrap tonight. Most likely Friday afternoon