Noah Wyle and Isa Briones are stars of HBO Max’s hit series The Pitt. Photo by Warrick Page/HBO Max

Arts & Culture

“A Roller-Coaster Ride of Emotions”—BU Med Students and Boston Medical Center Doctors on Watching The Pitt

HBO Max drama is commended for its mostly accurate portrayal of an urban hospital similar to Boston Medical Center

Warning: Spoilers below.

For years, doctors and nurses have criticized TV medical dramas like ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and Nurse Jackie for their over-the-top storylines, unrealistic medical practices, and plot twists that distort how hospitals actually operate. 

But HBO Max’s Emmy Award–winning medical drama The Pitt, starring Noah Wyle, now in its second season, is earning widespread praise for how real it feels from people on the front lines of emergency medical care. Set over a single shift in a chaotic Pittsburgh emergency department, the show follows physicians, nurses, and medical students as they juggle trauma cases, routine illnesses, and the emotional toll of the job. 

“You see lots of running around—distractions, conversations, multitasking, and pivoting,” says Christian Arbelaez, Boston Medical Center chief of emergency services, and a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor. He has worked as a doctor for over 25 years and holds BMC’s Endowed Chair in Innovation in Exceptional Care in Emergency Medicine. He acknowledges that the show has made him emotional at times by resurfacing memories. 

“Some people call it organized chaos,” he says. “There are always patients who need different things, nurses asking for things, and new patients coming in who are really sick. You don’t know what is coming in, and one day is never the same as the other.”

At BMC, Arbelaez oversees one of the busiest academic, essential emergency departments in the country and the region’s busiest trauma center, treating more than 130,000 patients each year—numbers that reflect the broader strain that emergency departments face nationwide.

Emotional to watch

Recent Pitt episodes have reflected that strain, depicting a cyberattack that shuts down hospital computers, forcing doctors to rely on paper charts; a catastrophic waterslide collapse; a young mother dying of lung cancer; and the mounting stress felt by staff dealing with one crisis after another.

Arbelaez says the show’s portrayal of procedures, teamwork, and the fast-paced culture of emergency departments is strikingly authentic. “The show has given people a window into emergency medicine and emergency departments,” he says. “It has personally taken me on a roller-coaster ride of emotions myself as an emergency physician.”

As a leader, he sees not only the day-to-day grind in the emergency room, he says, but the broader problems with the healthcare system, “as well as with public health and society at large.”

Major issues the show covers include mass-casualty events, behavioral health crises, substance use disorders, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. 

“Just being on the front lines during COVID, [the show] spoke to me,” Arbelaez says. “I’ve cried probably three times from watching the show, [as it] triggered my own [memories] that I have felt or experienced.”

Medical students like it—to a point

Even some of the show’s more unusual scenarios resonate, like the cyberattack that forces a return to paper charts. Because Arbelaez trained before electronic medical records became universal, he knows how to use the paper ones—but many younger physicians may not. 

Medical student Cole Hansen (CAMED’26), who plans to pursue pediatrics after graduation, also finds the show impressively accurate. “I felt like they did their homework—the cases, the diagnostic criteria,” he says. “I’m still pretty close to the textbook knowledge of a lot of these conditions, so it was interesting seeing some of the same things we talk about in the classroom show up on the screen.”

Hansen says The Pitt captures the balance in teaching hospitals between education and patient care. “There’s a tension between wanting people to learn, and at the same time, patients asking, ‘When can I get a real doctor?’” he says. “It shows how supervising physicians can do a really good job of creating a good training environment—giving residents some autonomy to make decisions, while still supervising their work.” 

Graduating medical student Josh Lepson (CAMED’26), who intends to go into internal medicine, says that even when he feels burnt out from studying, he still enjoys watching The Pitt. 

His critique is the concentration of dramatic cases. “They have a higher proportion of medically interesting cases than you might see on an average shift,” Lepson says. “They have less bread-and-butter medicine”—like stomach aches or chest pains—“probably because it doesn’t make for great TV.” 

Vincent Sollitto (CAMED’26) agrees. The show captures the pace, but with maybe a few too many “HALO” procedures, meaning High Acuity, Low Occurrence. “You might see some of those cases once every few years, even once in a career,” Sollitto says. 

Harshita Pattam (CAS’26, CAMED’29) views the show through another lens. A student in BU’s now-ended seven-year liberal arts–medical education program, with a Deaf studies minor, she appreciates one storyline involving a Deaf patient who struggles to get access to an interpreter. In the episode, the patient waits hours for assistance and tries to use a glitchy video service before receiving assistance from an in-person interpreter. 

“It shows how detrimental that can be to the patient,” Pattam says. “I feel like dealing with these kinds of delays is a common issue that many Deaf patients face—especially if they live in rural areas—where access to that type of technology isn’t always readily available.”

Carly Batt (SPH’23, CAMED’23,’27) points to another of the show’s strengths: the hospital hierarchy. “In Grey’s Anatomy, surgeons run the emergency room, which isn’t how it works,” says Batt, who plans to go into internal medicine and hopes to become an oncologist. “They show how a med student reports to the intern, who reports to the resident, who reports to the attending.”

While the show may give students slightly more autonomy than in real life, Batt says the overall portrayal feels accurate. 

“Sometimes it’s like I don’t need to watch this,” she says, “because I just lived it.”