Actor Noah Wyle’s parents met in Pittsburgh when they were college students decades ago.
His mother attended Chatham University, and his dad went to Carnegie Mellon. Wyle, now 53, has found himself back in the city where his parents met, filming the HBO Max drama The Pitt, which centers on a fictional Pittsburgh emergency room. He says authenticity is key to the show, which was filmed partly at Allegheny General Hospital.
“We were looking for a city that hadn’t been overshot,” Wyle tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “Pittsburgh is also a wonderful microcosm of the country. It’s got great diversity of population, a large socioeconomic range, and it’s both urban but surrounded by rural areas, so you’ve got a great cross-section of cases.”
Wyle is no stranger to medical dramas, as he starred as the young Dr. John Carter in the long-running medical drama ER. In The Pitt, Wyle is now the seasoned veteran Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch.
The Pitt is gritty, realistic, and, at times, quite dark. Each episode depicts one hour in an emergency room, painted as a post-pandemic hellscape of people waiting hours for care. Viewers occasionally see Wyle’s character in flashbacks, dressed in a hazmat suit at the height of COVID. While we have yet to learn more about the trauma Dr. Robby experienced during the pandemic, it is hinted at enough to keep viewers intrigued as each hour-long episode gets us deeper into the day.
The hour-by-hour set-up of a 15-episode, 15-hour shift in the emergency room was a decision made by former ER producer and The Pitt show creator R. Scott Gemmill.
“He wanted it to feel much more like you’re doing a ride-along with a cop on a shift, or maybe you’re a war correspondent, and you’re embedded with a combat unit during a campaign, so that it’s an adrenaline rush to be a voyeur in this environment,” Wyle says. “You’re not dispassionate, you’re engaged emotionally, and the best way to do that is to not give you a sense of relief.”
Everything instead plays out in real time, giving both viewers and the characters they’re watching an endurance test of sorts.
“Everyone wants the same relief, and it creates this nice, kind of symbiotic relationship,” Wyle adds.
The Pitt was an idea born in the pandemic while Wyle was sitting at home and not working. He would get emails from first responders thanking him for inspiring them to go into their careers or keeping them inspired.
“They were very confessional about how hard it was, what they were going through, and what they were seeing,” Wyle says. “I thought to myself, man, there may be more stories to tell here.”
Wyle, along with Gemmill and fellow former ER producer John Wells, got together and soon realized they all had the same feeling: the pandemic changed everything in healthcare.
“There was a sort of B.C. and A.D. aspect when it came to medicine, and we needed to start investigating what the other side of that demarcation looks like, specifically for the practitioners who have been on duty the entire time, the toll that it’s taken, and the fragility of the system,” Wyle says.
Dr. Joe Sachs, a board-certified emergency room physician, is a technical advisor, writer, and producer on The Pitt (and was on ER too).
“[Sachs] set up a series of interviews with just about every expert from every aspect of the healthcare system that you can imagine,” Wyle says. “One of the first questions we asked is: what isn’t on TV that you think should be on TV, and what in your job specifically would you love to have mentioned?”
Wyle, who was on ER for most of his 20s and 30s, has made himself available and as much of an open book as possible for the young cast of The Pitt. “It’s tricky; you don’t want to sound like an old fuddy duddy know-it-all,” he says. He is happy to provide any advice and tips, but he calls The Pitt cast a “pretty sophisticated bunch.”
“I was really surprised and impressed at how quickly they hit the ground running,” he says. “I think back at my old castmates on ER, and I realized we were all probably the class clowns at our school.”
The Pitt cast is made up of what Wyle calls “probably the top students” at their schools who “hated the class clown.”
“Most of the time, I try not to embarrass myself by telling what I think they think of as dad jokes,” he says.
Wyle and The Pitt’s creators did talk to Pittsburgh doctors while creating and filming the show. While Wyle himself wasn’t able to get much sightseeing done while filming in the city for the first season, he plans to visit ER castmate Ming Na Wen’s family’s restaurant, the Chinatown Inn, on Third Ave. downtown.
On Feb. 10, he returned to visit Allegheny General and met with staff, who called the show “enormously realistic.”
“Hopefully [that will] grease the wheels to allow us to come back for a season two,” Wyle tells City Paper.
The Pitt is currently streaming on HBO Max.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.
