Banner by Donna Cho

What Distinguishes “The Pitt”?

by Caitlin Cohen

I remember when my mom started watching Suits (2011), which would often prompt my dad to leave the room. Although my dad used to be a lawyer, he didn’t want to watch a show about lawyers, given that Suits does not accurately portray either his life or that of his colleagues. It was less a form of entertainment to him and more a reminder of his life for the last 20 years or so. He liked his job, but wanted to keep it at the office, not at home.  

Many healthcare workers face this same question: Is work always as riveting as it's portrayed in shows like Grey’s Anatomy or ER? Like my father, many pay little to no attention to shows like these, as it feels like a “parody” of sorts. Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, a pediatric emergency physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Children’s Hospital, believes that many of these shows have the potential to positively impact healthcare holistically. She believes that this genre of television is “trying to honor a day in the life of what you do for those who don't understand what you do.” 

 The show Dr. Owusu-Ansah is referring to is the five-time Emmy Award-winning HBO drama The Pitt (2025). Highlighted in its namesake, the show takes place in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her comment doesn’t come unsupported: Owusu-Ansah was a medical consultant for the premiere season, which aired in January 2025. The writers reached out to Owusu-Ansah due to her decades of expertise in emergency medicine as well as her extensive stay in the city of Pittsburgh. 

 In March 2024 (almost a year before the show’s premiere), Dr. Beth Hoffman, a friend who works with Hollywood, Health, and Society (HH&S), reached out to Owusu-Ansah about a unique position: a medical expert in the Emergency Department (ED) was needed to “talk about health care disparities in Pittsburgh.” Soon after accepting the position, HH&S contacted her to set up a Zoom call with the writer’s room.  

At the time of this interaction, Owusu-Ansah explained that the production wasn’t even “greenlighted to be a show yet.” Writing was still in its infancy, and the creators’ main non-negotiable was to tell stories through real-life accounts. Not only was her job to keep the authenticity of the show in check, but also to make sure the show was a reflection of her own experience, with real patients, such as “a girl who had a sickle cell pain crisis who was mistreated” and “a kid who had a THC ingestion.” Equally important as patient interaction was her individual story: being the only African-American pediatric ED physician in her department. She further evaluated this unique experience in her previous short film “In Good Hands,” which will soon be presented at the International Black Film Festival.  

 On January 9, 2025, the pilot of The Pitt premiered on HBO Max, not wasting any time to display the daunting realities healthcare workers face every day. One of the opening scenes pans to a saturated, overcrowded waiting room filled with patients and their families–a reminder that many hospitals still haven’t recovered five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with too many patients for too few beds. Owusu-Ansah, however, has a different outlook on this scene based on her experience: To her, what separates the ED from most other departments is that “other places can say no, because you don’t have insurance or you don’t have enough money.” This has persisted, as an “ongoing crisis,” even pre-COVID, and has been “highlighted by The Pitt.”  

As the show progresses, many curveballs are thrown at the healthcare team throughout the course of the shift. One of the most notable events toward the end of the season was a mass casualty incident at “Pittfest,” a fictional festival within the show. Dr. Owusu-Ansah further elaborated on the authenticity of this event, specifically noting that “a lot of people thought the MCI [Mass Casualty Incident] was over the top,” but that “we're having more and more of those types of events[…] Does it happen every day? No–but it's not unrealistic.” 

 With that being said, there were a few notable areas in which the show fell short. Owusu-Ansah notes the use of the derogatory term “sickler” by the healthcare workers for those with sickle-cell anemia. She also highlighted the stark “lack of allied health fields” present in the show, such as the patient care technicians (PCTs) and X-Ray technicians. 

These two weaknesses to her, however, are quite minor in comparison to the massive fallacies other medical dramas have portrayed, such as an alleged tachycardic (elevated heart rate) patient recording 62 beats per minute (BPM) on the monitor (normal heart rate for a healthy adult is 60-100 BPM), or less noticeable to non-health care providers, “a suction catheter in place of an intubation tube that’s taped wrong.” 

In addition, Dr. Owusu-Ansah took time to praise the cast and crew of The Pitt for their dedication to training for their respective roles. She noted that the cast participated in a medical bootcamp, with “three to five on-site emergency medicine physicians on the production site at all times.” In addition to verifying the accuracy of the script and actions taken in the show, the physicians demonstrated basic skills needed as a health care provider, such as “holding a laryngoscope” or “carrying out an ultrasound.” 

In a world preaching “work-life balance,” The Pitt gives society a brutal but much-needed reality check. As the Dean of Northeastern University’s School of Nursing, Amanda Choflet emphasizes that, “they’re just showing one shift–a lot of providers work three shifts in a row…[i]magine that level of stress three days in a row, four weeks a month, 12 months a year…” While many healthcare workers may avoid these shows due to much of their lives being saturated by them, others, like Dr. Owusu-Ansah, see it as an honor and gift that others can see and appreciate what they truly go through.