Kai Ryssdal

That's our Scott Gemmel.

He created The Pit.

He's also the showrunner and a writer and an executive producer of that show, along with Noah Wiley and John Wells, both of whom he worked with on ER way, way back in the day.

If you're not watching, full disclosure, I am.

The Pit is a medical drama on HBO Max.

It happens in real time.

Each episode is a single hour of a shift in the emergency room.

New episodes drop on Thursdays, if you're looking for something to watch, by the way.

Scott Gemmel and I sat down in the show's writer room.

There's so much in here I want to talk about.

Let's talk about that thing behind you, first of all.

It looks for all the world like an architectural drawing, like actual plans for a hospital ER, except clearly it's for the show.

Yep.

And you've got, I guess, characters and people and places and all sorts of things on multicolored stickies up there.

Yeah.

What's going on there?

This is how we plan out our show.

We have to track everyone, where they are.

These are all patients.

You can see they've all got tags on them that also tell which episode they're in.