After 11 seasons on ER, Noah Wyle thought he was finished with medical dramas: "I spent 15 years avoiding — actively avoiding — walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road." But then COVID happened, and he felt compelled to tell more of these stories. He spoke with Dave Davies about the making of The Pitt, the medical jargon, and his mom's feedback on the show. Also, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Poems by Dorothy Parker and The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Noah Wyle and what is 'The Pit' about?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, Noah Wiley, is an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series, The Pit, which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room.
Wendell Stone, 52, Chief Rigger from Pit Fest. Isolated trauma to the left chest when a speaker tower came down on him. Looks like multiple rib fractures. Pulse 110, BP 130 over 85, decent stats at 96, 50th bent in the field. Got it?
How we doing, Mr. Stone? Mr. Stone's my dad. It's just Stone.
The pit has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And it's gained a following of real-life emergency room doctors who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wiley is a veteran of stage, screen, and television who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs.
He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series ER for most of its 15 seasons, where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series Falling Skies and The Librarians and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organization's Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World.
The Pit is now wrapping up its 15-episode run and has been renewed for a second season – Noah Wiley, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character, maybe I didn't, he's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And, you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization, and it's a teaching hospital.
So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced, residents in training and medical students, on their first day, I believe, in their rotation as this thing begins. So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character, Dr. Robbie.
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Chapter 2: What makes 'The Pit' medically authentic and how was it produced?
Chapter 3: How does Noah Wyle describe his character Dr. Robbie Rabinovich?
I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners, post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And it's taken a toll on him.
He's seen a lot and done a lot. He's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that.
Right. And things – he runs into some rough seas. You know, he's surrounded by these young medical students. And I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific.
The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally. We found actors in Australia. We found them in England.
We found them on the East Coast, West Coast. But we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.
And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance. And we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in.
And then you hear this one, two, three as the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney. And then the team gets to work. Let's listen.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the cast face during casting and rehearsals?
23-year-old Ben Kemper, no helmet, got doored riding an e-scooter. Neck versus handlebar, then face planted to the pavement. Obvious facial fractures, but alert and oriented with good vitals.
Here we go. One, two, three. That's probably from the nosebleed. Short rapid rhino, please.
Tachy at 120, pulse ox borderline at 90.
We'll buy it 15 liters for now.
Neck contusion, larynx shifted to the right, no crepitus.
Four morphine. I'm gonna stick something in your nose to stop the bleeding.
No hemotimpanum.
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Chapter 5: How does the show portray intense medical scenes and technical jargon?
Better.
What's up?
Good vitals, A&O, let's have a look.
And that's a scene from The Pit where our guest Noah Wiley is a star.
Awfully intense. It's tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Laforte 3 floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.
Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into this series?
I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board certified emergency room physician.
He was a technical advisor and a writer on ER, and he is with us again. And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes.
He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.
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Chapter 6: What inspired the creation of 'The Pit' during the COVID pandemic?
Right, right. You know, I should just mention, it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of ER, has sued alleging that The Pit is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean one of the differences between the two shows is that The Pit is the entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER.
There's an hour – essentially in real time, an hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day. So that's the real distinction.
Very much so. Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road, and then it became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by we have.
You're the lead attending in this emergency room. And in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast, which includes a lot of, you know, much younger actors. Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people learning the craft?
In a way, you know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and to re-familiarize myself with how much has changed in health care, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras.
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Chapter 7: How does Noah Wyle reflect on returning to medical drama after ER?
And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself and I ate lunch by myself. Eight together, the R2s and 3s ate together.
That's fourth-year residents, second-year residents.
Second-year residents, fourth-year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know. And the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth. And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything.
But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over.
So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before, yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.
Was there a wrap party after you finished taping in which those barriers broke down or –
Yeah, to a degree. I mean, I don't stand on ceremony when I work and I try to create as much of an egalitarian and democratic environment as possible. And so I try to erase numbers on call sheets and I try to erase barriers between foreground and background or cast and crew and try to call the whole thing company and get everybody to buy into the same thing. And it's very hard to do that.
It's very rare that you're successful. This one was the stars aligned beautifully. Everybody just jumped in. Which made it a real pleasure.
You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate.
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Chapter 8: How are emotional and ethical challenges depicted in the show?
And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.
The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is – I mentioned before that this series kind of the germ of it began during COVID when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robbie – During COVID, lost a mentor, another doctor.
And I believe this day that is the focus of the series is the anniversary of his death, right? Correct. We learned that early on. And then you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks, his PTSD, if you will, is portrayed in the show?
This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with.
He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home. But today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them.
And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.
And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode. in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four-year-old.
I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed. And she finishes, and I said, my goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. I said, well, this one wasn't either.
And she said, but it felt real. And it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that? And she said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me.
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