‘The Pitt’, Noah Wyle & Katherine LaNasa Emmy Panel: Notes On The Season

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit.

As you might have heard, especially if you are a Television Academy member like me, final Emmy voting begins Monday, and for the first time ever the Academy is starting it off with a bang, its own Woodstock, or shall I say “Televerse,” which lets studios, networks and streamers loose on its members with panel after panel after panel of nominated stars, writers, directors and artisans. All are wanting that last shot to make their case before the casting of ballots — or in some cases it is simply a free screening of a TV episode or show (which is free anyway on the Academy’s digital platform) — or via panels that explore various aspects of the industry today or have a gimmick like Henry Winkler conducting an acting class ($40 to get into that one). Televerse started Thursday and runs through Saturday, culminating with the Television Hall of Fame ceremony (at the very same J.W. Marriott where Televerse takes place) featuring, among others, Winkler himself being inducted.

Also this weekend, Deadline is teaming with Apple TV+ for a big panel at SAG on The Studio that I will be moderating with Seth Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Kathryn Hahn and more, followed by a reception. On Sunday, Deadline is partnering with HBO Max for the Emmy nominations leader’s now annual event highlighting all it Emmy nominees with huge panels so no HBO Max nominee is left out. Among them will be one for The Pitt.

However, not to be outdone during this final push for Emmy glory, I got to The Pitt first on Monday at the Motion Picture & Television Fund campus in Woodland Hills, with a packed reception followed by Q&A I moderated with stars Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa and creator/executive producer R. Scott Gemmill. Our conversation took place in front of TV Academy members, residents of MPTF and was also livestreamed to residents who couldn’t join us in the theater which is often busy during various awards seasons with new movie screenings, and for this Emmy season TV screenings, such as the first-season finale of The Pitt which played after the panel. (Coming on Tuesday will be Adam Scott for a Q&A preceding the finale of Severance.)

It is so nice the industry doesn’t forget about MPTF (where I have often visited and even co-authored two books on it), and how appropriate to have The Pitt at a venue that is also a hospital since this show hits close to home. It received 13 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Wyle, and Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for LaNasa. Thanks to MPTF president and CEO Bob Beitcher for inviting me to participate.

Wyle, who was nominated five times previously as Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his work as the young doctor John Carter in ER, revealed that the original idea for the new series (which of course significantly included ER veteran John Wells, nominated for directing the pilot this year, as well as being an EP) was to bring Wyle back as Carter. “Initially, that is where this was sort of born in the pandemic, with a desire to sort of tell a different story than we’ve told before with ER, but about a very contemporary issue, which is what was unfolding during the pandemic, and it seemed like the most appropriate delivery system would be to revisit the old character and sort of walk it through that way, and then that became a nonstarter, and gratefully so, because a lot of this is sort of telling the story fresh, without any attendant baggage or backstory, and really focus it on what we want it to do,” Wyle told me of the decision to create a new character, Dr. Michael Rabinovitch aka Robby, whose emotional journey is as intense as it gets, a long way from the affable Carter. As Wyle describes him: “He’s drowning.”

Thus The Pitt, which takes place in a Pittsburgh trauma center right there in the emergency room, with the entire season’s 15 episodes each taking place in one specific hour during the course of a single day between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. And being on HBO and its streaming component HBO Max allows for realism they couldn’t do on NBC during the ER days decades ago. “Yeah, I mean, this is very freeing for us. It’s a new format. I did not work on a streaming show (before),” Gemmill, another veteran of ER said. “There’s a lot more leeway with language and some of the procedures we show, but at the end of the day it’s still stories about people in conditions and how they interact with each other, and doing the 15 hours in one day. I just feel like we tried to do so many things differently for us so that the show felt different, and I hope we achieved that.” Gemmill told me they have already shot five episodes of season two, written eight scripts so far, and it will all be set on the fourth of July. You can expect medical fireworks to be sure.

LaNasa, a cancer survivor herself, discussed how that experience informed the way she approaches playing Dana, the Charge nurse. “I really wanted to honor the people that treated me with Dana. It was very spiritual to me, you know, that I felt like I was having a hard time getting a job, and then going through the cancer, it was a rough period, and finally getting this job was really like a testament of faith. It was really beautiful, and it has been just one of the best experiences of my life. I feel so grateful,” she said.

LaNasa also explained that very black eye she got in episode 9 when a disgruntled patient socked her smack in the face. It was a very unglamorous look for the remaining six episodes to be sure, but she was game. I asked if that kind of violence against medical professionals came up in her research for the role. “You know, I didn’t get to talk to them about violence too much, but I did keep talking about Kathy Garvin, who my character, in some ways, was loosely based on, and I went to Pittsburgh County, and she said, Yeah, that they all get kicked. They all get hit. They all get punched. That’s part of it, you know?”

The makeup the black eye required was just a small part of the job of the Emmy-nominated makeup and prosthetic teams that do remarkable work in keeping it all so graphically real, something also not possible in this kind of detail on ER and other network hospital shows. “You know, we always had to stop at a certain point on ER,” said Wyle. “Standards and Practices would only allow us to show certain things, and in order to really capture the reality of the environment, that was one of the aspects we wanted to push the envelope on, and the technicians and the equipment have gotten a lot more sophisticated from the old days. So, the photorealism that we’re able to employ is really uncanny. Everything from a full chest cavity that has, inside of it, a heart that beats because of the puppeteer under the gurney who’s beating it, and then lungs that are beating in time that another puppeteer is working, with somebody else who’s squirting fluids through tubing. All of it working in concert with the actors, all of it resettable so that we could shoot take two, take three.”

“And then, you know, I think the most impressive one of them all was the delivery scene that we did last year, where this lovely actress was basically sitting in a chair like I am, and her entire belly was a prosthetic. Her legs were prosthetic, and if you’ve seen the scene, everything else that you saw was a prosthetic, but as an actor, I’ve never been able to not act more. Everything I said I was doing during the delivery of that baby, I was actually doing, and the baby that came out was a robot that was swimming, taking a dive … It’s so graphically real, that the immersion that allows the performers is an eye-opening experience.”

At that point I admitted to them all that as a “class A hypochondriac” I had to force myself to get through the first couple of episodes. It was a shock to the system, but the payoff for the whole season was so extraordinary I had to get over my squeamishness.

But really, even harder for me to take these days is the fact that the health care system in America is in a crisis mode, and a show that aims for such realism like The Pitt has to be one step ahead of the headlines. It’s important. We live in a country where the whole system is under attack, lifelong medical heroes like Anthony Fauci endure online threats on their lives, and just the other day a gunman tried to shoot up the CDC and killed a police officer who was protecting it.

Wyle, who also is a writer on the show as well as a producer in addition to starring (and will be directing in Season 2), is well aware of the challenge. “It’s a great question. You know, we spend a lot of time on it,” he said. “We have a great team of technical advisors, led by Dr. Joe Sachs (whose script for the episode “2:00 pm” earned one of the series’ two Emmy writing nominations), who reaches out to all these different spheres of healthcare. We meet with experts, and they tell us, you know, what it looks like from their vantage point, and then we ask them to look into their crystal ball and say what’s the world going to look like in 10 months when these shows air? And they have worst-case scenarios, and they have contingency plans for that, and we ask them, what would they like to see on television, and what would be of use to them in their work, and those become our storylines. But that was a year and a half ago. Things were changing relatively slowly, you could make these kind of predictions. It’s almost impossible now, I would imagine, to guess what the world’s going to look like in 10 months, but we’re doing the best we can.”

I was tempted to ask Wyle for medical advice since he has been at this TV doctor game for about 30 years between ER and now The Pitt. I wondered if people do confuse him with the real deal? “Tonight or in general? What’s frightening is the way that I’ve answered the question with increasing confidence. That’s what we should be more concerned about, not being delusional into thinking I can help them. My delusion is in thinking that I can,” he laughed. “You know, it’s been a great conversation icebreaker for now almost 30 years. For 30 years, I’ve been able to watch changes in healthcare, but more importantly, though, relationships with people in that sphere, and I just can’t say enough how high of a pedestal I hold them on, we should all hold them on. You know, they are selfless, they are tireless, but they aren’t inhuman. Like, they are fragile, and this is an unsustainable situation. So, the show’s intention was to put the spotlight back on the people that we need in those jobs for the next crisis, and right now, those ranks are thinning, and their morale is flagging. So, to show them in a heroic light and hopefully inspire a new generation to want to go into this line of work is also part of the goal.”

Among those in the audience was Wyle’s mother Marty, a well-known fixture around MPTF and someone who clearly inspired her son in this role. “My mother. That’s where it all started. My mom is a hero in my life,” Wyle said, becoming emotional as he pointed her out. “My mother’s been a nurse for 40 years (for much of that time at Kaiser). She keeps her license up. She just celebrated her 80^th birthday recently, and she never stops doing that.”