Perhaps now is the right time to reveal that, concurrent with The Pitt‘s second season, I’ve been watching the show’s spiritual successor for the first time. While I caught a few episodes of ER here or there in my youth, I’d never actually sat down to consume all 15 seasons and 331 episodes of the hospital drama that put Noah Wyle on the map as an iconic fictional healthcare provider.
The experience of watching five seasons and counting of ER has been… a bit of a slog. Following a fresh (for its time) and creative first season, the series settles in to standard network schlock soon after, despite Wyle and company’s undeniable charms and (increasingly occasional) commitment to medical accuracy. But the watch has also produced several moments of incidental assonance with The Pitt season 2. One such moment arrives in ER season 5 episode 6 “Stuck on You” when surgeon Dr. Peter Benton speaks to deaf colleague Dr. Lisa Parks through her interpreter.
“Dr. Parks asks that when you speak to her you look directly at her so she can read your lips,” the woman cheerily tells Dr. Benton, who immediately works to correct his behavior.
“Stuck on You” premiered on November 5, 1998. Now, some 27 years later, ER doctors in Noah Wyle-starring medical dramas still need a helpful reminder now and then. Even in an environment that brings the nurse Donnies of the world into regular contact with a diverse cross-section of human beings and their medical conditions, there’s always something new to learn…even if some of your peers learned it nearly three decades ago.
Learning experiences abound in “10:00 AM” and not every doctor in the Pitt acquits themself capably. Despite his early status as the med student golden boy, Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) commits the trauma room’s cardinal sin by hastily removing a foreign body from a living person. The foreign body in this case is a shard of glass and the living person is Vince Cole, a 23-year-old parkour artist who fell through the skylight of a floral shop. Turns out that shard of glass was load-bearing and blood immediately begins to rush out form the wound, stopped only by an impossibly cool and somehow-not-science-fiction tool that injects microscopic sponges into the human body. Of course, Ogilvie wouldn’t have even been in that situation if radiology didn’t miss the obvious foreign object in their initial scan. Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) chalks it all up to “first week in July syndrome.”
Elsewhere in the ER, our beloved Pitt-sters continue to take L after L. Santos (Isa Briones), who is already in danger of repeating her R2 year, can’t focus during an examination of a patient alongside Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden). It falls to Mel, herself distracted by her incoming deposition (“Yeah, still counting down the hours. There are five left if you were wondering,” she helpfully notes for the audience), to make the diagnosis of bulimia, which often goes unrecognized in Black female patients.
