If you’re anything like me, you’ve consumed a LOT of books, film, television, music, video games, and [insert other media of choice] over the course of your lifetime.
I’ve been on this planet nearly 50 years, and in basically all of that time, I’ve been a junkie for the stuff.
I can’t rattle off details of my own life in nearly as much detail as I can the particulars of a television show I consumed multiple times over the course of my childhood.
That Disney trip when I was six? Pretty fuzzy.
But that kid with melting chocolate smeared all over their face having consumed the gooiest cookie imaginable in the company of one noted thespian Cookie Monster on “Sesame Street” … that visceral image will probably be with me on my death bed.
I think realizing this fact as an adult in part helped me come out of my shell, meet a wonderful woman, get into adventures, and even begin raising kids … leading to even more adventures!
One’s own life should be more memorable than a TV character’s, yeah?
“Yeah, I know James Bond just jumped out of a plane. But I changed my kid out of a mega-ton poopy diaper. Let’s see him do THAT!”
But I do love me some media. And personally, I tend to gravitate toward fiction because I like storytelling.
I like the mere concept of it, of a yarn-spinner with a rapt audience telling tall tales of adventure and excitement.
But I also enjoy the craft of it, peeling back some of the layers and figuring out the how and why of what eventually turned up in a story.
“The Pitt” offers a different spin on the standard hospital procedure we’ve all seen before, shifting the narrative into roughly hour-long episodes that correlate to the passage of hours over a particularly intense shift in an emergency unit of a hospital in the Pittsburgh area (hence “The Pitt”).
15 episodes in a season of the show = 15 straight hours at a crazy-town period of time at this hospital.
The format here is distinct as most shows go, and it adds to the urgency. If someone comes in with a moderate problem in Hour 1, and then you see it devolve into a more serious issue by Hour 4, you’re at that point invested in seeing the patient come through. Partly for their own sake, of course, but more often for the sakes of the doctors and nurses doing their best to provide good care to the people around them.
Over 40-plus odd years of watching movies and television, reading, listening to music, and playing games, I’ve certainly seen things get repeated a fair bit.
So, something new makes an impression.
“The Pitt,” now very much highly lauded by critics and the awards shows, elevates previous attempts at the genre such as “E.R.” through its special structure. That’s enough to make the show an easy recommendation.
But for me, a particular storyline in Season 1 is what sunk its talons into me and convinced me this is one of the most important shows on television, and again, it was because it provided me something new.
It answered the question, “How do we say goodbye?”
Continue reading Why ‘The Pitt’ deserves all of its flowers … and more
