Right now, The Pitt is the show of the moment. Every week since early January, millions of viewers have been tuning into the show’s second season to watch the nurses and doctors of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center save lives and cure patients on a very hectic and dramatic Fourth of July. The Pitt is something of an anomaly in today’s television landscape in that, during its first season, it became a hit through positive word-of-mouth and a steadily growing week-to-week audience. It was given the chance to find its footing and reach viewers, and now it’s already one of the biggest shows of the year.
However, there’s also little question that The Pitt got a boost from a show that came before it. Medical dramas are almost as old as television itself, and more often than not, they follow a familiar formula of rotating patients and doctors, high-stakes cases, and plenty of blood. The Pitt found a way to stand out with its real-time format, but it still has a lot in common with its predecessors in the genre — especially ER, which is now seeing a surge in viewership on streaming. Over 30 years after it premiered, the Michael Crichton-created drama is still very much worth a watch.
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‘ER’ Brought Intense Realism to the TV Medical Drama
Before Noah Wyle was The Pitt‘s experienced and traumatized Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, he was ER‘s newbie, Dr. John Carter. The acclaimed drama first began in 1994 and tracked both the professional and personal lives of the many doctors and nurses who roamed the halls of Cook County General Hospital. Looking back on ER today, one can see shades of several present-day medical dramas, including Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med, though those shows might not have been created without ER paving the way. The series redefined what a primetime medical procedural could be, depicting the intensity of a high-volume emergency room with unflinching realism.
ER was ambitious right from the start, as it was born from a screenplay Crichton wrote that was then translated into a two-hour pilot. It introduced its core cast, led by Anthony Edwards‘ Dr. Mark Greene, and plunged them right into a packed 24 hours within the hospital, expertly combining devastating medical cases and character-driven drama. This would soon become ER‘s defining formula, best exemplified by the County General set itself. In one room, you could find Greene and Carter working to save someone’s life, while the next one over would see Dr. Doug Ross (a pre-big-break George Clooney) sharing a private moment with Nurse Carol Hathaway (Julianna Margulies).
ER is still considered one of the best medical dramas ever, but for a time, its significance for younger generations seemed overshadowed by the soapier antics of shows like Grey’s Anatomy. However, The Pitt has revived interest in ER, with the two shows occupying opposite ends of HBO Max’s daily Top 10 Series chart — #1 and #10, respectively — at the time of writing. They make good companions, both because of their emergency medicine settings and their creative teams. In addition to Wyle’s onscreen roles on both shows, The Pitt was created by former ER producer R. Scott Gemmill and is produced by John Wells, who served as the showrunner for ER‘s first six seasons and as an executive producer for the whole run.
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Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
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Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Ten questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s Anatomy
🔬House
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🩺Scrubs
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01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
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02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
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03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
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04
How do you actually perform under extreme pressure? The worst shifts reveal things about you that the good ones never will.
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05
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
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06
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
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07
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
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08
What kind of medical work do you find most compelling? What draws your attention when you walk through those doors matters.
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09
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
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10
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
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Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
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The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown. The Pitt doesn’t romanticise the work — it puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away. You are someone who needs their work to be real, who finds meaning not in the drama surrounding medicine but in medicine itself, and who has made peace with the fact that this job will take from you constantly and give back in ways that are harder to name. You don’t need the chaos to be aestheticised. You need it to be honest. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center is exactly that — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
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ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential. County General is built on the shoulders of people who show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without requiring the job to be anything other than what it is. You care deeply about patients as individual human beings, you believe in the system even when it fails you, and you understand that emergency medicine at its core is about holding the line between order and chaos for just long enough. ER is television about endurance, and you have it.
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Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door. Grey Sloan is a hospital where the personal and the professional are permanently, chaotically entangled, and where that entanglement produces both the greatest disasters and the most remarkable saves. You are someone who feels things fully, who forms deep attachments to the people you work with, and who understands that the most extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection. It’s messy here. You would not have it any other way.
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House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else. Not the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it — but the case as a puzzle, the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one. Princeton-Plainsboro is a hospital that exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind, and everyone around that mind is there because they are smart enough and stubborn enough to keep up. You work best when the stakes are highest, when the standard answer is wrong, and when the only way forward is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you would do here.
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Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure, and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time. Sacred Heart is a hospital where the laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable — where a terrible joke can get you through a terrible moment, and where the most ridiculous people are also, on their best days, remarkably good doctors. You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field. You lean on the people around you and you let them lean back. Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job — and you are still very much in the middle of that process, which is exactly right.
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‘ER’ Takes Its Characters Beyond the Hospital, but Always Keeps Its Heart Intact
Noah Wyle’s John Carter, Sherry Stringfield’s Susan, Anthony Edwards’ Mark, George Clooney’s Doug, and Eriq La Salle’s Peter in a promo shot for ERImage via NBC
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Much has been said about The Pitt‘s similarities to ER — in fact, the Crichton estate has sued over the allegation that it grew from an ER reboot that never came to pass — but there are many things that set the two shows apart. Most notably, ER takes its doctors outside the eponymous department, going up to the surgical wing and into their houses. It stands as a sharp reminder that while these people are everyday heroes capable of saving lives without breaking a sweat, they’re also very human. They face mental health crises — Carol is brought into the hospital after a suicide attempt in the very first episode — and relationship troubles just like anyone else.
Because several characters stick around for multiple seasons, viewers truly get invested in their lives, making their trials and tribulations even more impactful. Greene’s eventual departure after spending years as County General’s most reliable doctor is made all the more emotional thanks to the years spent with him, and Carter’s evolution from baby-faced rookie to hardened ER vet is rewarding. Though ER somewhat suffered from its longevity — when a character both loses a limb via helicopter and then is later killed by one, it’s hard not to feel like the shark has been jumped — it always kept its core values intact.
This meant honoring healthcare workers, giving grace to patients, and delivering non-stop drama. At its best, ER could feature storylines that felt devastatingly real, yet utterly shocking, such as a standout Season 1 episode where Mark makes a fatal error when treating a woman in labor. Above all else, it was a fascinating peek into how an emergency room could function, and one that put equal stock in the tragedy and camaraderie that can thrive there. With The Pitt now reminding viewers how effective the medical drama can be, it’s the perfect time to revisit ER.
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