Dr. Elizabeth Ferreira, consultant on “The Pitt,” said her husband of seven years only realized what she meant when she said she intubates patients at work after watching the show.
“‘That’s what you do?’” Ferreira said, mimicking his shock.
On Feb. 23, USC Visions and Voices hosted its first Arts + Health Symposium, where researchers, creatives and medical experts discussed how art and medicine intersect in everyday life. The event featured a fireside chat with showrunners and stars of “The Pitt,” explaining how the stories of real doctors and nurses inform the show’s captivating narrative.
“The show is really, at heart, an empathy generator,” Wyle said.
Noah Wyle, who plays protagonist Dr. Robinavitch, said medical practitioners feel “seen and heard” through the show’s realistic portrayal of working in an emergency room. Wyle also said family and friends better understood and empathized with what their medical worker loved ones go through every day.
Ferreira said she saw her nurses come out of burnout as they watched themselves be represented in a show. The simple act of naming one of the nurses “Princess,” for instance, played a big part in properly portraying the Filipino and Hispanic nursing community, as the name is prevalent in their cultures. She said depicting nurses’ struggles, especially experiencing loneliness during the COVID pandemic, to a global audience gives their hard work visibility.
“[Viewers] are tuning in to be reminded that there’s dedicated, intelligent, compassionate, complex people that are out there…compartmentalizing their own trauma to [help others], and oftentimes don’t get any of the credit that they deserve,” Wyle said.
Kate Folb, director of Hollywood, Health & Society medical consulting program under the Norman Lear Center, said the center researched and discovered how the show shifted audience attitudes, moving them to action. She said one in four viewers who finished the organ donation plot, and over a third of audiences who watched the end-of-life storyline, said they researched these topics after watching. This was two to three times more often than non-viewers. Ninety percent of viewers said they were now more aware of understaffing issues after the show aired as well.
Executive producer R. Scott Gemmill said the show can tell these stories because the showrunners talk directly to medical practitioners, asking them about problems people outside the hospital do not know about.
Cole said the Pitt showrunners had over 30 consultations with medical experts across the span of their two seasons. Wyle added that the cast went to a medical boot camp before filming season one, exposing themselves to what real emergency doctors go through daily.
As a result of these consultations, Gemmill said the show is able to touch on relevant issues medical professionals face constantly. The show touched on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the hospital, sexual assault, cyberattacks and racial disparities because these were problems real nurses and doctors faced in the last year.
Writer Simran Baidwan also said medical accuracy helped shape important plotpoints, sharing that characters would die within two to three episodes because certain health complications will kill a patient in two to three hours in real life.
“All of these nuances playing together and having to happen simultaneously is live theater,” Baidwan said.
To achieve visual accuracy, Ferreira said it takes weeks, sometimes months, of preparation to portray operations in a scene. The prosthetics and makeup department must research which organs to sculpt and how they are supposed to move. Doctors like Ferreira have to choreograph operations, showing the cast how to hold a scalpel in a way that shows expertise or novitiate. On film days, puppeteers have to inflate and depress fake lungs under the operating table, while the cast has to execute precise choreography while capturing the anxiety of their characters.
Gemmill said he felt most fulfilled when real medical practitioners started recommending the show to friends.
There was then a need to continue telling honest stories for those who identified most with the show.
“We really want to do right by them,” Gemmill said, “So it’s very important for us to be a voice of the people that are involved in health care.”