The only thing for certain on The Pitt is that nothing is for certain.
Controlled chaos is what keeps us tuning in every week, and the man usually controlling it onscreen — Noah Wyle’s ever-capable Dr. Robby — stepped off-camera literally to let the nurses’ story take center stage, while Wyle himself made his directing debut.
”I wanted to do it in the first season, but I wasn’t sure if it would be a distraction or an impediment to the creative process. I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize what we were trying to do,” he tells Gold Derby. “This was not intended to be an ego stroke for me or to see how many hyphenates I could have. It was just about how much hands-on storytelling I could involve myself in as long as it was added value to the process.”
Season 2 proved the right time to finally step behind the camera, he says. “This year it felt like it would be a good fit and that the crew and the cast were really receptive to it,” he explains. “It was an episode that focused a little bit more on the nurses than the doctors. It was a great, fun story to tell, so I just jumped at it.”
The episode titled “12:00 PM” centers the nurses as they deal with the usual roller-coaster ride that is a day at PTMC — as Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell) sagely advises the medical students, “Always listen to the nurses. They run the ER. We just try to stay out of their way.”
But while The Pitt’s doctors usually pull off heroic saves, this episode saw them suffer a rare, painful loss — fan favorite and frequent flyer Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.). His death ripples across the ER, impacting the nurses and doctors alike. Turns out it wasn’t an easy decision in the writers’ room, either.
“There was a big debate about where he should die, and I was on the side of no,” says writer and executive story editor Valerie Chu in The Pitt‘s official post-show podcast.
“We didn’t know if we wanted to kill him off, because what I love about our process is we’re never doing anything for dramatic purposes. We didn’t want to just throw in a death for no reason.”
But after talking with the nurses who consult on the show about what it’s like for them working with unhoused patients, Chu says the decision ultimately dovetailed with the episode being nurse-focused. “It was one of those things we sort of stumbled on, like those happy accidents that happen creatively,” explains Chu. “I can’t say that it was necessarily planned, but it ended up working out really well, because you see how every nurse is affected by their passing. They’re the ones checking on them. They’re the ones contacting family, trying their hardest to find anyone who might have known this person who would care about their passing. It’s just this idea that I really loved that we set up the mystery of who was this person. We’ve seen them every day or every other day or frequently for the last few years, and we don’t know who they are. And then you find out at the end of the episode that Robby, during the slow night, got the whole story.”
This episode also highlights the long-simmering tension between Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) and Dr. Robby, who still hasn’t forgiven Langdon for the events of Season 1, which saw him abusing drugs — and then turning to Katherine LaNasa’s character, Dana, for support. “I think Dana is a wise old mother that has seen a lot, and kids mess up,” says LaNasa in the podcast. “Dr. Robby doesn’t have any kids. He has one stepson. So he doesn’t really know the journey that you take with children as they become young adults. And I think Dana believes in redemption. … And I think she wants Robby to give him a second chance. But this is torture.”
In the podcast, Chu explains that, although the show doesn’t highlight specific characters episode to episode, “12:00 PM” did present a unique opportunity to showcase Dana. “I wanted to show how she really is the mother hen of this group,” says Chu. “And on the other hand, it felt like after six hours, we hadn’t really gotten a sense of Langdon’s last 10 months.”
So the two characters returned to the kitchen — recalling the scene from the finale of Season 1 — where Langdon is trying to figure out what Dana knows about his misdeeds. “Noah and I talked about having that same sort of [blocking], him, leaning over at the sink as she’s trying to make coffee,” says Chu. “We got to know a bit more about Langdon but also we get to see Dana in her finest moments, and also another peek behind the curtain in terms of where she is with her PTSD in terms of the patient who punched her.”
Chu says she rarely cries on set, but she broke down when LaNasa is wiping down Louie’s body. “I think it was a combination of her humanity cleaning up the body, and you see that she’s lived through so much with this patient,” she says. “We talked a lot in the room about how her exterior and her toughness is almost like she’s calcified this season, but then you get little peeks of light coming through.”
Chu credits Wyle’s direction as well for handling the scene so well.
“I remember when Noah called ‘cut’ he turned around, looked at me, and he was amused that I was that I was crying,” she recalls. “But that was the power of his direction.”
Wyle says his experience on the set in the first season gave him all the preparation he needed. “Certainly knowledge of the story, the overall story — I know all the characters, I know all the actors, I know the set, I know the crew, I know what the intention of the script of the moment was when we broke it in the room, what we were trying to accomplish there, and a pretty good communicator of how to get it on camera on the other end,” he says. I think it’s just familiarity with all the players.”
Ever humble, Wyle refuses to evaluate his own performance as a director. “You’d have to ask everybody else how it went,” he says. “I thought it went great.”
