The most satisfying network TV drama in years doesn’t air on a TV network. With its second season about to begin streaming on HBO Max, The Pitt still strikes me as something of an ungainly hybrid between binge-era storytelling and the slow drip of a weekly network show. But like a traditional TV series, The Pitt’s first season got better as it went, particularly once the introduction of a storyline about a devastating mass shooting gave more weight to its real-time format. Friends and co-workers have become obsessed—Slate now has its own #pittheads Slack channel devoted to chatter about what Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby and Co. are up to this week—and that feeling of fandom is infectious, especially with a show where it feels organic and not mandated by a pummeling promotional campaign.
The Pitt’s second season is still chained to a real-time, single-location format that frustrates the conventions of TV storytelling, to the extent that when, after several episodes of buildup, Dr. Mel (Taylor Dearden) gets called away to testify in a malpractice deposition, she simply vanishes from the screen for the rest of the hour, lest the cameras stray farther from the E.R. than the ambulance bay. But it’s otherwise so indebted to the old-school rhythms of network TV that even its “hour-long” episodes tend to run about 40 minutes and change, as if they’re leaving room for commercial breaks to fill out the time slot. (That must have made it handy for TNT, which aired the entire first season last month, arguably putting The Pitt where it belonged all along.)
There is, however, still one feature of classic TV shows missing from the equation, something that would ground The Pitt more firmly in the tradition from which it descends and give fans a treat for tuning in week after week, rather than waiting months so they can swallow all 15 episodes in one big gulp: an old-school opening credits sequence.
These days, not even network shows have opening credits. At best, you get a quick shot of the title and a few seconds of upbeat music to mark the transition from the cold open to the first act. But without the fixed boundaries of a linear time slot, there’s no reason The Pitt can’t give us 60 or even 90 seconds of slo-mo shots of the cast every week, paired to a catchy Mike Post theme song.
I know, we live in a “Skip Intro” world. But consider how episodes of The Pitt currently begin, with a quick fade up from blackness and a desultory title card reading something like “Hour 2: 8:00 a.m.” Is that any way to reward an audience for carving an hour out of their busy lives every week? Shouldn’t the beginning of each frenzied episode give each member of the sprawling ensemble cast their own iconic moment, even if it’s just a dramatic turn of the head, so that we don’t have to do a Google Image search just to figure out who plays who? It’s been 17 years since ER went off the air, and at least a few more than that since the last time I watched an episode, and yet I can instantly conjure the image of a triumphant Peter Benton punching the air with one fist, overlaid with the words “and Eriq La Salle.”
An opening credits sequence doesn’t just give the cast and creators their due. It tells you you’re in the right place, and it lends viewing a sense of occasion. When my family and I huddled around an iPad to watch the Stranger Things finale on New Year’s Eve, no one reached for the screen to skip past the slow assemblage of letters that spell out the show’s title, because we wanted to savor, just for a few seconds more, the shared experience, the faint hint of ritual.
HBO—and here I mean the network proper, not its many-named streaming subsidiary—is one of the few places where opening credits still have room to work their magic. Ramin Djawadi’s Game of Thrones theme is so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness that even a few notes are enough to stir up feelings of excitement, as its brief, tongue-in-cheek invocation in the upcoming spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms swiftly demonstrates. Sure, an opening roll call might disrupt The Pitt’s commitment to minute-by-minute realism, but the show could use an occasional break from the nonstop chaos, a reminder that, for all the onscreen trauma, we’re entering a world that’s meant to take us away from our troubles, not underline them. (It also makes a space for one of TV’s most distinctive features, the pre-credits stinger, or what I have come to call the “little funny.”)
An enterprising Pitt fan has already taken up the call, mocking up an ER-style opening that planted the cast’s names in my head more effectively in 50 seconds than 15 episodes of white-on-black text have managed thus far, and underscoring just how well Noah Wyle serves that long-practiced look of calmed concern. But every one of The Pitt’s actors deserves the same form of blue-tinged immortality, to have some defining moment repeated week after week to a driving synthesizer beat. Something that says, every week at 9 p.m./6 p.m. Pacific: It’s Pitt time.