An innocent hero is yanked into a life-or-death problem and, despite massive odds against them, must overcome it using their wits. Many stories are about dudes or dudettes with problems. But the keys to this genre are ordinary people who are undeservingly pulled into the predicament and forced to react.

The 3 elements of a DUDE WITH A PROBLEM story are:

1) An innocent hero who is dragged into a mess without asking for it—or even aware of how he got involved.
2) A sudden event that thrusts our innocent(s) into the world of hurt—and it comes without warning.
3) A life or death battle is at stake—and the continued existence of an individual, family, group, or society is in question.

Caveat: The Pitt pilot is not a standard DWAP as Robby and the doctors trained for these intense situations; however, the unexpected gravity of the Covid pandemic and its aftermath have contributed to a sense of “innocents dragged into a mess not of their own making.”

Platform: HBO Max

TV Genre: Hourlong drama

Story DNA

Heroes: Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch and his team of ER doctors

Goal: To fulfill the Hippocratic Oath of medical ethics; in other words, to save lives

Obstacles: You name it: disease, accidents, abuse, human error, lack of proper materials and funding, bureaucracy—shall we go on?

Stakes: The lives of every single person that comes through the emergency room doors and the hearts of those that love them. But, hey, no pressure.

Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for the The Pitt TV Pilot

Opening Image

Dr. Robby (Noah Wylie) walks to the hospital through the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, blissfully unaware of the ambulance screaming behind him because he’s listening to extremely loud music. Robby pulls out his earbuds just as he enters the emergency room and we watch reality hit him like a sledgehammer: the ER is mobbed with people. At 7 in the morning. And he’s got 15 hours to go.

Theme Stated

The exhausted Dr. Jack Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) says “I must have had a reason at one time to keep coming back, but I can’t think of it right now.” Robby wryly replies, “Because this is the job that keeps on giving. Nightmares… ulcers… suicidal tendencies…” These physicians chose their careers because they wanted to make a difference, but the actual job is relentless, impossibly messy, and mostly heartbreaking, with just enough meaning and saved lives to raise one’s hopes—only to have them dashed again.

Set-Up

Robby glances at a photo on the wall, which we will later discover is Dr. Montgomery Adamson, Robby’s mentor who died during the Covid pandemic. Today is the fourth anniversary of his passing, a day that Robby usually takes off of work, so the other doctors are watching him carefully, knowing that Robby somehow still blames himself for Adamson’s death.

Robby’s first order of business is talking Abbot, the overnight attending physician, off the ledge. Literally. Abbot’s last patient, a vet who survived three overseas tours, died after being hit by a car in a crosswalk, and the despondent Abbot is on the roof, suspiciously close to the edge. Robby has a choice of how to respond and he goes for gentle and darkly humorous, a Save the Cat! moment that he (and we) will sorely need later in the day.

After this inauspicious beginning, Robby gets handed a set of new residents and med students to deal with, including the abnormally perky Dr. Melissa “Mel” King (Taylor Dearden) and Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez), who’s all of 20 years old but looks 16. The newbies get the briefest of orientations—their job is to make sure no one dies in the waiting room—before they are thrown right into the action. In this thesis world, overwhelmed med student Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) asks, “Is it always this busy?” only to be answered, “Uh… no. It gets a lot busier.”

Catalyst

A couple of Level 1 trauma patients are wheeled in: an elderly woman who fell on the subway tracks and ripped half her leg off and the man who sustained a brain injury while trying to rescue her.

Debate

Everything ramps up exponentially. The seasoned ER doctors know how to deal with these gruesome injuries, but the residents… not so much. Whitaker shrieks in pain after jamming his finger while making a simple patient transfer from gurney to bed, and when they try to remove the injured part of the woman’s leg by basically tearing it off, Javarti passes out.

The elderly woman screams in an unknown language while Robby quizzes the residents on what might have made her faint onto the subway tracks. Their heads swivel back and forth between Robby, the patients, the police who need to question the victims, and the other doctors who are making maudlin jokes and snidely playing out their obvious issues with each other. This is what an ER rotation is going to be like?!

Break into Two

Chief Medical Officer Gloria Underwood (Michael Hyatt) breaks into the chaos, demanding to speak to Robby. He avoids her as long as he can, but ultimately capitulates, pushing us into Act Two and an antithesis world where it’s abundantly clear that the business of healthcare is more important than either health or care.

B Story

The “Blank of the Week” A Story of Robby and his doctors trying to mend people and save lives is haunted by the B Story of Dr. Adamson and the horrific losses of the Covid pandemic.

Fun and Games

Underwood informs Robby that the ER’s Press Ganey Scores, which measure customer satisfaction, are at a dismal 8%. Robby sarcastically claps back that she keeps patients in the ER because it’s too expensive to give them beds upstairs and Underwood goes for the jugular, saying that Robby’s mentor Adamson obviously didn’t teach him appropriately about hospital administration. It’s the first time we’ve seen Robby genuinely rattled; he’s barely able to swallow down his rage as Underwood threatens his job.

But there’s no time to process any of this as Robby is immediately forced to put a patient with cardiac arrest in a hallway and a healthy triathlete who comes in for shortness of breath codes and has to be defibrillated while children from another exam room watch in shock. For the doctors, patients, and viewing audience, The Pitt continues to meet the definition of trauma to the nervous system: too much, too fast, too soon.

Midpoint

When one of the elderly women from the daily influx of nursing home patients dies, Robby and the doctors take a respectful moment of silence. It’s a false victory of humanity over business as usual and one of the very few areas of control the physicians exercise, the B Story of loss and death sneakily crossing over and preparing us for a wallop of a Finale.

Bad Guys Close In

A lethargic toddler who ingested his father’s cannabis gummies, an unhoused mom with a badly burned hand from cooking outdoors on a Sterno, and a surly teenaged boy with a mother vomiting from some mysterious illness start to bring the familial drama of the outside world into the Pitt, reminding us that these doctors often have to also serve as marriage counselors, social workers, and mind readers.

Despite Robby’s constant attempts to not get too involved with the patients, he is forced to ask Theresa (Joanna Going) what is actually happening with her supposed illness. She confesses that she came into the ER not for herself, but because she’s worried about her son David (Jackson Kelly) and needs their help.

All Is Lost

Robby looks wary of wading into this murky territory, but Theresa begs him to listen, saying that she’d come across something David had written about wanting to hurt some girls; specifically, he’s planning to “eliminate” them.

In over his head, Robby turns to the hospital’s actual social worker, Kiara Alfaro (Krystel V. McNeil), who, in a stunned voice, asks the million-dollar question: “What does she want us to do?!” Robby comes back with a character-revealing—and knowingly futile—response: “Help him, protect him… save him.”

When Robby and Kiara try to gently question David, he bolts out of the hospital. Robby chases him as far as he can, but David disappears into the outside traffic.

Dark Night of the Soul

Robby returns to the ER, but the minute he sees the full room, he has a full-fledged panic attack. The lights are suddenly blinding, there’s a high-pitched ringing in his ears, and he starts to sweat profusely.

Break into Three/Break into Series

A and B Stories cross violently as Robby has a trauma flashback to the Covid pandemic. He is encased in protective gear from head to toe with double masking, the ER is a sea of gasping patients that need to be intubated, and in a Final Image that mirrors the Opening, one of the other doctors tells him that Dr. Adamson has just gone down with a dangerously low pulse ox. It’s a painful synthesis that reminds Robby he couldn’t rescue the person he cared about the most, so what if he’s never able to help, protect, or save anyone else?