[COLUMN] From Pulse to The Pitt, the Medical Drama is Back to Life | by Darren Mooney

Looking at television and streaming schedules, it seems like the doctor is well and truly in.

Of course, the television medical procedural never truly went away. Grey’s Anatomy is likely to be renewed for a twenty-second season. Chicago Med seems on the bubble for a possible eleventh season. The medical drama is a television standard, a format that lends itself to episodic storytelling. There is a reason that so much television is cop shows and doctor dramas. Hospital shows also have the advantage of not coming with the baggage that burdens modern legal procedurals.

However, the classical medical series has been in something of a slump in recent years, with a number of high-profile examples of the genre being retired. The Resident wrapped up in 2023 after six seasons. New Amsterdam bowed out after five seasons in 2023. The Good Doctor concluded a seven-season run in 2024. Those are decent runs, but they are considerably shorter than the extended fifteen years E.R. spent on the air or the nine years that Scrubs was broadcast.

To be fair, that might have something to do with the moment. The classic hospital drama was perhaps facing challenges emerging from the recent global pandemic. Audiences might not have wanted to spend as much time in a hospital as they used to. Indeed, it’s worth acknowledging that medical shows like Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Doctor struggled to find the right balance between acknowledging the reality of the pandemic and offering audiences an escape from it.

Interestingly, the past year has seen an explosion in high concept medical shows. There is St. Denis Medical on NBC, a mockumentary from Superstore creator Justin Spitzer. NBC is also home to Brilliant, a show about an eccentric neurologist (Zachary Quinto). CBS has the medical mystery show Watson, which finds Sherlock Holmes’ companion John Watson (Morris Chestnut) returning to practice. ABC launched Doctor Odyssey, set on a cruise ship. Fox premiered Doc, featuring an amnesiac doctor (Molly Parker) returning to her life. There is a Scrubs revival on the way.

The revolution has also come to streaming. The Pitt, a real-time medical drama on Max from much of the creative team behind E.R. that unfolds over the course of a single shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room, is one of the genuine word-of-mouth sensations of the past few months. Netflix have also gotten in on the game with Pulse, which feels like a less ambitious cousin to The Pitt, a more middlebrow show set during an emergency shift in a Florida trauma centre during a hurricane.

So, why all of this? And why now? It’s perhaps possible to situate this revival in larger cultural trends. The streaming revolution has largely been a failure, particularly for the major studios. It seems like the days of absurd and unchecked spending on franchise streaming shows that are sold as “eight-hour movies” are coming to a close. Warners have moved their brand shows off Max and over to HBO. Disney has made it clear that they are cutting down on Star Wars and Marvel shows.

As much as streaming was sold as a revolutionary concept, it seems like the future of these streaming services looks a lot more like classic television. This is reflected in the push towards bundling, live broadcasts and advertising. Unsurprisingly, this shift in form has been accompanied by a change in creative priorities. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have made a big deal of the fact that they are no longer chasing cultured and niche audiences. They are going middlebrow.

Amazon has banked big on its slate of “dad shows”, slightly elevated versions of the network fare like Reacher, Jack Ryan and The Terminal List. Netflix’s leadership has boasted about wanting to make “gourmet cheeseburgers”, media that can be both “premium and commercial at the same time.” Artisanal and auteurist shows like Barry Jenkins's The Underground Railroad or Steven Zaillian’s Ripley are likely to become the exception rather than the rule.

As such, streaming networks have begun leaning hard into the kind of programming that was once a feature of network television line-ups. Peacock has the half-hour sitcom Ted and the Columbo-adjacent mystery series Poker Face. Netflix has invested a lot of time and energy trying to find a sitcom that works for them: One Day at a Time, That ’90s Show or Dad Stop Embarrassing Me! It was only a matter of time before the streaming providers decided that they wanted their own television medical dramas.

At the same time, broadcast television seems to be responding to the influence of streaming. Medical procedurals are not the only classic television standards getting high-concept reinventions. The past few years have seen an explosion of playful mystery shows, like Elsbeth on CBS or High Potential on ABC. Even CBS’ reboot of Matlock is decidedly playful, a reboot of the property that features a lead character (Kathy Bates) who is a fan of the original series imitating the earlier show.

There is a sense in which television is coming back to itself after a few years in the cultural wilderness, when it felt like streaming might replace traditional television broadcasting. Indeed, these shows are very clearly television in the traditional sense. They are not “eight-hour movies” that have been cut up into arbitrary chunks. Unlike so much modern streaming media, they understand the importance of the episode as a unit of storytelling.

The Pitt adopts the classic format of 24, with each hour-long episode of the show being an hour in real time in a way that would not work if the same story were told as a two-hour movie. Leaning the other direction, Doctor Odyssey structured the first few episodes of its weekly broadcast around themed weeks on the eponymous cruise ship, with “Halloween Week” airing the week of Halloween. The series crossed over with an episode of 9-1-1 airing on ABC the same night.

As such, it’s possible to see the resurgence of these television medical dramas as a broader resurgence of television as a medium through one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable formats of television.  Still, it feels like there is something more specific about this trend. It isn’t just traditional television formats making a comeback. This is a resurgence of the medical drama in particular. While it might exist in the context of larger forces, it is its own distinct thing.

After all, while mystery shows like Elsbeth and High Potential have made a return, those sorts of investigative shows aren’t quite as ubiquitous as this new wave of medical dramas. While reliable police procedurals like The Rookie and S.W.A.T., along with the Law & Order and NCIS franchises, continue to trundle along on broadcast television, there has not been a particularly prominent new wave of cop-centric procedurals like there have been with these hospital shows.

If the brief dip in hospital-set procedurals during the early 2020s was a reflection of audience’s anxieties over the global pandemic, perhaps the genre’s return to prominence is a reflection of the public’s desire to move on from that healthcare crisis. It is perhaps telling that, allowing for the streaming shows The Pitt and Pulse, most of this new wave of doctor dramas are either lighter and goofier like Doctor Odyssey and St. Denis Medical or more character-focused like Brilliant or Watson.

Like the new wave of murder mystery shows, these medical procedurals skew more towards the playful and fun side of the genre than the grounded or gritty. Watson is very obviously a spiritual successor to House, another medical procedural that owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes and which had at best a loose connection to medical conduct. Shows like Watson, Brilliant and Doc are driven more by their lead character than they are by procedural reality.

Indeed, Doctor Odyssey explicitly positions itself as a post-COVID show. In the premiere, Doctor Max Bankman (Joshua Jackson) reveals that he was the first person in the United States to be diagnosed with coronavirus. It was his experience as “patient zero” that led him to “pursue joy at all costs”, which led to his decision to become a doctor on a luxury cruise. Despite the obvious association between cruise ships and COVID, escapism comes baked into the premise of Doctor Odyssey. The Pitt is an interesting contrast, with Doctor Michael Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) haunted by flashbacks to the pandemic, struggling with PTSD.

Still, COVID is largely suppressed in these narratives. Even something ostensibly more intense like Pulse is more interested in litigating the sexual politics of #meToo than in unpacking the legacy of the recent massive global health crisis. This is entirely understandable. Audiences lived through COVID, and it seems that they have very little interest in delving back into that experience through the lens of television. These medical shows perhaps represent an appealing promise of a return to normality, a reset back to an early public perception of healthcare.

More than that, there are other reasons that viewers might find themselves drawn to the comfort of a medical procedural. These sorts of shows are typically “competence porn”,  they show incredibly smart and capable individuals often collaborating as part of a team to solve life-and-death problems. In contrast to police procedurals, medical shows can often do this without resorting to violence or threats. These are shows about people who are good at their jobs in high stakes situations.

That is perhaps its own form of escapism, particularly in the context of a world where it seems like audiences cannot even rely on government to work the way that it is supposed to or on existing infrastructure to continue to function. This is an era of “enshittification”, when everything is getting worse. Viewers cannot count on their elected officials to govern or on the political opposition to hold those officials to account. The stakes seem higher than ever, but nobody seems capable of fixing it.

In this context, the resurgence of the medical procedural makes a great deal of sense. It’s oddly appealing to watch skilled, intelligent and capable people confronting real crises and finding the best possible solution in the circumstances. It’s something that viewers cannot get in reality, but the doctors in these shows can offer. They might be imperfect, they might be flawed, they might make mistakes, but – broadly speaking – they are doing their best in impossible situations.

In the current climate, that is perhaps as fantastical as any superhero show.