7 hours Ago By Genevieve Koski
Have you heard? The Pitt ! If your instinctive reaction to that exclamatory prompt wasn’t responding “ The Pitt !” with gusto, perhaps you haven’t yet thrown yourself into Max’s instantly compelling new medical drama. Like my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk , I also “found myself powering through The Pitt with so much delight that I became actively annoyed when I had to pause to watch something else,” because also like Kathryn, I was privileged to receive early screeners of the first ten episodes, which I mowed through in less than three days and then became instantly despondent that the final five episodes of the season were not available to me. I was addicted to The Pitt , a show whose propulsive hour-by-hour storytelling structure is tailor-made for a binge-watch experience.
It’s also tailor-made for a weekly viewing experience, which is how Max has chosen to roll out the season for general audiences (who are surely and understandably annoyed with me for flaunting screener privilege right now). The Pitt is an intense show, its nearly real-time structure careening from one stressful emergency scenario to the next, only occasionally pausing to wallop us with an inevitable yet emotionally devastating moment of mortal tragedy. I emerged from my binge energized by the show’s right-out-of-the-gate greatness, but also emotionally exhausted and slightly dehydrated.
Taking a week to recover between episodes is probably advisable, but a difficult sell to the newly Pitt- pilled. The Pitt ’s weekly rollout is also advisable from a word-of-mouth standpoint. While some streamers, particularly Netflix and Prime Video, still cling to the full-season drop that was the default streaming model for so long, the last couple of years have seen more shows reverting to the tried-and-true weekly-release model that defined linear television for decades.
There are several overlapping reasons for this, but anecdotal evidence — in this case, Vulture’s annual roundup of our most popular recaps , which is heavy on the weekly releases — suggests the episode-a-week model may be preferable because it extends the watercooler conversation and offers a longer on-ramp for viewers to pick up on a show. That’s great positioning for a new series like The Pitt , whose familiar medical-procedural format may cause the jaded to overlook it, while the ample body trauma and medical gore might put off the squeamish. The longer this show has to convince viewers to overcome those potential obstacles to viewing, the better.
But once you’re onboard, The Pitt can be a difficult ride to get off, which brings us back to the question of whether it’s best experienced as a binge. This debate is currently playing out in the comments of Vulture’s The Pitt recaps , with a fairly even split between those bemoaning how the break between episodes “dissipates the emotional impact” and those who are “happy to have a week to savor and reflect on all the good stuff here.” The nice thing about The Pitt being a streaming series is that it can accommodate both preferences, via the “delayed binge” approach of waiting until the season is over to gulp down all the episodes at once.
While I clearly identify with the desire to binge this show, my admittedly hypocritical stance is that delayed binges are a self-defeating prospect. Sure, you’ll get the immediate gratification of hitting “play next” and finding out what happens to Dr. Robby and Dr.
Collins’s medical-abortion patient, but the opportunity to dissect and discuss that moment with fellow viewers will have long passed by. Bingeing robs us of the extended collective-viewing experience that is one of the television medium’s great pleasures. I felt that absence acutely during my own binge of The Pitt , as I sent one excited observation after another to Vulture’s TV critics, who at that point hadn’t watched their screeners and understandably left me on read.
But once they did and the responses started flowing in, the serotonin hit I got from hearing their reactions was so much stronger than the one I got from being able to immediately watch the next episode. I get the same pleasure now from reading the comments in The Pitt recaps, which transport me back to a time when I, too, was wondering how many pairs of clean scrubs Whitaker would go through before his shift ends. There’s a part of me that’s wistful for the viewing experience I was not able to have.
Of course, I wasn’t able to have that experience because a bigger part of me just couldn’t wait a damn week to watch the next episode, so I’m not going to sit here and tell viewers they have to exercise the modicum of patience I was not able to. I am, however, going to suggest it anyway. Be stronger than me! But this to-binge-or-not-to-binge dilemma could have also been alleviated if Max had utilized the hybrid release model it has used in the past and would have been a perfect match for The Pitt : release two to three new episodes a week.
Max frequently premieres with the first two episodes of a series, as it did with The Pitt , but for a handful of shows , the entire season was rolled out in mini-binge bundles, which seems like the ideal way to administer The Pitt ’s addictive qualities. Alternatively, Max could have leaned all the way into those qualities with a so-crazy-it-just-might-work suggestion Kathryn made to me: one episode every night, five days a week, for three weeks. While I admire the innovation and audacity of that suggestion, there’s clear precedent for the weekly bingelet model on Max, which used it for previous seasons of The Sex Lives of College Girls , Our Flag Means Death , and Hacks.
This middle ground between the weekly release and full-season drop feels especially appropriate for The Pitt, a show that, as Kathryn pointed out in her review, straddles the traditions of network and streaming television. It would still allow me and my fellow Pitt- heads a solid six to eight weeks of watercooler discussion, while helping manage the feelings of withdrawal that come from having no more Pitt to watch right this second. Maybe Max should consider it for the show’s second season .
.. which will definitely happen because we’re all enthusiastically and communally watching The Pitt , right? The Pitt!.
