HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those £10 a month subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint.
Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called ‘the best medical drama on television in years’. This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as ‘most amusing form of cancer’ or ‘most ineradicable variety of testicular lice’. But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.
The fuss, basically, is that The Pitt looks as if it were tailor-made by the most cunningly manipulative AI intelligence to deliver to mass audiences all that they most desire in a medical drama. So: snappy, wise-cracking, edgy-seeming dialogue chock-full of abstruse, incomprehensible terminology; a handsome, capable, unflappable lead doctor (Noah Wyle as Dr Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch) and a Benetton team of diverse ethnicities and contrasty sexualities; urgent, terrifying, race-against-time pacing with a few lulls, periodically inserted, a bit like on a fox hunt, so that everyone has time to chill/be funny/reveal hinterland; gore – loads and loads of gore – filmed up close, so that you feel simultaneously repelled but thrilled at how brave you’re being, stalwartly enduring so much authenticity, almost as though you’re a real emergency medic actually saving all these victims yourself.
This stuff only works on you if you give it permission – a bit like when you invite a vampire across your threshold. If you don’t though, you’re immune. For example, you notice that the most cynical one-liners have been implausibly put into the mouths of ethnic female characters so as to render the offensiveness palatable; and that the overarching schemata is that, yes, these people may say some brusque, seemingly heartless things under pressure, but underneath, these are the most caring, dedicated, omnicompetent lifesavers since Galen first drew breath.
It helps if you watch with a medical-drama expert, as I did with Boy Delingpole who watches this tosh all the time and can predict with surgical precision exactly how each plotline will develop. Boy: ‘That guy’s in serious trouble.’ Me: ‘How so?’ Boy: ‘He’s a fit, healthy, thirtysomething marathon runner and he’s cheerful.’ Sure enough, within a few minutes of marathon runner smiling and going ‘It’s nothing, right, doc?’, the poor guy is flatlining.
My instant diagnosis was that marathon man was suffering the consequences of multiple safe and effective Covid jabs. (Remember all that terrifying footage of superfit footballers suddenly collapsing on the pitch?) But this was naive. The one thing these dramas don’t do is shit on their own patch. So: iatrogenically induced fatalities are a rarity; modern medicine and Big Pharma are your lovable friends; if you’ve ended up in hospital it’s probably because you’re an idiot.
‘The unacknowledged background secret. That’s another classic,’ explained Boy as we pondered the conundrum of a previously hyperactive but now comatose four-year-old boy. Sure enough, it was the idiot dad! What he’d failed to realise was that his irresponsible best buddy had left behind some cannabis gummies on his recent visit.
So hold off on that HBO Max subscription, I would, and try to eke out a bit more value from that money you spent on Apple TV+ so that you could watch Slow Horses, Severance and, till it got too excruciatingly twee, Ted Lasso. If, for example, you haven’t yet watched both seasons of Drops of God, the French-Japanese drama about a sassy French girl and a moody, handsome Japanese chap on a picturesque, international quest through the world’s vineyards for the ultimate bottle of wine, then that most definitely is a treat in store.
The Pitt looks as if it were tailor-made by the most cunningly manipulative AI intelligence
You might also want to have a shot – excuse the terrible pun – at The Hunt, a French drama about a group of chasseurs somewhere near the Alps. It’s a bit like The Deer Hunter, without the Nam sequences. The strong, capable Robert De Niro character, Franck (Benoît Magimel), likes to go shooting with his not-that-well-drawn buddies (only the overweight drunken one is vaguely distinguishable). One day, they find themselves under fire from unidentifiable assailants. They shoot back and one of the baddies is killed.
I’m only two episodes in and waiting for the brooding, slow-burn menace to develop into something less boring. The impression so far is that our chasseurs have messed with the wrong people and it could turn very nasty. It has had mixed reviews. The release was postponed because of a plagiarism suit, settled now that the story has been credited to a 1973 novel by Douglas Fairbairn called Shoot. Mainly, I’m sticking with it because I like the regional working-class French setting and because I want to see how the fat man gets offed.
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