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When most people are recommending The Pitt to a friend—and, if the timeline is any indication of real viewership, a lot of you have been—the go-to reference point is ER, for obvious reasons. It’s Noah Wyle scrubbing back in to the procedural format that made him a household name in the ‘90s, even re-teaming with one of ER’s showrunners, John Wells—but in a series that feels more distinctly 2025 in its brutality, even as its pacing hearkens back to that old network-TV feeling. (I guess—I’ve never watched ER.) But The Pitt got me on the bandwagon early, and kept me more locked in and committed than any other medical series ever has, because of its central conceit: The fifteen-episode season covers a single emergency-room shift, one increasingly hellish hour at a time. As the emergencies stack up with a relentless, often savage pace, the show I was reminded of most was 24, an early-aughts gem that helped redefine what network TV could do—and whose peak-era seasons still feel fresher and more engrossing than most of the sludge streamers throw out today. Over the course of its first season, The Pitt more than lived up to the promise I saw in the pilot, and with a second season already greenlit and lightly conceptualized (Pitt crew vs Independence Day, lfg), I’m leaving season 1 with very few notes for improvement.
Except one.
To fully embrace its real-time chaos, The Pitt needs a 24-style countdown clock.
Look, I know one of The Pitt’s campaign promises is its realism. The story may be as melodramatic and as low-key conventional as TV drama was in 1994—that’s kind of the secret of the show’s appeal—but the storytelling is as no-frills as possible. No opening theme song, no pomp-and-circumstance endings, just a slow fade to black and roll credits.
What I’m proposing would not be a big upset to the vibe. We don’t need the full-on doom-intoning seconds-tickdown that became 24’s signature. But those episode-ending and act-break bookends weren’t 24’s only trick. Real ball-knowers remember that throughout any given hour, in place of the split-screen on occasion, the time would just flash at the bottom of the screen just to give viewers an anchor of where we were on the clock. And for super-heavy moments, like the loss of a fan-favorite character, the big counter would tick silently, the better to let viewers sit with the gravity of what they’d just witnessed.
Right now, Pitt episodes end unceremoniously—almost too much so. The conclusion of each episode almost comes as a surprise—like “Oh, this is where we’re ending? Ok.” That doesn’t matter much when the last scene is Dr. Robby crumpled in a corner in the throes of a meltdown or Dr. McKay getting arrested, but when it’s, say, Dr. Collins breaking up a fight between a pro-life mother, her pregnant daughter and her interloping sister, that’s a little less sexy. A few silent seconds ticking away would help tie a (still-unfussy) bow on it, and flashing that clock at the bottom of the screen every now and then would go a long way to casually making things even more tense at any point in any given episode. Don’t ask me why, but time makes us anxious, and time is one of The Pitt’s main gimmicks. Why not lean a little harder into it?
A flashing clock just inherently ratchets up adrenaline. My mind is already spinning around the different ways knowing exactly what time it is could enhance season 2’s planned July 4 conceit; just imagine the seconds ticking down on an hour when the inevitably disgraced Dr. Langdon makes an uninvited but still welcome return to the ER when he’s needed most. Or when Dana comes back to man the ship, six or seven episodes after being absent long enough for viewers to believe she’s really gone. 24 used to make a meal out of dramatic encores for previously departed fan favorites too. Incorporating some more DNA of its network forebears could be the hack that makes The Pitt just as generational as those shows were.