Today, Explained - Watercooler TV is back

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

The Pitt, The White Lotus, and Severance have people talking about TV again. A writer from The Pitt and Vulture's Kathryn VanArendonk explain why. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Miles Bryan, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A scene from the medical drama The Pitt. Photograph by Warrick Page/Max via HBO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember the global COVID-19 pandemic? All of a sudden everyone had to stay home and people didn't really know what to do so they started watching TV. Lots of TV. And we talked about all the TV we were watching. Not since way back then have more people been asking me about the TV I'm watching. Like my dude are you watching The Pit? Don't you have to know basic anatomy to become a doctor?

He's a student doctor. Did you see that White Lotus monologue? Maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls. Severance! Have you ever heard the story of the Glaxoopen? Let's assume we haven't. Something's afoot with all these seemingly unrelated television programs. Yes, they actually have one very, very

important thing in common that has directly to do with what you are saying, which is that they are released weekly. Water Cooler TV is back on Today Explained. Hey, it's Cam Hayward, defensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers and host of Not Just Football podcast. The NFL Draft is coming fast. and over the next few episodes, we're going to be talking about it. Diving deep and also bringing the draft party to Pittsburgh for a special live taping to have some fun.

You're not going to want to miss it. So tune in to our show, Not Just Football with me, Cam Hayward, for a special draft coverage brought to you by Verizon Business. You can find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. My parents have had a lot of time on their hands lately. At first, it was nice. Hey mom, can you drive me to soccer practice? Sure can. We're having slow cooked ribs for dinner. It was awesome. And then it became a lot. Some friends are coming over to watch a movie. Oh, what are we watching? I'll make some popcorn. Thanks to Voila, they can order all our fresh favorites from Sobeez, Farmboy, and Longos online, which is super reliable.

And now my parents are reliable. A little too reliable. Voila. Your groceries delivered. Just like that. You're listening to Today Explained. Alright, so TV's got people talking again and one of the shows they're talking about is The Pit.

And if we're going to talk about The Pit, we got to talk about ER. I'm Joe Sacks. I am an executive producer, writer, and also a real-world emergency physician. I came in halfway through the first season of ER and stayed for 14 and a half years. For people in our audience who, you know, maybe weren't even alive in 1994, can you just help people understand how big a deal ER was and why?

Yeah, you know, back in the day, there was no streaming. There was no YouTube. Basically, there were four television networks. There was NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. So after I came on the show, there was a milestone. Please, please, my brother needs help! He's gonna drown! One man's defining moment.

Over 48 million people experienced it. The show got a 50 share. That means that 50% of all televisions in America that were on were watching ER. So, you know, right now a big hit show gets two or 3% of the American public is watching you. And it was really the classic water cooler show. And what's fascinating about The Pit is that I've heard

so many stories and so many online postings from people who say that on Friday morning Everybody's talking about the pit in the office Joe had half the TV watching country eating out the palm of his hand in the 90s a feat That's basically impossible to pull off now unless you're the Super Bowl So we asked him why he wanted to return to the medical drama with The Pit. Well, after ER, I didn't have a strong desire to work on a medical show. And in fact, I worked for 10 years on a crime show. When John Wells, Noah Wiley and Scott Gemmell first called me in to pitch the show, they

said, well, what's changed? What's different? And my answer was everything. And I said, after COVID, you wouldn't recognize the place. There's this thing called the boarding crisis. Most of the beds are in all the hallway spaces are taken up by patients who can't go upstairs to be admitted because they don't have the nursing staff, they don't have the beds. The waiting room is filled to the brim and you have to try to practice medicine from

the waiting room. So people are angry, people are frustrated, waits are long. And these doctors and nurses who are trying to deliver quality, compassionate care have the deck is just stacked against them. So I said to them, you wanna make it real, this is how it's real. And they embraced that, that number one, there's a crisis in emergency medicine,

and we're gonna show that, warts and all. And number two, post-COVID, there's tremendous post-traumatic stress on emergency workers who worked during the pandemic before there was any effective treatments and who just watched hundreds and hundreds of people die. And in order to tell this story of what it's like to be an emergency medicine physician in 2025-ish, you guys decide to tell this show in this continuous fashion where every episode is picking up exactly where the last episode left off, depicting the course of one long, chaotic, gnarly shift at one hospital.

Yes. How can we make the show different from anything you've seen before? And that's to do a 12-hour shift in 12 hours, where every episode is an hour of the same day. I wanted to ask you about that. It's funny, you know, I'm used to shows on HBO being six episodes, eight episodes, 10 episodes. I just watch Adolescents.

It's four episodes. This show is 15 hours, which it's HBO, it's Max or whatever, but it feels kind of like old school network television where there's a lot of episodes. Yeah, and the powers that be at HBO Max decided that they wanted this show to be unique from what people are used to seeing, the seven or eight hours.

And 12 just wasn't enough. So they wanted 15 to say, wow, here's a streaming show that can give you 50 in a year. And one of the reasons we can do 15 in a year is because we're in the same place, same set. We don't go out on location. We don't go home with people to see their personal lives. So we are literally in this submarine for 15 hours. And that saves you a lot of time and money

with location work and sets and costumes. Cause everybody is wearing the same thing for the whole run, except for Whitaker, of course, who gets bodily fluids on his scrubs every now and then. Oh, do something, man! Um, I need a little help here! Jesus! Noob.

Were you nervous that the amount of stress in this hospital, in this emergency room, in this tight 15-hour period, would overstress your audience out and they might get scared off? Were you at all nervous about that? I honestly had no idea how the public was going to respond to our show. I just wanted to do it as realistically and as accurate as possible. That was the bar that I sat for the medicine,

but what a delightful surprise to see that people responded in a way to seeing what we worked so hard to create. How did people respond? I can say that people in medicine are saying, this is the first medical show I've been able to watch that feels real. Huh. And I can also say that for many emergency workers,

they're saying, for years I've tried to explain to my friends and my family what it's like, and I've never been able to put it into words. Now I just say, watch an episode of The Pit and you'll know what my work day is like. That's a big compliment. Then there are the emergency workers who see it and see the flashbacks to COVID and say, oh my God, I have been dealing with such post-traumatic stress

disorder, and I've been denying it, and I need to get help. Wow. And that's a wonderful thing. The show's also pretty gnarly at times. I mean, if you're like, you know, faint of heart, there's this floating face moment early in the show where I was just like, I mean, the noises that come out of me while I'm watching the show

are pretty hilarious, I imagine. Yeah. The skinless foot, I think, in the first episode, there's like a needle in the show where I was just like, I mean, the noises that come out of me while I'm watching the show are pretty hilarious, I imagine. Yeah. The skinless foot, I think in the first episode there's like a needle in the heart. Was there stuff that didn't make it because it was too gnarly or did you guys just go for it? Not so far. No. No.

The first episode, the degloved, fractured, dislocated foot. Train ran over her foot. Got caught between the platform and the incoming train. Ma'am? Ma'am, what's your name? Came about by the writer's room looking to me and saying, what would make a young medical student faint? Mmm.

An artery is totally transected. The smooth muscle in the tunica media contracts with hemostasis. But if it's a partial cut, get out your umbrella. I'll stabilize the knee for the reduction. Dr. Langdon will be distracting distally before moving medially to clear the tibia. Ready? My student down.

That's the dramatic need of the story. It's not like I've been saying, oh, man, I want to do this degloved, fractured, dislocated foot, and I got to have that on thisved, fractured, dislocated foot, and I got to have that on the show. That came out of nowhere. That came out of what can we show that will just make the audience feel the same way that

this young medical student feels. And on other medical shows and on ER, you know, we open chests and we put in chest tubes, and we put tubes in every orifice and this and that. But the degloved, fractured, dislocated ankle was a case that I had actually had as an emergency physician. And when I pitched it to the room, all the eyes lit up and they all said, that's it.

So what are you going to show us that we haven't seen before in season 2? Stay tuned. Joe Sacks is an executive producer and writer on The Pit, which had its season finale last night on Max, which means you can binge the whole thing over the weekend now and maybe still catch the tail end of some of that water cooler conversation that we are going to be talking about when we return on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Koala.

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And we've asked you here because we just talked about The Pit with a guy from The Pit, but it turns out The Pit isn't the only medical drama on the television right now? No, there are hundreds, thousands. You could be buried underneath them. There are so many medical shows right now. It's wild. What are the big ones that we maybe don't know of yet? Well, so a lot of these live on network television. And if you have only ever been watching Netflix

or Macs in the last couple years, but you're like, I need more doctors. Where are all the doctors? They're on network TV. They've always been. They've never left. But now there are all these other options. There is one called Watson on CBS.

And that one is your more detective-y kind of medical drama. Not a lot of blood, not a lot of guts. A lot of people staring at a board and being like, what if it's this genetic mystery? That's the vibe of Watson. There's a truly bonkers one called Doc that's on Fox. And the premise of Doc roughly is that the main character suffered a traumatic brain injury and does not remember the last eight years, but does still remember mostly

how to be a doctor. And so she's just wandering around the hospital, like being a doctor, even though she's also, you know, not fully compost mentis. But the other great thing about Doc is that it turns out eight years ago, she was a jerk. And now she's nice. So she's trying to understand everything that happened to her in the last eight years to turn her into a jerk. That was's crazy. You're really selling me on duck. Look, there's a lot of options for people. If you prefer your medical dramas to be not in English, there's also Berlin ER on Apple TV Plus that's quite good. And like The Pit, that's kind of the vibe of Berlin ER.

But if you're like not that kind of not in English, there are also several Korean, new Korean medical shows on Netflix too. So again, you're hurting for choice really. And you didn't even mention the one I have heard of, which is Doctor Odyssey? Doctor Odyssey is the new Ryan Murphy show on ABC. And in that, Joshua Jackson is a super hot daddy doctor and he wears pristine white uniforms and yet somehow cares for people's blood and other liquids and there's threesomes. Like that's kind of the vibe of that show. Oh, that's good. I haven't seen one in the pit yet,

but I haven't finished it yet. Well, fingers crossed. Ha ha ha ha. Why are there so many daddy doctor, doctor dramas, doc, Watson, et cetera? So there are, I think, a couple of reasons why we're suddenly seeing all these medical dramas. One is that TV just tends to go through trends, right?

And we have been in this period where there are tons and tons of cop dramas. There's been this huge proliferation of the Dick Wolf style shows, but the medical drama has always also been a TV mainstay. But the dial has just been turned a little bit more toward cop drama, I would say, in the last decade or so. I do also think that there is this moment in Hollywood and sort of politically where it's like, hmm, how are we feeling about cop dramas right now? They used to be the great American pastime, watching somebody get murdered and then somebody else be like, you did it. But we are currently in this moment where everyone is

like, are cop dramas, is this a partisan thing now? How do I feel about this? And network TV wants to be a big bucket. It wants to get everybody in. And the medical drama does not have those same kinds of political associations. Now, a show like The Pit, I would argue, is radically political, but we just sort of as a national discourse have not turned to the medical drama and been like, this is where the culture war is happening. And so it is this political procedural safe haven for TV right now. Tell people how the pit is radically political.

Yeah, so the pit, because it takes place in the ER hour by hour, and because its co-creators and writers make this really deliberate choice to be focusing on the stories of the patients who come in, not the personal lives of the doctors. The cases that show up on the pit are things like a situation where a black woman comes in and she is experiencing an incredible painful crisis because she's having a sickle cell crisis, and she is instead assumed to be drug seeking.

Stop fighting. Calm the fuck down or I'm calling the cops. My meds at home aren't working. Please, I have sickle cells. Okay, stop. Everybody stop. Later in the season, there is a measles case and this becomes a big and very fraught discussion

about vaccines. Georgia was sick, but she got better on her own quickly. Yeah, many people get better on their own, like Georgia. However, as many as one in 20 kids that get measles get pneumonia like your son. Are your children vaccinated against measles? No. The MMR vaccine is perfectly safe.

Measles is not. And then there is this, of course, this huge season arc that's about a mass shooting, and that includes a lot of implicit, I would say, commentary on like why, on the role of guns. As the nearest trauma center, we are going to be getting the majority of the victims. We don't know yet how many we are getting,

but we are instituting hospital-wide emergency protocols. And that's sort of interesting to me because people are watching this show as escapism. Our colleague John Quillen-Hill was explaining this morning how she feels like watching The Pit is like, oh, this is my new family. These are the people I hang out with every night. And yet when it's getting so political and when people are constantly dying or almost dying, like how is that escapism? Yes, I have a theory about this for the pit in particular.

Your brain knows that things are crazy, that the world is very stressful right now. And even when you are seeking escapism, it is very hard to turn off the part of you that is like alarm, alarm, alarm. So things that are purely escapist, things that are like a fantasy world that has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on right now are hard to enter into. Something like the pit is instead this incredibly comforting fantasy of competency. Emergencies that are happening that people can deal with, they care about, and they want to deal with in the best way they possibly can. The world is a mess, but you don't have

to care about that. All you care about is what is in the emergency room in front of you at this moment. What I'm hearing from you is that it's escapism in that someone has your back in this world. One million percent, I think that is the nature of this. And I truly cannot emphasize enough just like, not just that they have your back, but they're so good at their jobs. And I cannot imagine anything more gorgeous, fantastical, and escapist right now. And how does the pit and its throwback quality fit into the broader trends we are seeing in television,

whether they're on the tail end or somewhere in the middle, I'm not really sure. But I mean, the pit exists in the same... televised universe as the third season of White Lotus and the second season of Severance. And these shows don't seem to have much in common with each other, except for the fact that people are talking about them a lot right now.

Yes, they actually have one very, very important thing in common that has directly to do with what you are saying, which is that they are released weekly. Mm. TV used to know how to create conversations, and it did that by releasing one episode a week, so that your friend could be like, TV used to know how to create conversations. And it did that by releasing one episode a week so that your friend could be like,

you know what shows really good? The pit. And you're like, how many episodes are there? And either they say two and you're like, great, I'm gonna catch up. Or they say like, there's seven season that they all came out four years ago. And you're like, well, that's never gonna happen.

And so I strongly, strongly believe that the weekly release is a huge part of why all three of those shows have been so discourse-y lately. I think both White Lotus and Severance are built on this prestige TV model, this peak TV thing where it's like you find a guy and you give him a billion D dollars and then he goes off and creates a whole season of TV and he's an auteur and he's a genius. And The Pit is like, what if we made, can I swear on this, what if I made TV-ass TV? Like what if I just made the most, like it feels like a show that you watched in 1995, but we're going to streaming it, right? Like we're gonna

be able to have gory medical procedures, the runtimes are gonna be just a little more flexible, you don't have to hit the commercial breaks quite so hard. It has been very frustrating to watch streaming shows from the last 10 years forget how to make television. And watching The Pit feels like somebody finally remembered how to make television again and put it on a streaming platform. And I'm just so hopeful that other streamers look at this, other creators look at this and are like, great, we can make suits again too and put it on Netflix. And for all the people out there, Catherine, who are mourning the loss of their precious pit or their brief sojourn to Thailand

or hanging out with the Severance kids, what are you excited about in the coming weeks and months on the TV? I was not actually the biggest fan of The Last of Us season one, but I very much enjoyed The Last of Us season two. And that will have that weekly release rhythm. There are seven episodes, so you get to...

You've already seen it all. I have, yeah. I'm really excited about Andor. Yes! It is not quite weekly release. It is in chunks. It's like three episodes a week for a couple of weeks. But I think Andor season one

is astonishingly great television. And it is also the kind of thing where you're like, oh, it's Escapist. It's a Star Wars show. And then you're watching it and you're like, actually, no, this is the most devastating text about fascism that any entertainer has created in the last decade. Another great example of escapism, but not. 100%. Something more like full escapism,

the Sex and the City spinoff, and just like that will be coming out again at some point. Finally. Finally. Finally, our long national nightmare is over. The other thing that I want to mention about The Pit though, is you won't have to wait that long for it to come back. It is actually on a network schedule. Like they are going back into production this summer. Okay great, so what you're saying is if

you're missing The Pit, don't worry, you can watch The Pit. Yes, yes. Catherine Van Aarondonk, New York Magazine fan of The Pit. So is Hadi Mawagdi who made the show with help from Miranda Kennedy, Miles O'Brien and Patrick Boyd who's not sure he needs the stress of The Pit in his life at the moment. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. We'll be back Monday but don't forget we've got a Sunday show now. It's called Explain It to Me. This week they're gonna explain it to you

why high school grads aren't automatically being funneled into college anymore. You can find that where you find this, except on the radio. That show isn't on the radio. This one is. Shoutouts to TV by the all-new Nissan Murano. Okay, that email is done.

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