Only a year after Suits became the biggest show in the streaming world of television five years after it went off air, the idea that every show on a streamer needed to be prestige television seemed to die down quite a bit. In a cable world, procedurals in legal, medical, and emergency fields were always the most reliable form of television. For the studios, content was both efficient and inexpensive to produce in bulk, while audiences had shows they could put on without having to think or keep up with on-going plots in between viewings of their favorite, more-serious and narrative-driven appointment television.
While these shows certainly still existed, primarily remnants of the previous era such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit or the copious volume of procedurals that aired in a vacuum on CBS, the main shows in the cultural lexicon have almost been exclusively been prestige television since Netflix made its arrival statement with the release of Orange is the New Black and House of Cards over a decade ago. For Netflix, their top shows range from Stranger Things to Ozark, while Hulu in recent years has made its name with FX hits such as The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, and anthologies such as Fargo. The newer streamers such as Apple TV have become prominent players with hits such as Severance, Shrinking, and Silo. Meanwhile, HBO has struggled until recently to produce as many surefire hits as it did at its peak due to the massive influx of competition in prestige television. Not to mention, in a binge culture, even their previous hit shows from yesteryear such as The Wire, Deadwood, and The Sopranos would struggle to stick in the mind of a viewing audience that previously held HBO as the highest standard of quality entertainment in the television industry.
Then, in the last couple years, Hacks and The White Lotus found larger audiences, The Last of Us became the largest video game television adaptation of all-time, and a prestige drama focused on a Batman villain became a light in what was a very dark period for WarnerBros and the MAX service. Riding the wave with them? The Pitt, a television show that is redefining streaming in a remarkably familiar way.
Introducing Prestige Adjacent Procedurals
MAX offers a rather diverse catalogue of offerings. In fact, that seems to be at the core of its current strategy. For those who enjoy prestige television, the HBO name will always carry cache. However, MAX’s offerings beyond gripping television carries into the world of sports with the NHL and NBA, the world of professional wrestling with All Elite Wrestling, a large backlog of Discovery channels, and a far higher volume of animation than is offered by any non-specialized service. Their latest foray into something new for a specific audience is The Pitt starring Noah Wyle.
Wyle is most remembered for his role as John Carter on ER, but now offers a far grittier, very different characterization in his portrayal of an emergency room doctor at The Pitt, a Pittsburgh-based ER ward that doubles as a school for resident doctors. Wyle’s Dr. Robinavitch is one of three doctors that are training new interns as part of a four-year program that forces students to sink or swim in a life or death situations in a hospital.
Dr. Robby, however, is still struggling with unaddressed trauma he suppressed while working the COVID ward during the pandemic, forcing himself into his work and leaving his personal life at the door. As Robby actively deals with death, notably the death of an elderly patient whose kids can’t move on and an 18-year-old drug overdose whose parents are left shattered, the trauma forces its way back on the anniversary of his mentors passing. The most fascinating part of The Pitt conceptually is that Robby is working a double, and the fifteen hour-long episodes each represent one hour of his shift. Essentially, the show takes a procedural and sets it to similar time constraints to that of a 24, upping the stakes and taking the viewers on a ride throughout the process.
The show did an excellent job in its first season exploring its secondary characters: veteran doctors, residents in the first day at their job, but also the patients being treated and those in its overpacked waiting room. A thing that most procedurals were criticized for at their peak was that it was hard to make an audience care about people they’d see once and would never come back, ultimately lowering the stakes that the main cast would be up against throughout the episode. However, with patients staying for hours at a time, the pull becomes which patients can they save and which can’t they save, humanizing the patients and socially frowned upon medical emergencies in the process to make the audience root for the patients to pull through. Thus, we have a narrative-driven procedural that makes the audience care about those within the procedural, giving it a more complex storyline in the process.
What Other Streamers Can Learn From The Pitt
While WarnerBros Discovery historically keeps its viewership numbers close to the vest, reports indicate that The Pitt saw an increase in viewership every single week of its fifteen weeks on air. While most streamers continue to do bulk drops with their television shows, MAX has shifted from the strategy recently. The Pitt implemented its strategy of weekly drops at the same time as the White Lotus used the strategy, and on the day of The Pitt’s season one finale, HBO’s Hacks started their Thursday slot takeover. This strategy of weekly episodes works for five reasons, and they’re the same reasons that they worked on cable for the better part of fifty years.
- This keeps the show in the cultural subconscious. Data shows that people who binge through a season are a lot less likely to remember everything that happens when the next season premieres. This is because instead of letting the brain comprehend what happened for a week, we’re watching everything that happens at one time triggering information overload. From strictly a conjectural standpoint, one could also argue that without breaks in between episodes, people are less likely to try to predict what happens, which means they’re also less likely to look at smaller details to support their fan theories.
- One episode a week forces the viewer to open the app and watch the show weekly. This creates appointment television in a streaming world, ultimately forcing people to associate the brand with television that they actively prioritize. In theory, this cultivates a mindset where they’ll watch a show with a less interesting premise on MAX in the future because they know it will be quality.
- Word of mouth over time is critical for the enduring success of any program. The more it stays in the mind of the cultural sphere, the more eyeballs you’re likely to receive. People talk about the show they watch for a week or two, and then focus on their next show. Focusing on a show for fifteen weeks means they’ll be telling their friends and family about the show for fifteen weeks.
- Fifteen weeks of a television show allows for fifteen more weeks of marketing. Encouraging people to binge watch a show the moment it drops eases the foot off the gas of the marketing department. A weekly drop keeps advertisements in front of eyeballs for a longer period of time.
- With every streaming service struggling with retention rate as more people churn between streaming services, grabbing their attention and keeping it for a minimum of fifteen weeks gives you four months to introduce another show to keep them on the streaming service even longer. Without introducing contracts that made people originally sour on cable, the most coherent strategy to reduce churn is to have content people want to watch for more than a week and a half of their time.
The other thing that The Pitt has going for it is that Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO and MAX content, has already confirmed that season two will air in January. Of course, as previously established, procedurals are both easy and cheap to produce. However, the bigger thing is that its concept allows for a quick turnaround. The biggest issue facing television in a streaming era is that since cable contracts don’t exist in the same way they did, TV shows only have finite windows with everybody together. Take HBO’s Euphoria, for example. It’s one of HBO’s biggest properties. Since the cast isn’t signed on to do a definitive amount of episodes they aren’t contractually obligated to shoot at the behest of WarnerBros. Zendaya not only has Marvel and Dune taking precedent, but also roles such as Luca Gaudagnino’s Challengers and the upcoming Christopher Nolan Odyssey adaptation. Sydney Sweeney has had a multitude of movies since the last season of Euphoria, and Colman Domingo has notched two Oscar nominations and could notch a third depending on the release schedule of Michael entirely in between seasons of the show. Similar complaints about length between seasons have been levied at every other streamer, most notably Netflix and Stranger Things. When your show is constantly creating stars, it becomes impossible to get their schedules to line up to shoot at the same time, and ultimately people care less when the new season arrives.
However, The Pitt as a concept sidesteps this conundrum entirely. With the concept of the show focusing on a singular shift, casts beyond Wyle can come in and out of the show by season without having to be written off since their characters can simply be off the clock. The inherent ability to bring people in and out of the show without having to take them out of it will allow far more flexibility for The Pitt than other shows in a streaming environment.
The Pitt is here to stay, and it may not end up as the streaming juggernaut for MAX that The Last of Us or The White Lotus is, but it’s going to become a popular staple for the streamer because what’s old is new again. The procedural can still work, but the appointment television philosophy works better. There’s a lot that streamers can take away from The Pitt’s somewhat surprising success, but MAX hit a homerun this season with the Noah Wyle medical drama.
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