The Pitt: Max’s new show isn’t HBO. It’s TV.

Left for dead only a few years ago, network television sprang back to life in 2024. CBS’s Matlock reboot drew monster numbers, and ABC’s High Potential, with Kaitlin Olson as an LAPD janitor who is also a crime-solving genius, drew the network’s highest ratings for a new series in six years. While The Bear stumbled under the weight of its ambitions, the billboards for Doctor Odyssey promised a frothy good time, cheekily touting the cruise ship-set medical drama’s “Big Deck Energy.” There couldn’t be a better time to revive ER, which transformed prime-time drama in the mid-1990s and turned George Clooney from a veteran of short-lived sitcoms into a major star and sex symbol. Related From Slate The Great New Netflix Show From the Creator of The Good Place Looks Like a Sitcom but Is Something Else The Pitt isn’t quite ER: 30 Years Later, although it was created by ER veteran R. Scott Gemmill, produced by ER showrunner John Wells, and stars ER’s Noah Wyle, who played medical student-turned-attending physician John Carter for its first 11 seasons. It did start out that way, but after failing to come to terms with the estate of Michael Crichton, who created ER and wrote the script for its pilot episode, the Max series’ creators changed course and set their show in a different city’s emergency room, with Wyle playing an entirely different emergency medicine specialist named Michael Robinavitch, the overworked chief of the emergency department at an overwhelmed Pittsburgh hospital.