Credit: Ainsley Jay

In Anatomy and Physiology classes, sometimes they watch medical dramas. ‘The Pitt’ season two recently came out, and it has gained being an accurate medical tv show.

Warning: The following article contains spoilers to ‘The Pitt’

In the past years, medical dramas have shown up numerous times on TV, with some doctors feeling the portrayal is unrealistic. However ‘The Pitt’, an Emergency Room (ER) TV show, has gained attention from medical workers for its “accurate” portrayal of working in a hospital.

‘The Pitt’ is an Emmy-award winning tv series with the two seasons following a whole shift in the hospital. On set are consultants with medical experience helping the actors with medical jargon and performing procedures.

Some ER doctors have found the show has strong accuracy in representing the pace of working in the ER, as well as diagnosing patients.

“I would say I’ve had similar cases to a large percentage of the cases that are protracted on the TV show,” former ER Doctor Katie Boyle said. “ There is a lot they get right in terms of the banter, the interaction between the physician and patient and the staff.”

Boyle worked at Beth Israel emergency medicine around COVID-19 and left to work at a Biotech company. While Boyle worked as an emergency medicine doctor, she also ran medical toxicology research. Part of the reason she transitioned to running clinical trials was for the involvement in biotech.

“I will say that emergency medicine is an awesome career,” Boyle said. “Just because I left it didn’t mean that I didn’t love it, I think that it’s a specialty that has a lot of challenges right now, and I would say that for anyone that’s thinking about going into it, it’s a really fun and rewarding specialty.”

In the first season of ‘The Pitt’ the main character, “Dr. Robby”, has past memories of working in the ER during COVID, which touched upon the stress nurses and doctors in the ER felt during the pandemic. Mass General Hospital found burnout rates among physicians doubled during the COVID pandemic.

“The emotional and psychological demands of the job are heavy, and we all felt that they intensified during the COVID pandemic,” Dr. Melisa Poulos, an ER doctor at Brockton Hospital said. “In a lot of cases that challenging time for us as medical professionals was a breaking point for some.”

‘The Pitt’ also touches on the mental toll of being an ER practitioner. ER physicians have some of the highest burnout rates among all medical specials, a 2026 National Library of Medicine found 52% of ER physicians surveyed have experienced burnout.

“On a weekly basis we experience so many losses, so much trauma [and] so many moments where we are present with patients in their grief, or for their last breath,” Poulos said. “[There are] so many emotions that we can’t give much air time to, that we must compartmentalize those feelings so we can walk into the next patient’s room to care for that person and their needs.”

For Boyle, she probably wouldn’t watch ‘The Pitt’ if she was still working in the ER, as some of what is shown on the TV show hits too close to home.

“It brings up memories, and so there’s been a few storylines that I’ve had to like to leave the room for,” Boyle said. “You remember cases, you remember faces of patients that you’ve treated, or families that you’ve treated, [‘The Pitt’] brings up memories.”

In the current season of ‘The Pitt’, season two, the doctors are confronted with a cyber attack. Recently, at the hospital Poulos works at, the hospital also faced a cyber attack, leaving them unable to access electronic records and relying on paper documents.

‘The Pitt’ also doesn’t shy away from commenting on real world situations that often occur in real world emergency rooms. Some of these situations might include in-house patients, patients lacking proper insurance to pay for treatment and rape victims.

“I think that maybe there’s been some criticism that the show’s political, and I don’t feel that way,” Boyle said. “Certainly there are political situations that play out, but that’s just the reality of the emergency department.”