At the Emmys in September, there were three big winners. The first was Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries which took the world by storm this year and won a whopping six awards. The second was Seth Rogen’s comedy The Studio, with four wins. And the third was a medical show called The Pitt, which was awarded perhaps the most hotly contested Emmy of all: best drama.
If you watch a fair bit of television, you may well have seen the first two. You almost certainly haven’t seen the third. The Pitt, as in the Pittsburg Medical Trauma Centre, is a new show from some of the people who worked on ER and aired in the United States between January and April this year. It takes place in real time, à la 24, with each of the 15 episodes covering one hour of a long, gruelling shift in the emergency department of a hospital. But even though the programme has been the talk of the television year in America, it is still not possible to watch it in the UK. This is a real rarity nowadays, for a massively successful US show not to make it over here at around the same time as its initial release.
Why don’t we have it yet? The streamers and production companies have remained tight-lipped. There are some possible reasons, though. Representatives for the estate of Michael Crichton, the late creator of ER, believe that The Pitt is an unauthorised spinoff of ER and are suing over it. Their argument is based on the fact that The Pitt team approached the estate about an official ER reboot, the estate said no, and the team went on to make The Pitt, which is set in an ER department. I imagine that the presence of Noah Wyle, one of ER’s original cast members, has muddied the intellectual property waters: he stars in and produces The Pitt, although he plays a new character.
Who knows whether the estate has a case legally, but this ongoing dispute may be one reason why UK streamers haven’t picked up the show yet. Another might be that Max (formerly HBO Max) is launching in the UK in early 2026, and may use The Pitt as one of its flagship shows to lure in subscribers.
It would be unwise for me to admit in print that I have seen a show unavailable in my country of residence by any legal means—so I won’t. But word has it that it’s very good. It will be interesting to see what happens when this show eventually drops in the UK because, despite the differences in medical context between here and the US with regards to health insurance and the like, the crises in emergency department staffing and funding don’t seem too dissimilar to problems in the NHS.
Word has it, it’s very good...
Once upon a time, we watched what was available to us on the television set, largely oblivious to what we were missing out on in other countries. If you didn’t catch or record a show when it aired, you could buy it on video or DVD. Otherwise, that was it. You’d missed it. Now, we watch television from all over the world, usually at the same time as the rest of the world is watching it. It feels like everything is available to us, so it strikes an odd note when something simply isn’t.
In truth, we have a lot more and also a lot less available to view nowadays. Not so long ago, we also lived in a more lawless era of the internet where, if you did want to stream something illegally, it was relatively easy to do so. Over the past decade or so, there has been a serious and effective clampdown by copyright holders on dodgy websites called things like “letmewatchmyshow.net” where you could, for instance, watch the entire back catalogue of ER (currently also unavailable via UK streaming subscriptions).
Even using a VPN seldom offers a way around location-locked content anymore. A friend desperate to watch The Pitt told me she’d used a VPN to sign up for Max, but was scuppered by the requirement to provide an American phone number. Even in this supposed era of everything being watchable, the siloing of content between different streamers means the telly-crazy have to subscribe to a slew of platforms to keep up, which is a) work, and b) expensive if you were to just sign up for everything in perpetuity.
While we wait for our time in The Pitt, I recommend that you join me in binge rewatching House, all eight seasons of which have just landed on Netflix. However badly you think this show might have aged, I promise you, it’s worse. Delicious.
