‘The Pitt’ star Noah Wyle on that tribute to his grandfather, why making the show was a risk

They say you can’t go home again. But don’t tell Noah Wyle that.

Some 15 years after saying goodbye to ER, the series that made him a star — and earned him five Emmy nominations in the process — not only did he return to the medical genre with the enormously popular and critically acclaimed Max series The Pitt (on which he serves as an executive producer and writer of two episodes), but he did so on the Warner Bros. Studios lot just one soundstage over from where the hit NBC series filmed.

But the memories, he says, came flooding back even before filming began.

“We did the two weeks of medical boot camp on Stage 12, which faces Stage 11, which is where we had done ER all those years,” Wyle says on the latest episode of The Awardist podcast. “So, it’s only about 100 feet, but it felt like 100 years and about 20 pounds and about 10 million memories. It’s been the most synchronistic sense of completion [and] closure experience from the jump.”

On ER, which ran from September 1994 to April 2009, Wyle started as medical student John Carter; on The Pitt, he’s Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending physician in the emergency department at an underfunded and understaffed Pittsburgh trauma hospital. The series plays out over one day, each episode representing an hour of their shift — and where ER often focused on the patients’ cases and the doctors’ personal lives, The Pitt centers squarely on the medical professionals and the toll these cases, both past and present, take on them.

During the pandemic, Wyle and ER executive producer/showrunner John Wells and co-EP R. Scott Gemmill started exploring the possibility of a reboot of ER, created by Michael Crichton. “We were close enough that we were in the rights conversation with the Crichton camp that broke down,” Wyle reveals, “and that’s how we got to where we are.”

Wyle acknowledges that a reboot “would’ve been satisfying for ER fans,” but the creative team realized it wasn’t going to be easy to get the original cast back together, but more so, they “wanted to move from 2020 forward, not go back to ’93 and bring everybody up to 2020.”

Having starred on 254 episodes of a medical drama didn’t deter Wyle from returning to the genre. In fact, he says he “was the one doing the arm-twisting on this one a little bit” in his attempt to convince Wells and Gemmill they should do it. “Individually, we’re at a point in our lives and careers where we wanted to punch above our weight class again and to reach for something that we weren’t feeling like we’d touched in a while,” he explains. Gemmill had just wrapped up a 14-season run as EP and showrunner of NCIS: Los Angeles. And Wells didn’t have “anything else to prove in television. But he has a lot to lose when he puts his neck out there, especially in an arena where he’s already established quite a bit of credibility,” Wyle says. “It’s very easy to fall and almost disgrace your legacy if you don’t land the plane elegantly. So, we were very conscious of what we had to risk in this endeavor.”

He realized the risk was paying off when he saw an edit of the first episode. “There was a lot of, and rightly so, speculation about whether or not using music was a good idea or a bad idea… [or] having actors be doing background in scenes that they’re not in. These are things that sound good in concept, but you’re not really sure if they’re going to take something away from the dramatic punch when you put it all together,” he explains. “It wasn’t until we saw it cut together and seeing that these cases really benefit from playing over multi episodes, audiences can remember where we are. In fact, they appreciate the fact that we’re able to do a little bit of a deeper dive and play these things out in real-time. If I say your labs are going to be back in an hour and I come back with the results of those labs, that’s engaging and innovative in a way that we didn’t appreciate was going to really work. But it has, and it validates the proof of concept, which really is encouraging going into season 2.”

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On this particular day and shift, it’s the anniversary of the death of Dr. Robby’s mentor, Dr. Adamson, who died at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — a death Dr. Robby carries a lot of guilt over. All the while, he and his team are saving lives while also, inevitably, losing some. A mass shooting at a Pittsburgh music festival results in multiple casualties, which play out in the season’s final few episodes.

“Those were the championship rounds. Those are the ones I was probably less fun to live with,” Wyle says of the grueling shoot, as well as the emotional weight of the storyline, which results in Dr. Robby having a private breakdown. “It just was easier to stay in it than to try and come out of it. My wife and children were really compassionate and understanding and supportive all the way through. And I walked everybody through what I thought the process was going to be, and it was very similar to what I thought it was. My wife, to her credit, when I came out the other side, just said, ‘I’m sending you away to be away from humans and just flush.’ And so, that’s what she did.”

Earlier episodes packed emotional punches of different kinds, including episode 4, one of two that Wyle wrote. In it, a brother and sister (Mackenzie Astin, Rebecca Tilney) struggle to make an end-of-life decision about their elderly father, who’s declining quickly as a result of a severe case of pneumonia.

“End-of-life care, how we ease people into these difficult decisions, how we depict the choices and the consequences of those decisions, was really important. And I’ve gotten a lot of really lovely feedback from that episode in particular as people have said that it helped them frame the experience for themselves or brought up having gone through it fairly recently and give them a little bit of grace and feeling seen and heard,” Wyle says.

In writing it, Wyle paid tribute to his grandfather.

“I called my mother and I told her that I’d finished writing the scene where an adult sister and brother [are] saying goodbye to their father. And it reminded me of when she and my uncle Sandy said goodbye to my grandfather,” he recalls. “And my mother said, ‘It was so funny, right before dad died, he opened his eyes and he said her mom’s name, he said, “Marge.” And then he smiled and he just went away.'”

Wyle took note and added that extra touch to the character’s final moments. “My mother, I was sitting next to her when she watched the episode and that moment happened and I thought, ‘Oh, God. How’s she going to feel?’ And she turned to me and she just smiled. She was so touched that that moment became that moment, which then apparently became a moment for a lot of other people. So, the point is to make these connections. The point is to aim for hearts and connect them to each other.”

Listen to Wyle’s full interview on The Awardist podcast, below, where he also reveals secrets of the practical effects team, explains Dr. Robby’s complicated emotional state, looks back on his and George Clooney’s guest-starring roles on Friends, and more. Plus, we discuss Nate Bargatze being named host of the 2025 Emmys.