Noah Wyle Is Still In An ER And So Are We

Noah Wyle has been standing in an emergency room for thirty years. Think about that. The man graduated from ER, took a short nap, and HBO Max woke him up, handed him the same stethoscope, and said buddy we need you back in the pit. Literally. They named it The Pitt. That's the title. They looked at Noah Wyle — a man whose entire face is now just worry lines from watching fictional people die of fictional sepsis — and said you know what, we want more of that, but dirtier, and in Pittsburgh. And the show is good. That's the insane part. It's the best thing on television and it is essentially a man being slowly crushed to death by the American healthcare system in real time. Must-see. Wait, I said I wouldn't say that. Worth-see. Whatever.

The Pitt — Season 3 (HBO Max)

The gimmick is each episode is one hour of a shift. The reality is this show has a higher body count than most war movies and makes you feel grateful you have insurance, which you don't, because nobody does. Wyle plays Dr. Robby, a man whose first name is probably something like Michael but everyone calls him Robby because that's what happens to you when you work thirty-six-hour shifts — you lose the use of your own first name. Season three. Still great. Still stressful. Still the only drama on TV where nobody is solving a murder and somehow it's more tense than the ones that are.

Strip Law (Netflix)

An adult animated comedy about an uptight lawyer who teams up with a Las Vegas magician. Adam Scott is the lawyer. Keith David is in it, which is the only reason anyone should be in anything. The premise was clearly pitched as "what if Better Call Saul but a cartoon and also there's a guy pulling doves out of a briefcase." I'll say this — the finale episode is called "A Show About Lawyers," which tells you the writers knew exactly what they were doing, which is making a show Netflix ordered because the algorithm spit out the words "lawyer" and "Vegas" in the same week. It exists. It's on at 3 a.m. Watch one, see if it sticks.

56 Days (Prime Video)

Dove Cameron and Avan Jogia are a couple whose romance ends with a body in a luxury apartment, and detectives have to reconstruct the last fifty-six days. So it's the entire genre of streaming crime show in one sentence. The twist is it's based on the Irish novel by Catherine Ryan Howard, which means there was a good version of this, and now there's this version, which is — well, it's competent. Dove Cameron has been grinding really hard to be taken seriously since she stopped being a Disney person, and fair enough, you have to eat. The fifty-six day structure means every episode is a countdown, which is the only structural idea streaming has left besides "what if it was a prequel."

Being Gordon Ramsay (Netflix)

Gordon Ramsay is opening five restaurants in one building. Five. In one building. In London, in the tallest building in the City of London, which I guess is different from London London — the British have invented new kinds of London specifically to confuse tourists. The show follows him for nine months doing this. Nine months. You could have a baby in that time. He's having five restaurants. At some point being Gordon Ramsay stopped being a job and became a hostile takeover of the concept of eating. I will watch this. I'm not proud of it.

Portobello (HBO Max)

Marco Bellocchio — the Italian director who's been making movies since the Nixon administration — directed this miniseries about Enzo Tortora, a beloved Italian TV host falsely accused of being in the Camorra in the 80s. If you don't know who Enzo Tortora is, congratulations, you're American. If you do know, this is apparently extraordinary. HBO Max buried it in their menu behind four tiles of House of the Dragon spinoffs, but it's there, and it's probably one of the two or three actually serious pieces of television dropping this month. Here.

Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model (Netflix)

The documentary where Tyra Banks and her former colleagues show up to explain that yes, actually, it was bad, and we feel weird about it now. Every reality show from 2003 to 2011 is going to get one of these. Project Runway is next. Just wait.

Jujutsu Kaisen, Frieren, and the rest of the anime wing

Both back with new episodes. Frieren is one of the best-reviewed things in the entire medium — 8.8 on TMDb, which for a database where people rate everything a 6, is a five-alarm fire. If you're not watching Frieren and you tell people you like prestige TV, you're lying. It's slow, it's sad, it's about an elf who lived too long and now has to figure out what any of it meant. That's the entire premise. That's also, coincidentally, the premise of Netflix executives right now.

The movie wing, briefly

Morgan Neville made a Paul McCartney documentary called Man on the Run on Prime Video, which is going to be good because Morgan Neville has never made a bad one. Sophie Turner and Kit Harington reunite in The Dreadful on Prime, a medieval horror movie, because apparently the two of them signed a blood contract that they can only work with each other now, forever. And Karl Urban is in a pirate movie with Priyanka Chopra called The Bluff, which I will watch purely because Karl Urban in a pirate movie is the kind of thing a man does right before he either wins an Oscar or gets divorced, and I want to know which one.

Pick of the Week

The Pitt, season three. It's the one that's actually good. Everything else is fine, some of it's funny, some of it's beautifully shot Italian miniseries nobody will watch, but The Pitt is the show. If you want a movie, Man on the Run. McCartney plus Morgan Neville is a lock.

See you next week. Someone will have gotten fired by then.