“I watched up through the beginning of season six of ER after The Pitt,” admitted NYC-based researcher Isha Patnaik. Yes, the Pitt-to-ER pipeline is real. Boeing employee Aasha Zinke recalled her roommate Catherine going on an ER binge in the same timeframe. TV writer Jenny Jaffe’s best friend Dani managed to view all 331 episodes of ER in the time since The Pitt aired. We heard similar stories from a number of other fans of The Pitt, though not all have made it to the end of the show’s 15 seasons (yet).
The buzz around The Pitt even got previously established ER fans hyped up to revisit hospital-based drama. “I started an ER rewatch when The Pitt premiered and my friends were like ‘Why?’ and I was like, ‘IDK I just like ER and I wasn’t in a new show mood,’ but then when The Pitt ended all my friends were like, ‘I’m having Noah Wyle withdrawal’ and I was like, ‘You know what might help?’” recalled comedy writer Lauren Scharf.
Numbers-wise, the spring of ER may be no summer of Suits, but it’s definitely A Thing, even if the exact amount of Thing-ness is hard to quantify (streaming data is notoriously hard to come by). After The Pitt premiered in January, searches for the show spiked on Google. While HBO Max declined to comment for this article, the sheer availability of the show—also available to stream on Hulu and Disney+—is sure to have some kind of bolstering effect, à la the Netflix Bump.
Of course, not everyone who went looking for Pitt-like action in the halls of Cook County General Hospital found it. At least half a dozen viewers who spoke to Glamour turned off ER some time around the pilot, finding the show soapy and dated. The Pitt, for instance, doesn’t have music; ER is paced for network commercial breaks. As writer Madeline Goetz put it, “I did watch a little ER afterward and I decided I get freaked out by old-looking, dimly lit hospitals; I also found the hospital scenes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer unsettling; why is it so dark in there!!!!”
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