‘The Pitt’: Noah Wyle on Why He Loves Writing for Shows, Isa Briones on Santos and Garcia

Isa Briones as Santos, Tracy Ifeachor as Collins, Noah Wyle as Robby — 'The Pitt' Season 1 Episode 1
Spoiler Alert
Warrick Page / Max

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 1 Episode 4.]

Noah Wyle wears many hats. In addition to starring in, he also executive producers and has written two episodes of The Pitt. (He’s also directed episodes of shows he’s done in the past.) The first is the fourth episode (covering the 10 to 11 a.m. hour of Robby’s shift), which dropped on Max on January 23.

“I wanted to be on the writing staff this year. I was on the writing staff for Leverage: Redemption and Librarians and did some writing on Falling Skies. So writing is something I feel is such a huge part of my creative process and gives me a stake of ownership in the projects I’m working on, allows me to be familiar with the DNA of how they come about and be collaborative with all the people that really put the architecture together,” Wyle tells TV Insider. “So, John [Wells], [R.] Scott [Gemmill] and I early on were talking about narrative, and then when we hired the rest of the writers and began to break the season out, I wanted to pick an early episode so that I could get one under my belt in case production demands or rehearsal demands sort of made my time in the room have to be split.

He reveals, “I was also finishing the third season of Leverage Redemption at the same time we were doing the writing room. So because of the time difference, I was working on Leverage in the first half of the day and then joining the writing room in the second half of the day so that I could be part of both. And Episode 4 allowed me an opportunity to be present in the writing room for the first several weeks and then take my outline and go write it while I was doing Leverage: Redemption in New Orleans. And that worked out great and then it just so happened that I finished Leverage: Redemption, everybody dug my first script and so I wrote Episode 9, too.”

Speaking of Leverage: Redemption and The Librarians, it’s a reunion for Wyle with Drew Powell, who plays a patient who’s getting increasingly impatient in the waiting room. “Drew is becoming my Zelig,” Wyle says with a laugh.

Powell’s Doug Driscoll is calling attention to something that’s prevalent in hospitals. “Most big city hospital emergency rooms are overcrowded and understaffed and patients have to wait on average between six and eight hours to be seen by a physician. It’s hard to wait six or eight hours, especially when you’re having what’s probably one of the worst days of your life,” explains Wyle. “So by the time physicians see patients, they’re seeing a really agitated, very upset person in addition to whatever their issue is. And we wanted to have a storyline really reflect that frustration of the patient journey being so arduous before you even get to an examination.”

He continues, “And the character Doug Driscoll sort of epitomizes that to a very large metaphorical degree because of where that character ends up. But we wanted to show how a non-drug addicted, non-agitated, seemingly normal and well-adjusted individual could be pushed to emotional and physical extremes by the pressures of just having to wait for care.”

Elsewhere in this episode, we continue to see surgeon Garcia (Alexandra Metz) taking an interest in intern Santos (Isa Briones). She’s letting her do procedures. She wants to hear from her during traumas. It’s a very different experience than Santos has with senior resident Langdon (Patrick Ball).

“I think Santos and Garcia are very cut from the same cloth in the way that they keep to themselves, they’re kind of hard asses, they like to give everyone s**t,” says Briones. “And I think they recognize that in each other, that everyone kind of doesn’t like them and so they like each other. But yeah, I think it’s just very much, they’re good at what they do and they don’t really take any s**t from anyone, and so there’s a kindred spirit there.”

Noah Wyle as Robby, Isa Briones as Santos, Alexandra Metz as Garcia, and Patrick Ball as Langdon — 'The Pitt' Season 1 Episode 4

Warrick Page / Max

But even without that backing from Garcia, Santos would 100 percent be pushing as hard as she does, including wanting to be alerted for any chest tubes that need to be done. “That’s just her character,” Briones explains with a laugh. “When we were talking about all these characters back when we were first in medical boot camp and forming our characters before we started filming, the writers let me know what they had in mind — not that it was necessarily going to come out in this one day at work, but that she’s a former athlete, a former gymnast. She’s very competitive, very like, it’s me against everyone else and not just the physical athleticism, but also the mental getting into people’s heads and trying to get ahead and use her kind of wit and narcissism to kind of freak people out.”

Santos does see Garcia as someone on her side and someone she can go to, “which is the antithesis of her relationship with someone like Langdon, with whom it’s been nonstop butting heads. But no matter what, she’s getting ahead. She’s on her own journey. She’s not really looking for friends. She just happens to find someone who takes an interest in her.”

But Santos is moved, like most of the staff, by one of the patients: a college-aged student who is braindead after an accidental overdose. His parents struggle to accept that and want to blame another student brought in, but she tells them he was the one to pick up the drugs for them. After witnessing her talking to his parents, Santos acknowledges she has a lot to learn. While the nature of the show — it takes place in real-time, with each episode covering an hour — doesn’t allow too much time to spend time on seeing shifts in characters, we will slowly start to see one in Santos.

“Any good character in any story has an arc. No one is just [one thing]. No one is purely just evil or mean. Obviously it comes from somewhere and it’s a credit to the writing and to the writers, how they slowly throughout one day kind of naturally unfold certain hints about people’s characters that would naturally come out in a day,” Briones says. “But I think with her, you start to realize, okay, yeah, she can be a little aggressive and kind of tunnel vision on her own path, but there’s a reason why, there is obviously vulnerability. She jokes about it in the beginning saying, ‘Oh, it’s a defense mechanism against insecurity. I’m just joking.’ That’s not a joke. We all have insecurities and there’s reasons why we have walls up. And I think you start to very slowly see and chip away, oh, there’s something underneath there. There’s something that made her this way and made her only look out for herself.”

What do you think of The Pitt so far? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Pitt, Thursdays, 9/8c, Max

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