In The Pitt, Maxs new medical drama, a Silicon Valley-esque directive to do more with less is delivered shortly before a patient with botched silicone butt implants cries for help. A doctor dealing with her pregnancy complications must convince a mother to allow her teenager to have an abortion. Rats that escaped from the many layers of an unhoused mans clothes roam the emergency room while an unfathomable amount of misdirected bodily fluids chip away at an ever-dwindling supply of fresh scrubs.If the employees at this hospital were working a regular eight-hour shift, they would have been able to clock out shortly after the death of a child and the honor walk for a recently deceased organ donor teenager rocked them to their cores. But this isnt a 9-5 job and The Pitt isnt an eight episode prestige TV show. Everyone involved has to endure seven more hours of hellish events that compound the horrors that came before.Much has been made of The Pitts single-day format and pseudo real-time structure. As weve discussed, that format makes The Pitt the stylistic heir to Foxs 24 and gives it a creative edge over countless other medical dramas. As someone who has historically bounced off those other medical shows, Ive found that The Pitts chaotic nature not only gives it a creative edge but helps ensure that the series doesnt have time to fall into the same dramatic pitfalls that often make this well-tread genre frustratingly complacent.Yet, The Pitt is more than a medical drama. In many ways, its a show that confronts the question all of us have probably asked some version of in the last few years, How much more can we possibly take?That isnt meant to belittle the unique horrors The Pitts doctors and their real-life equivalents endure. It is mercifully difficult to imagine having to wake up and endure the kind of day The Pitt portrays, much less a careers worth of such experiences. The Pitt may be exaggerated for dramatic purposes, though the biggest exaggeration seems to be the idea all of these things would happen so quickly during the same shift. The greater purpose is to convey that aforementioned sense of compounding tragedies that can make such days feel like this.But when The Pitt star Noah Wyle described the show as a medical drama for the post-COVID world, you get the sense that he wasnt just talking about the fresh hells and PTSD that event brought to the medical community. The last several years have tested the resiliency and sanity of every right-minded person. Supposed once in a lifetime events have been stacked on top of each other in ways that may have also once felt exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Some have lost everything and many have been forced to process more than they thought they could ever stand.All the while, we and the staff at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital must deal with a world that refuses to slow down long enough to let us actually heal. Worse, those in charge often seem more obsessed with archaic metrics of production and progression that often feel more trivial than ever, despite their growing prevalence. Are any of those metrics (such as the vague patient satisfaction score that threaten to get The Pitts staff fired) used to help find ways to make things truly better? Rarely. More often, they are used to further a world in which the only real incentive is the threat that things could still get worse.So, we develop a callus. We harden ourselves enough to allow us to press on without having to constantly process the everything of it all. It helps us survive, but we cant help but wonder if weve given away too much of what makes us human. As surviving and living have become so intertwined, we look for proof that sacrifices and displays of humanity will allow us to do more than feel like fools in a world seemingly trying to tell us to stop caring and make the whole thing easier.This is where The Pitt performs its most miraculous trick. It shows us what heroes look like in such a world. In a post-anti-hero age where the cynical have seemingly inherited the Earth, The Pitt makes it so easy to root for protagonists that have been molded by the toughest of times but havent fallen victim to them. At least not yet, and at least not entirely.Its not that we can do exactly what they do. Even if we had their training, were not TV doctors. What matters so much more is that we can watch them be taken to the absolute brink of human endurance and handle it in a way that feels truly admirable. Each of them is as resilient as we can possibly hope to be while still feeling, and its still never going to be enough. Get enough such people together, though, and things feel different. When someone thinks they cant do it anymore, another comes through with the kindness, empathy, and strength required to keep them on the path.How much more can we possibly take? All signs suggest we havent found out yet. In such times, its odd to find comfort in a show that also offers an unlimited supply of trauma. Yet, there is a comfort in watching people act as we would like to believe we would act when things are as bad as they could possibly be. Because as The Pitts doctors sometimes find the time to realize, where else would you rather be in a world where everything is going wrong than where you could do the most good?Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!New episodes of The Pit premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on Max, culminating with the finale on April 10.