How HBO’s The Pitt portrays faith in a non-preachy way

In a hospital ER treatment room, doctors have just given up their struggles to save a critically injured patient. “Call it,” says the senior doctor.

The view pulls back to reveal a cleaner pushing her cart along the corridor. She hears the patient’s heart monitor flatline. Without looking round she stops, bows her head for an instant, then moves on.

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That fragment of a scene offers a glimpse into the critically acclaimed HBO series The Pitt, and how it weaves faith and spirituality seamlessly throughout the life-and-death episodes of a fictional Pittsburgh trauma centre. The show, now in its second season, won five Emmys last year, including best drama series. Its understated but pervasive treatment of faith stands alone in current dramatic television shows.

There’s no shortage of shows that are explicitly religious or that never mention faith at all (overrepresenting roughly a third of Canadians and Americans who cite no religious affiliation). But it’s vanishingly rare to find a series that incorporates faith into its very fabric, not as plot device but as part of life.

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Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), the senior physician, sets the tone in the first episode of season one, when the new crop of interns experiences their first death. “One of the things we do here is to take a moment of silence when we lose a patient, to respect their humanity,” he tells them.

There’s no explicitly religious language in the scene, just an open space into which the assembled characters bring their own spirituality. Charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), a Catholic, crosses herself. Nurse Perlah Alawi (Amielynn Abellera), in her Muslim hijab, bows her head. Other characters bow or clasp hands as if in prayer; one closes her eyes but raises her head — this isn’t her thing. Another, more explicitly, rolls his eyes at this waste of time. Faith gets its moment, along with a full gamut of reactions, from devotion to derision.

Wyle, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of Robby, plays the soulful doctor with the patience of Job. He also serves as an executive producer and writer on the show.

While a mostly non-observant Jew, Robby in a moment of crisis breaks down and, in Hebrew, recites the Shema, a daily prayer learned at his grandmother’s knee. Does it comfort him? We can’t know. But when he hits bottom, prayer is all he has.

Robby can be seen as Isaiah’s wounded healer, leading a team who each carry some measure of baggage — trauma, abuse, disability, despair. All bear their own frailty as they work to heal others.

In an episode Wyle wrote, Robby tries to comfort two adult children as their elderly father nears the end of his life. “Is your family religious?” he asks, to which they respond, “Oh, god no. No god.” So he tells them about a traditional Hawaiian cultural practice, ho‘oponopono, a healing prayer with four phrases: “I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.” In the absence of religious language, the two are able to embrace this ritual of forgiveness and reconciliation.

A grace note for a broken world.

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Douglas Tindal is a writer and actor in Haliburton, Ont.