After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels 'right at home' in 'The Pitt'

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, Noah Wyle, is an executive producer, writer and star of the new Max series "The Pitt," which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PITT")

NOAH WYLE: (As Dr. Michael Robinavitch) Wendell Stone, 52, chief rigger from Pitfest. Isolated trauma to the left chest when a speaker tower came down on him. Looks like multiple rib fractures. Pulse 110, BP 130 over 85. Decent sats at 96. Fifty of fent in the field.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Got it.

WYLE: (As Dr. Michael Robinavitch) How we doing, Mr. Stone?

J TEDDY GARCES: (As Wendell Stone) Mr. Stone was my dad. It's just Stone.

(SCREAMING)

DAVIES: "The Pitt" has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue and well-drawn characters, and it's gained a following of real-life emergency room doctors who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wyle is a veteran of stage, screen and television, who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs. He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series "ER" for most of its 15 seasons, where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series "Falling Skies" and "The Librarians" and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organizations Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World. "The Pitt" is now wrapping up its 15-episode run and has been renewed for a second season. Noah Wyle, welcome to FRESH AIR.

WYLE: Thank you so much for having me.

DAVIES: You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character - maybe I didn't - he's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And, you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization, and it's a teaching hospital. So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced, residents in training and medical students on their first day, I believe, in their rotations, as this thing begins. So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character, Dr. Robby.

WYLE: I play Dr. Michael Robinavitch, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need, and because he's really good at what he does, and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And it's taken a toll on him. He's seen a lot and done a lot, and he's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today, we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that.

DAVIES: Right. And things - he runs into some rough seas. You know, he's surrounded by these young medical students, and I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific.

WYLE: The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally. We found actors in Australia. We found them in England. We found them on the East Coast, West Coast. But we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.

DAVIES: And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance, and we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in. And then you hear this, one, two, three, as the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney, and then the team gets to work. Let's listen.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PITT")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Twenty-three-year-old Ben Kemper. No helmet. Got doored riding an e-scooter. Neck versus handlebar, then face planted to the pavement. Obvious facial fractures, but alert and oriented with good vitals.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Here we go. One, two, three. How we doing, Ben?

JORDAN HENDRICKS: (As Ben Kemper) Blood back of my throat.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) That's probably from the nosebleed. Short rapid rhino, please.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Tacky at 120. Pulse ox borderline at 90.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Blow by at 15 liters from now.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) BP 138 over 84.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) Neck contusion. Larynx shifted to the right. No crepitance.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Four of morphine. I'm going to stick something in your nose to stop the bleeding.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) No hemotympanum.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Inflate the balloon.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #7: (As character) How about now, Ben?

HENDRICKS: (As Ben Kemper) Better.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) What's up?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Good vitals. A and O. Let's have a look.

DAVIES: And that's a scene from "The Pitt," where our guest Noah Wyle is a star. Awfully intense.

WYLE: Tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Le Fort III floating face fracture, which, when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.

DAVIES: Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into the series?

WYLE: I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisers on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board-certified emergency room physician. He was a technical adviser and a writer on "ER," and he is with us again. And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes. He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling, given the circumstances and stakes of the case.

DAVIES: Yeah. You know, I watch this series with my wife, who is 25 years as a primary care physician. She gets almost all of it. I get maybe a third of it, but I don't feel like I'm missing much. But I did wonder - you were a writer on the show, I know - I mean, do you think about maybe letting up on some of that, or is getting all that in critical to the authenticity of it?

WYLE: One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack on the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show, and we need you to feel sad here 'cause we're playing strings or exciting here because we're using percussion. We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack in the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes the emotional equivalent of a score. And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about. It's competency porn.

DAVIES: (Laughter) Well, the other thing that's interesting about those scenes is everybody's moving, and all of these different actors are barking these observations and commands, and they've got to be careful not to talk over each other so much that you can't hear it so there's - it's got to be crisply delivered and well miked. I imagine this took some pretty meticulous rehearsal.

WYLE: The rehearsals are extensive, especially for the medical scenes. We often rehearse those 24 hours in advance of shooting them, so we can come in with it pretty well in our muscles already and then figure out how we want to photograph it on the day we shoot. In terms of how the dialogue is overlapped, that's intentional because that's real. You know, you've got four or five people in the room, all who are working simultaneously, trying to do their own thing and record their own thing in the medical records. So a lot of times, the sound is really cacophonous.

DAVIES: The effect is impressive. You know, the origins of this show are interesting. As I understand it, during the pandemic, you began hearing from medical providers and first responders who were dealing with all this high-stakes, stressful demand on them. Is that right?

WYLE: Yeah. Yeah, I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders, and some of it was, you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.

DAVIES: Carter was the character you played on "ER," right?

WYLE: It was, yeah.

DAVIES: Yeah, yeah. Right.

WYLE: And a lot of them were sort of thanking me for inspiring to go into a career in medicine, but also telling me how hard it was at that moment. And I was sort of overwhelmed being a lightning rod for that at that time. And so I pivoted a lot of that mail to John Wells, who executive- produced "ER," and said, outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever do with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here - even though we said we'd never do it again (laughter) - I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple of years later, you know, after we saw how this broke down over socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here.

DAVIES: What was it like for you to put on scrubs and a lab coat and get back in a hospital setting again after all those years?

WYLE: It was wonderful. I think I spent 15 years avoiding - actively avoiding walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road. And then finally, I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped a stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home.

DAVIES: But now you have a beard. I mean, you were a callow young kid when you started that show, and then you were eventually an attending physician. Now you're a guy with a lot of miles on you.

WYLE: Yes, yes. I'm - ironically, I'm 20 years older than Anthony Edwards was playing the attending 30 years ago - so that makes me sound ancient.

DAVIES: (laughter) Right, right. You know, I should just mention, it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of "ER," has sued alleging that "The Pitt" is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean, one of the differences between the two shows is that "The Pitt" is - the entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER. There's an hour, essentially - in real time, an hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day, so that's the real distinction.

WYLE: Very much so. Different city, different character. You know, we had started down a reboot road, and then it became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by we have.

DAVIES: You're the lead attending in this emergency room. And in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast which includes a lot of, you know, much younger actors. Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people learning the craft?

WYLE: In a way. You know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody - myself included - to kick some rust off and to refamiliarize myself with how much has changed in healthcare but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras. And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to 'em (laughter). And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself, and I ate lunch by myself. And then the R4s ate together, the R2s and 3s ate together, the (inaudible) ate together...

DAVIES: That's fourth-year residents, second-year residents? Yeah.

WYLE: Second-year residents, first-year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves, and they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know, and the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth. And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything. But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over. So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before - yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.

DAVIES: Was there a wrap party after you finished taping in which those barriers broke down or (laughter)...

WYLE: Yeah, to a degree. I mean, I don't stand on ceremony when I work, and I try to create as much of an egalitarian and democratic environment as possible - and so I try to erase numbers on call sheets, and I try to erase barriers between foreground and background or cast and crew and try to call the whole thing company and get everybody to buy into the same thing. And it's very hard to do that. It's very rare that you're successful. This one was - the stars aligned beautifully. Everybody just jumped in, which made it a real pleasure.

DAVIES: We're gonna take a break here. We are speaking with Noah Wyle. He's an executive producer, writer and star of the new Max series "The Pitt," which is streaming now. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Noah Wyle. He's an executive producer, writer, and star of the new TV series "The Pitt," which is about a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room.

You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in, and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series, where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate. This is one I want to play now, where a man and a woman who are a brother and sister, played here by Rebecca Tinley and Mackenzie Astin, are at the hospital with their elderly father who has pneumonia. The father has, you know, left instructions, he does not want to be intubated, and they're talking to you as Dr. Robbie about it. Dr. Robbie speaks first. Let's listen.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PITT")

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid.

REBECCA TILNEY: (As Helen Spencer) Can't you take the fluid away?

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the bipap works.

TILNEY: (As Helen Spencer) And if it doesn't?

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) Then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine.

MACKENZIE ASTIN: (As Jereme) We're still talking about it.

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing - do not intubate.

TILNEY: (As Helen Spencer) We're thinking, try it for a week.

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated. He might need to be restrained, 'cause he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat. And he wouldn't really know what was happening. Elderly patients can often develop psychosis.

TILNEY: (As Helen Spencer) Well - but he might get better.

ASTIN: (As Jereme) Or he might get worse. What would you do?

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose.

TILNEY: (As Helen Spencer) But he's not your father, and he can recover from this.

ASTIN: (As Jereme) What my sister means is that we're still deciding the best thing to do.

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.

DAVIES: And that is our guest, Noah Wyle, in a scene from "The Pitt," which is now streaming on Max. There are a lot of these scenes where you're dealing with loved ones who just can't accept what's happening. There's another one, two parents who just can't accept the fact that their son who came in with a fentanyl overdose is brain-dead. You want to just say a little bit about preparing for these scenes?

WYLE: Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours, it feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters.

When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view. In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for wanting to keep their father alive that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are. And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.

DAVIES: The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is, you know - I mentioned before that this series, kind of the germ of it began during COVID, when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robby, during COVID lost a mentor, another doctor. And I believe this day, that is the focus of the series, is the anniversary of his death, right?

WYLE: Correct.

DAVIES: And we learned that early on. And then, you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks - his PTSD, if you will - is portrayed in the show?

WYLE: This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, you know, he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival, and then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with. He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should've stayed home, but today he went to work, and as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy, to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them. And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him.

And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood. And she came over for breakfast last Sunday. And she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode and that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the 4-year-old. I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed, and she finishes.

And I said, my goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she says, well, that wasn't real, (Laughter) and I said, well, this one wasn't either. And she said, but it felt real, and it brought all that up for me - isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely, sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the 4-year-old, when was that? She said, oh, I think your brother was probably about 4 at the time. I think that's why it hit me. And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night, and you helped us with our homework? Wow.

DAVIES: And she's carried that painful memory for all these years.

WYLE: That's 35 years that's been in there. Came out last Sunday.

DAVIES: We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Noah Wyle. He's an executive producer, writer and star of the new Max series "The Pitt," which is streaming now. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE FRESH CUT ORCHESTRA "THE MOTHERS' SUITE, MOVEMENT III - RITUAL OF TAKE")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Noah Wyle. He's an executive producer, writer, and star of the new TV series "The Pitt," which is streaming on Max. The show depicts the drama and chaos at a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room. Each of the series' 15 episodes depicts one hour in a hectic day at the ER.

All right, the next clip I wanted to play is a painful moment in the emergency room where a young child has died. And in this case, she drowned - I think after jumping into a swimming pool to try and save her sister who survived, right?

WYLE: Yes.

DAVIES: Right. So after the child dies, you gather the medical students and residents into a room for a moment and - let's listen to what you say.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PITT")

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure or meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do? I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans. And Day 1, I got a kid, 5-year-old boy, accidentally shot by his brother, playing with Dad's gun. Worried he was going to get in trouble right up until he coded and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night. I was walking and walking, walking. I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery, and I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts and I'm thinking to myself, OK, well, that's what I need. I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #8: (As character) Doc, Doc, I got patients throwing punches and chairs.

WYLE: (As Michael Robinavitch) OK, everybody. Let's get back to it. Just remember the employee assistance program is available, as are Kiara and myself if anybody needs to talk.

DAVIES: What an interruption. You wrote this scene, didn't you? This is - was your episode, right?

WYLE: Yeah, that was one of the two episodes I wrote.

DAVIES: Your speech about how to overcome a loss like this is interrupted. It's because they say patients are throwing chairs and fists. And it turns out to be two women who are fighting because one has - in the waiting room - yes, one woman has asked another woman to mask her coughing child, and the other mom calls her a Fauci zombie and slugs her. This is one of the many topical issues that you get into in this series, which weren't even around in "ER." I mean, the people listened to their doctors. They didn't, you know, resist vaccines and masks then.

WYLE: You know, we had a bit of a mandate. Let's not be too biased, you know. The fastest way to get people to turn the channel is if they feel like we're preaching to them or we're being dogmatic. So what we wanted was accuracy and realism. We wanted to just be presentational with what emergency rooms look like. I wrote that episode, and I couldn't resist (laughter) just taking one stance which I thought was fairly benign - which is to talk about the efficacy of masks and cutting down the transmission of disease and germs, which shouldn't be a political statement and shouldn't even be called into question. And yet, it has been in the last couple of years. And it's a great sort of metaphor for all the distrust that's been seated between us and our doctors. And it's really, I think, incredibly unfortunate. And I don't know if by the time this airs, how much worse the situation is going to get, but there were so - 20% of the NIH was just laid off. We're going to be seeing the tale of that decision-making for years and years and years to come.

DAVIES: Yeah. And you do have an episode later about a measles outbreak.

WYLE: Well, that was - what was so funny is, we wrote the sepisodes almost a year ago. And so when we did a storyline about neurocysticercosis, we had no idea that RFK Jr. was going to be diagnosed with neurocysticercosis - nor did we think when we did a measles storyline that it was going to be as topical as it is right now. Nine months ago, it wasn't. But it wasn't hard to look into your crystal ball and see what was going to happen if vaccine rates continue to drop, and we live with an international community that travels all the time. Like, we are as vulnerable as the next incoming flight.

DAVIES: You know, one of the things that I like about the show is that it is set in a real place. It's in Pittsburgh. And we're in Philadelphia. I've traveled around Pennsylvania a bit, and if you listen carefully, you can hear a lot of Pittsburgh stuff. I mean, Primanti sandwiches which is a thing there. And when the charge nurse breaks up this fight between the two women, there's this moment where she says, what are you doing? What are you doing? Where do you think you are? This ain't Philly. It's a hospital (laughter). I really appreciated that.

WYLE: Oh, I'm glad. I've gotten some mail from Philly that didn't appreciate it.

DAVIES: (laughter) I know.

WYLE: I meant it as sort of a compliment, 'cause when I - I grew up - I'm from LA, and, you know, when the Lakers would play the Sixers or when I would see "Rocky" or the "Broad Street Bullies," like, you guys were tough. They were tough.

DAVIES: Yes.

WYLE: So I just thought that's almost an homage to Philly to say it's the tougher of the two.

DAVIES: One of the interesting storylines in "The Pitt" involved the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which was - had been established by a group of Black men in Pittsburgh. I believe it's really the first kind of 911 ambulance services in the nation. And one of the patients, I guess, is a veteran of that. You want to tell us how that got into the story?

WYLE: Well, it actually circles back to what you mentioned before about trying to put as many details about Pittsburgh into the show. And in doing our Pittsburgh research, we came across this incredible story that is now starting to get told, about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which was a program started by Dr. Safar who invented CPR, where he recognized that up until that point, if you lived in - at any neighborhood and you needed to go to the hospital, you had to call the police. The police would come and pick you up, and you went into a paddy wagon, and they took you to the hospital. But if you lived in the Black neighborhood, that didn't happen. So the mortality rate in the Black neighborhoods was just terrible in the late '50s and early '60s. And so this was an attempt to train high school, college-age young Black men in lifesaving techniques, for the first time, deploy them in the field with that training and ambulances that could go to these neighborhoods and pick up people and bring them back.

And it was the very first ambulance service - the very first 911 system in the country. It was incredibly successful. The mortality rate dropped considerably, and it got the attention of all of the city fathers who looked at this and thought, my goodness, what a great program. We should fire all these young men, replace them with white drivers and make this a national standard, which is what happened. And all those original drivers lost their jobs. Some of them stayed in healthcare and worked in healthcare, and actually got to meet a couple of the surviving members when I was in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. And so we brought in a patient who is depicting a guy who had been one of the original drivers, so we could just shed a little light on it.

DAVIES: You know, one of the other things that you see in this series depicted is - and I think this was the kid who died with the - of the fentanyl overdose, and the parents - once they come to terms with the fact that he is brain-dead - agree to let him become an organ donor. And then, when he's wheeled out - when the son is wheeled out to start his journey, the whole staff line up in honor of this contribution. It's an honor walk, I guess, is what you call it, right?

WYLE: Yes.

DAVIES: That's a real thing, right?

WYLE: That is a real thing, and I've seen films of it done. And it's just as moving as we depicted it, if not more so, in real life. It's really beautiful.

DAVIES: Going to take another break here. We are speaking with Noah Wyle. He's an executive producer, writer and star of the new Max series "The Pitt," which is streaming now. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AMY RIGBY'S "PLAYING PITTSBURGH")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Noah Wyle. He's an executive producer, writer and star of the new Max series "The Pitt," which is now streaming. It depicts the drama and chaos at a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room.

Let's talk a little bit about your own life. You grew up in Los Angeles, right? Your mom was an orthopedic head nurse, and you said an OR nurse, too, right? You had two siblings, and then I guess your parents divorced when you were pretty young, and both remarried and had other kids. So it was a - (laughter).

WYLE: This is where the tree gets very fuzzy. I understand. It's very confusing.

DAVIES: A lot of people. What was your childhood like? What kind of kid were you?

WYLE: Eclectic. You know, I'm one of seven children spread over a couple of marriages. At the most, we had six under one roof sharing a bathroom. That's a lot of kids at the table. That's a lot of vying for attention. We had all sorts of - you know, we've had academics, we've had athletes. And I was trying to find my identity in the midst of all that, and I ended up the storyteller.

DAVIES: Right, you went to a private school about a hundred miles away from LA, I gather, and got interested in theater there?

WYLE: I did. I went to a boarding school, the oldest boarding school in California, a school called the Thacher School, founded in 1889. And when I was there, my sophomore year, I auditioned for a play kind of as a joke, intentionally to go and kind of make fun of the process, and ended up getting cast. And I just took to it. I enjoyed the process. More than that, I enjoyed somebody telling me that I was good at it after the show. And that feeling of being told I was good at something was enough to make me want to continue doing it.

DAVIES: Yeah, performing is fun. Getting praised for it is better (laughter).

WYLE: Yeah. Also, growing up in Los Angeles, an acting career didn't seem like a foreign concept. You know, I knew that roadmap fairly well, so it all seemed within grasp.

DAVIES: So you spent a few years, you know, I assume you were taking acting lessons - right? - and going to auditions. And was that - I mean, that stretch where you were going to auditions and getting small parts, what did it feel like at the time? Was it frustrating? It can be tough, right?

WYLE: Yeah. But, I mean, in retrospect, how long was that period of time for me? So short. So short that it's almost ridiculous that I could've been impatient. The truth is, I started when I was 19, and when I was 22 or 23, I did the pilot for "ER" and never looked back after that.

DAVIES: Right, which was a huge success from the beginning. It was a big project for NBC. Well, so this was like, what, 1994 when it debuted, right, the series? So that's when...

WYLE: Yeah, we shot the pilot in '93, '94.

DAVIES: So that's when, you know, there weren't all these videos on the internet and all that stuff, and people watched network television. And NBC, they had a two-hour special, I think, on Sunday night, and then the next episode was on Thursday night at 10, where it stayed for 15 seasons. Quite a remarkable thing. Were you ready for that kind of success? What was it like for you?

WYLE: I'm really incredibly grateful to George, Anthony and Tony. They were all 10 years older than I was and really took me under their wing like big brothers, to a certain extent Sherry and Julianna as well, but...

DAVIES: We're talking about the cast of "ER," George Clooney and Anthony Edwards.

WYLE: I'm talking about the cast. George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle.

DAVIES: Yeah.

WYLE: So they were mentors and tutors to me in the early years, and I don't know how I would've handled all the success and the workload if I hadn't had such incredible role models around me showing me how to be professional.

DAVIES: Did you trust it? I mean, you know, when you have that kind of huge success as a young person, it can give you kind of an imposter syndrome, like, do I really deserve this?

WYLE: No, I think it's very true. Well, the work was being recognized as groundbreaking, and it lasted a long time. I took for granted how well run the show was and how smooth it was produced and how well cared for I was in that ecosystem. And then I spent the next 15 years trying to recreate something that I thought was an industry standard without realizing it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And then I've been blessed by having lightning strike twice.

DAVIES: You stayed for 11 seasons, right? By that point, most of the original cast had moved on, right? And then you took a couple of years off to have kids, right, and then came back for the last season? Is that...

WYLE: Yeah, I left, and I called it a divorce with visitation rights.

DAVIES: (Laughter).

WYLE: I left a certain amount of episodes in the balance knowing that I wanted to stay part of the narrative, and also having had John Wells tell me that he wanted me to be part of the finale - that John Carter coming back to the emergency room as an attending seemed like a really lovely bookend to the whole experience from where the pilot began. So I wanted to be a part of that.

DAVIES: Yeah, John Carter was your character, who began as a med student, right?

WYLE: Surgical medical student, first day of his rotation in the emergency room.

DAVIES: Over the course of the series, we see him mature, become a doctor, get stabbed and nearly die.

WYLE: Become a drug addict, fall in love.

DAVIES: Yeah.

WYLE: Almost become a father.

DAVIES: Yeah, a lot happens. You know, during the series' run, you had a platform to connect with causes that matter to you, and you got connected with an organization called Doctors of the World. That's distinct from Doctors Without Borders. Want to tell us about that relationship, what you did?

WYLE: Well, sure. During that period of time and subsequently, I was approached by a lot of different charities and organizations, a lot of them medical-based, to use my celebrity to raise awareness or money for them. And I got very selective because you want to pick and choose. You want to make sure that when you go out and stump for something, it has some resonance in your own life and you can speak intelligently about it, passionately about it. And then I got approached by this group called Doctors of the World that was an American-based version of Doctors Without Borders, which is French, that was doing front line triage medicine in different war zones around the world.

And I was really moved by - it's a purely volunteer organization. Doctors, GPs from America would go and volunteer their time to go halfway around the world and practice, you know, wartime MASH medicine in very harrowing circumstances. And I had an opportunity to go during the war in Kosovo and be in a refugee camp in Macedonia and watch firsthand the heroic efforts of these doctors trying to treat this refugee population, and came back really galvanized about helping this organization and ones like it to that kind of humanitarian aid. And it was catalytic for us doing the storylines in Darfur and the Belgian Congo that we eventually did on the show.

DAVIES: Right, you carried it into "ER." What kinds of things did you see in Macedonia? I mean, you weren't treating people, obviously.

WYLE: Well, I wasn't, but, you know, it was sort of an all-hands-on-deck situation there, too. A bus would show up with, you know, maybe 50, 60 refugees of varying ages, mostly young children and old women, because any man that was of fighting age was fighting. So a lot of people had been on the road for a really long time. They were wearing everything that they could carry, so there was a lot of dehydration and a lot of malnutrition and a lot of fear, you know. And it began with taking people off buses and doing basic medical assessments. And then also there were lawyers and psychiatrists who would go and do interviews with the refugees and ask them about their experiences.

And those became testimonials that were later used in the war crimes tribunal trials with Milosevic. But I saw in that moment, the sort of hand in hand medical, psychological tandem treatment that was having an effect, both treating the body, but also treating the psychological damage of the trauma, and that led me to another organization called Human Rights Watch, which is a legally - legal-based advocacy group that does exactly that kind of work. They go around, and they take testimony to try and effect social change. So those two organizations kind of defined the '90s and early teenths (ph) for me in terms of activism.

DAVIES: Have you stayed active in Doctors of the World?

WYLE: It's been a long time since I've been in contact with them. I've been involved with a lot of other grassroots medical organizations over the years, ones that, you know, do anything from feeding people in disaster zones domestically to, you know, international stuff. Obviously, the cutbacks in USAID and a lot of the NGOs funding that we're seeing are disastrous to the communities that I've become close with. And it's very, very troubling.

DAVIES: So what are your priorities today as an activist?

WYLE: I tend to align myself with anything that involves human rights or civil rights. I'm right now extremely concerned about our health care system and its fragility to the next pandemic. I'm extremely concerned about the burnout rate of our practitioners and the overburdening that the nursing shortage and the boarding crisis is causing. You know, I can't express enough how interdependent we are as a population and how much we need each other. And yet, it just seems like every day, the seeds of division are being sowed to greater and greater degrees, and it's unsustainable. It really is.

DAVIES: Well, you have been renewed for a second season of "The Pitt."

WYLE: (Laughter).

DAVIES: Right? I mean, you've got your work there.

WYLE: Yes, more bread and circus.

DAVIES: Well, I mean, it's not just that, I don't think.

WYLE: I don't think it is. I like to think that we're part of a lighthouse kind of light that's going to keep everybody reminding everybody about what kind of country we really are at heart and how amazing the people that do this kind of work are. And that's the irony. You know, you can cut Medi-Cal, and you can take 80% of California's population off those roles, and you can kick people out of assisted living homes or out of old folks' homes, and you can force emergency rooms to close. The practitioners will still take care of sick people. The aged will still be cared for. Children will still be cared for because these people won't let those patients fall between the cracks because that's who they are, which is why it's so infuriating to watch them be taken advantage of, or worse, taken for granted.

DAVIES: Well, Noah Wyle, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been fun.

WYLE: Oh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you.

DAVIES: Noah Wyle is an executive producer, writer and star of the series "The Pitt," which is streaming on Max. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan recommends reading from two witty women authors - one a long-deceased legend, the other a debut novelist. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. If you could use some humor right now, our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has a couple of books she strongly recommends.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: As the saying goes, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And what better way to maintain stamina and mental equilibrium during tense times than a dose of wit? Two women writers - one a long-deceased legend; the other a debut novelist - give readers reason to keep calm and smile on. In my house, every time the mail brings a dread notice from, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, one of us humans is bound to mutter, what fresh hell is this? If for nothing else but that line, Dorothy Parker is a demigod. But of course, there's plenty else.

In her poems, short stories and surgical knife-sharp reviews for magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Parker brought into being one of the signature voices of the 1920s - wry, risque and hard-boiled, swaddled in a cocoon code of humor. It's been said, rightly, I think, that Parker's wit can't be fully appreciated by reading her. You had to have been at one of those boozy Algonquin Round Table lunches to marvel at how quickly she whipped out one-liners. But perhaps the closest we can come is reading her poetry, which, like so many works of the 1920s, is short.

The Everyman's Library has just brought out a pocket edition of her work, culled from Parker's bestselling collections, "Enough Rope" and "Sunset Gun." A lot of her poems are rueful odes to how tough it was for a smart, celebrated literary woman to find love. So how fun to discover other, lesser-known poems that are sassier. Here's one called "Fighting Words" that veers away from female martyrdom. (Reading) Say my love is easy had, say I'm bitten raw with pride, say I am too often sad - still behold me at your side. Say I'm neither brave nor young, say I woo and coddle care, say the devil touched my tongue - still you have my heart to wear. But say my verses do not scan, and I get me another man.

If Parker's voice embodies the wisecracking ethos of the 1920s, the humor of British-born novelist Camilla Barnes is more in the droll, psychologically astute tradition of a Barbara Pym novel. Barnes' debut is called "The Usual Desire To Kill." It's what two sisters here, Charlotte and Miranda, acknowledge that that's what they feel whenever they visit their eccentric, exhausting, retired parents at their tumbledown farmhouse in rural France. Mum, a homemaker, is described by Miranda as looking like a piece of low-slung Victorian furniture. Dad, a former philosophy professor, lives in his head.

Here's Miranda talking about her father's way of relating to the ducks, cats, chickens and llamas who live on the farm. (Reading) They were not pets. He didn't interfere in their lives in the same way he didn't interfere in his daughters' lives. He was just not very good at being interested in other living creatures, particularly if they only had two legs. The more legs the better, he would say. He would be happier living with a spider than with Mum, if the spider could cook. A millipede would be paradise.

The pair met in Oxford in the early '60s and married after their first real date resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. For more than 50 years, they've been nattering at each other, sunk deep into a marriage that Miranda describes as a game of stubbornness versus pedantry. The constant pleasure of reading "The Usual Desire To Kill" is Barnes' unexpected language. A bed with a hard mattress is likened to sleeping on old toast. Dried eggs, which the father recalls eating during World War II, are said to have tasted a bit like dandruff.

But as the story of their parents' lives comes to the fore through old letters and other narrative devices, it's evident that, much as Charlotte and Miranda have always felt unseen by their odd parents, they in turn don't really know those parents, not in full. None of us do, given that we mostly only hear selective stories of our parents' early lives. The sharpest humor is always grounded in some pain. Parker and Barnes both affirm that familiar truth. Reading these very different, very funny books boosted my spirits and lowered my tight shoulders.

DAVIES: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Poems" by Dorothy Parker and "The Usual Desire To Kill" by Camilla Barnes. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky. He's spent years studying how democracies die. He argues that the Trump administration is pushing the U.S. towards a 21st century form of autocracy where elections, opposition parties and independent media still exist but are weakened by the incumbent ruler's abuses of power. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair.

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DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

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