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. In the new film "Song Sung Blue," Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play a couple who form a Neil Diamond tribute band.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SONG SUNG BLUE")

HUGH JACKMAN: (As Mike Sardina) You know, Neil is special. And I just want everyone to get that feeling I get when I listen to "America" and "Forever In Blue Jeans."

KATE HUDSON: (As Claire Sardina) Or "Sweet Caroline."

JACKMAN: (As Mike Sardina) "Sweet Caroline," yeah. But I'm never going to be the real McCoy. I mean, I don't really look like Neil. I don't even really sound like Neil. And I'm - I got to be Neil, but I just got to be me, too.

HUDSON: (As Claire Sardina) Yeah. You don't want to be a Neil Diamond impersonator. You want to be a Neil Diamond interpreter.

JACKMAN: (As Mike Sardina) I was looking for the right way to say it, and you just came right out and said it. A Neil Diamond interpreter.

DAVIES: Today, we're going to listen to our interview with Neil Diamond. In the 1960s, he started out writing songs for a music publishing company, hoping someone would record them. He wrote The Monkees' hit "I'm A Believer." But it was Diamond himself who made most of his own songs famous. Here's a sampling.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOLITARY MAN")

NEIL DIAMOND: (Singing) Melinda was mine till the time that I found her holding Jim, loving him. Then Sue came along, loved me strong. That's what I thought - me and Sue. But that died, too. Don't know that I will, but until I can find me the girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me, I'll be what I am, a solitary man. Solitary...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHERRY, CHERRY")

DIAMOND: (Singing) She got the way to move me, Cherry.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #1: (Singing) She got the way to groove me. She got the way to groove me.

DIAMOND: (Singing) Cherry, baby.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #1: (Singing) She got the way to groove me.

DIAMOND: (Singing) All right.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M A BELIEVER")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Then I saw her face. Now I'm a believer. Not a trace of doubt in my mind. I'm in love. And I'm a believer. I couldn't leave her if I tried.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEET CAROLINE")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Hands touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching you. Sweet Caroline. Good times never seemed so good.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AMERICA")

DIAMOND: (Singing) On the boats and on the planes, they're coming to America, never looking back again. They're coming to America. Oh.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONG SUNG BLUE")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Song sung blue. Everybody knows one. Song sung blue. Every garden grows one.

DAVIES: As a lot of Neil Diamond's contemporaries fell off the charts, he moved from teen pop to adult pop. He recorded a duet with Barbra Streisand, had hits from his remake of "The Jazz Singer," and dressed in spangles for his sold-out concerts. In 2022, his life and music became the subject of the hit Broadway musical "A Beautiful Noise." Neil Diamond is now 84 years old. Let's listen to Terry's interview with him, recorded in 2005.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

TERRY GROSS: Your - I think it's fair to say your first big break - correct me if I'm wrong - was when you had recorded a demo, and the songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry heard the demo, and they really liked you. And they - some of their songs are "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Chapel Of Love"...

DIAMOND: "Be My Baby."

GROSS: "Be My Baby," yeah. So how did they hear you?

DIAMOND: I was making a demo. Usually, when you sold a song to a publisher, they would allow you to go in and make your own demo, which was invaluable experience to me. But I went in and made the demo and hired Ellie as a backup singer, which she did, despite the fact that she was having huge hits. She liked to sing in the studios with the other girls. And so I hired her for this session. And she liked something about what I was doing - my writing or my singing. And she brought me to her husband, Jeff, and he liked something about my - what I was doing. I don't know if he liked the writing or the singing. But one liked one, and the other one liked the other. So we started a working relationship. We were both working for the same music publisher. And I kind of got let go by that music publisher, and I asked Jeff and Ellie if they were interested in producing me.

GROSS: In the first session that you did with them, you recorded "Solitary Man." Did you like the idea of horns on this?

DIAMOND: I liked the idea of anything on those records.

GROSS: (Laughter).

DIAMOND: I was just thrilled to be there.

GROSS: Right. Well, let's hear "Solitary Man," which I have to say, I think it's really a terrific recording.

DIAMOND: Thank you.

GROSS: Yeah. So, OK, let's hear it. This is your first hit - yes?

DIAMOND: Yes, if you can call it that.

GROSS: ...That you recorded yourself. Yeah. OK.

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: OK. So this is Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOLITARY MAN")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Melinda was mine till the time that I found her holding Jim, loving him. Then Sue came along, loved me strong. That's what I thought - me and Sue. But that died, too. Don't know that I will, but until I can find me the girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me, I'll be what I am, a solitary man. Solitary man. I've had it to here being...

GROSS: That's Neil Diamond.

Now, did you write this song for yourself or for somebody else?

DIAMOND: No. I wrote this for myself. I had a contract with Jeff and Ellie, and I started to focus in on just what I wanted to do. And so "Solitary Man" was written for me and for the first sessions that I was to do with Jeff and Ellie.

GROSS: There's this, like, urgency in the song and in the way you sing it. And I think of you, in a way, as kind of specializing in some of your work in that urgency. Is that something you've been conscious of, that you think really, like, works especially well for you as a songwriter and as a singer?

DIAMOND: Well, I can tell you that I wasn't conscious of it until you just mentioned it. I've never thought of my songs having that sense of urgency, but I - you know, I'll listen again. And maybe as an objective observer, you can pick up on that stuff, but I never felt that there was an urgency. A sense of drama, a sense of yearning - lots of things, but not urgency. But you may be very - you may be very right about this. I'm going to listen again, now.

GROSS: So how did it "Solitary Man" change your idea of what you wanted from your musical life?

DIAMOND: Once I had a chart record of my own, I was no longer a kid knocking around on the streets. I was now - well, we didn't call them artists at that time. We called them vocalists, but I was a vocalist. And it was a whole different thing. I was writing for myself, so I had to really dig in and write as well as I possibly could. And I have to say, before that time, I don't know if I was doing that. I was just writing and writing and writing, maybe just to get an advance from a publisher. But there was not a lot of me in those songs, and "Solitary Man" was the first of a long line of me songs, my experience songs.

GROSS: When you were working as a songwriter for publishers, writing for other people, were you writing for specific people? Were you writing with specific singers in mind?

DIAMOND: Well, that's usually how it went back then, although I was never a good enough writer to kind of write for some other singer, to understand what they did best, the keys, the kind of song. Usually, you were told that so-and-so is coming up for a session in three weeks and they need a song of this type. And it was usually as close as possible to the song that they had previously, which was a hit, if it was a hit.

And you had to write a - kind of, like, a copy of that, in a way, 'cause that's the way it worked in those days. You have a hit record and your next record sounds - should sound as much like the hit record as you can make it. But I wasn't very good at it. That's probably why I spent eight years down there in Tin Pan Alley and had very little success. Nothing more, really, than selling a song and taking a small advance for it to get me through the week.

GROSS: Now, The Monkees did a couple of your songs - "I'm A Believer" and "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You." Did you write those with them in mind or for yourself? I'm trying to think of what the chronology was. Like, you start recording in - what? - like, '67?

DIAMOND: '66.

GROSS: '66. OK.

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: And what year are The Monkees? Like, is that after that?

DIAMOND: I think '67, something like that. I'd recorded a couple of songs, including "Solitary Man" and "Cherry, Cherry," which was a big hit. And because of that hit, the people who were producing The Monkees called and said, we like "Cherry, Cherry." Do you have any other songs? I said, well, I don't have anything like "Cherry, Cherry," but I have an album coming out soon and I'll send it over and take your pick.

GROSS: You know, it's funny. The common wisdom goes, when telling the story of, like, songwriters from the Brill Building and The Beatles, is that The Beatles changed everything. After The Beatles band started writing their own songs, it drove out the professional songwriters. But, of course, The Monkees are a band that's, you know, a kind of fabricated band copying the Beatles (laughter). And you have this tremendous success writing for them. And in that sense, like, The Beatles' success inadvertently really helped you as a songwriter.

DIAMOND: Oh, yeah. No question about it. But it was not only in the sense of The Monkees doing a couple of songs. It was in the sense that the doors began to open for songwriters who were able to sing. And I just happened to be one of them who'd been knocking around the streets for years and now suddenly was getting a new and fresh listening to my work. So The Beatles made an enormous change, as did Bob Dylan. They brought the songwriter up to - so up to the front of the line and said, you know, you guys do it. And it had a devastating effect on the music publishing business in Tin Pan Alley. But it opened up many doors for people like me.

GROSS: My guest is Neil Diamond. Here's his version of "I'm A Believer."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M A BELIEVER")

DIAMOND: (Singing) I thought love was only true in fairy tales, meant for someone else, but not for me. Love was out to get me.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #2: (Vocalizing).

DIAMOND: (Singing) That's the way it seemed.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #2: (Vocalizing).

DIAMOND: (Singing) Disappointment haunted all my dreams. Then I saw her face. Now I'm a believer. Not a trace of doubt in my mind. I'm in love. And I'm a believer. I couldn't leave her if I tried.

DAVIES: That's Neil Diamond, singing the song that became a hit for The Monkees. More of our interview with Diamond after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2005 interview with singer and songwriter Neil Diamond. The new film "Song Sung Blue," titled after a Neil Diamond song, stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as performers in a Diamond tribute band.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: I want to ask you about another of your songs. And this is also an earlier song. It's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon." And the Urge Overkill version of this was used by Quentin Tarantino in "Pulp Fiction."

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: Can you tell us the story behind the song?

DIAMOND: Oh, behind the song was pretty basic. I was playing mostly to teenagers, teenage girls, when I first started. And so going through that period, I just wrote a song for the audience for me to do in the show - and for the audience which was, as I say, teenage girls. And "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" was something I wrote for them and recorded it myself.

GROSS: How did you find out that Quentin Tarantino was going to use a version of this song for "Pulp Fiction"?

DIAMOND: Well, first they have to request the right to use it. But I got a request and a part of a script to be used in this movie called "Pulp Fiction." And I've always held to a very tenuous line as to what I wanted my songs to be used as. And I wouldn't let them be used in cigarette commercials or alcohol commercials. And the script that I read was way out there. It was, you know, beyond what I would turn down normally. And I did turn it down. I heard almost immediately from my publisher, who said, you know, you shouldn't turn this down. This guy is a tremendous director. And you should just do it and let them do it, which I did. And, of course, I've never regretted it because it was an entirely different way of seeing that song. But that's basically how it happened.

GROSS: So what'd you think of the movie?

DIAMOND: Oh, I love the movie. I was amazed by the movie. I've seen it. Yeah.

GROSS: How come you love the movie but didn't love the script? What was different actually seeing it?

DIAMOND: Well, I didn't get the whole script. I only got a few pages of the script in which the song would be used. And I don't know if you remember the scene. But she was - Uma Thurman was very heavily into a coke binge, and she went unconscious and had to be taken for some, quote unquote, "special treatment." And, you know, it just seemed too strong for my own taste. And I turned it down on that basis.

GROSS: Well, here's a song you wrote to please your teenage fans, and now it's going to be used in an overdose scene, in a drug overdose scene.

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: Not what you had in mind.

DIAMOND: Not at all. But I would've reacted the same to any of the other songs I had written.

GROSS: But it was very effective in the film.

DIAMOND: It was very effective, and it was a lesson that I learned, you know, see who else is working on it. See how serious they are. Don't take it at face value and don't take your prejudices into this kind of discussion.

GROSS: Why don't we hear your version of the song? Here it is.

DIAMOND: Great.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIRL, YOU'LL BE A WOMAN SOON")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Girl, you'll be a woman soon. I love you so much, can't count all the ways I'd die for you, girl. And all they can say is he's not your kind. They never get tired of putting me down, and I never know when I come around what I'm going to find. Don't let them make up your mind. Don't you know, girl, you'll be a woman soon. Please, come take my hand. Girl, you'll be a woman soon. Soon, you'll need a man. I've been misunderstood for all of my life. But what they're saying, girl, just cuts like a knife. The boy is no good.

GROSS: I want to ask you about another song that you wrote and recorded, a big hit for you, "Sweet Caroline," which is now played at Red Sox games at Fenway Park. And maybe you know the story of why (laughter), of why that is. But let's start with the song itself. Is there a story behind the writing of the song?

DIAMOND: Yeah, I think so. I was heading down to Memphis for my first recording session down there. And there were some producers I wanted to work with. And I only had two songs written. And in those days, a session was 3 hours, and you usually had three songs that you recorded. So the night before the session, at some motel in Memphis, I knocked out this song, "Sweet Caroline." It was one of the fastest songs I've ever written. And we recorded it the next day. And it became one of my biggest songs, if not the biggest song. But songs usually don't come like that. There's usually a lot of work and teeth-gnashing and agony and torment over any of these songs. But that one just popped out, and there it was. And here it is now. Still people can sing it.

GROSS: It's also sung a lot in bars.

DIAMOND: Well, the fact is that it's fun and easy to sing with. And I think that's the bottom line, as far as that song is concerned. It's easy to sing. It's fun. People like to sing it. And that's why it's popular in bars, because anybody can sing it no matter how many drinks you've had.

GROSS: Well, Neil Diamond, thank you very much for talking with us.

DIAMOND: My pleasure, Terry.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEET CAROLINE")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Where it began? I can't begin to know when. But then, I know it's growing strong. Was in the spring, and spring became the summer. Who'd have believed you'd come along? Hands touching hands, reaching out, touching me. Touching you. Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good.

DAVIES: One of Neil Diamond's biggest hits. Terry Gross spoke with Neil Diamond in 2005. The new film "Song Sung Blue" stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as performers in a Diamond tribute band. Coming up, Noah Wyle on his HBO Max series "The Pitt." Season 2 premieres tomorrow. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Our next guest, Noah Wyle, is an executive producer, writer, star and director of the HBO Max series "The Pitt," which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room. Season 2 premieres on HBO Max tomorrow. "The Pitt" earned 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 praised 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 later 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 appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organizations Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World. We're going to listen to some of my interview with him, recorded last April, when Season 1 of "The Pitt" was airing. Noah Wyle, welcome to FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

NOAH 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 #1: (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 #2: (As character) Here we go. One, two, three. How we doing, Ben?

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

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) That's probably from the nosebleed. Short rapid rhino, please.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Tacky at 120. Pulse ox borderline at 90.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Blow by at 15 liters for now.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Neck contusion. Larynx shifted to the right. No crepitance.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Four of morphine. I'm going to stick something in your nose to stop the bleeding.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) No hemotympanum.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Inflate the balloon.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) How about now, Ben?

HENDRICKS: (As Ben Kemper) Better.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) What's up?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (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 health care, 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 med students ate together.

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

WYLE: Second-year residents, fourth-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: Noah Wyle recorded last year, talking about the HBO Max series "The Pitt." Its second season premieres tomorrow. We'll hear more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR, and we're listening to the interview I recorded last April with Noah Wyle, who stars in the HBO Max series "The Pitt." Its second season premieres tomorrow. Wyle's also an executive producer, writer and director for the series.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

DAVIES: 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 intibate.

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 often times 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. Robbie, 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 the 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 have 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 in 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. Was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me any of that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. 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, how - 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: Noah Wyle recorded last year, talking about the HBO Max series, "The Pitt." Its second season premieres tomorrow. We'll hear more in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. And we're listening to the interview I recorded last year with Noah Wyle, who stars in the HBO Max series "The Pitt." Its second season premieres tomorrow.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

DAVIES: 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 #6: (As character) 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 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, 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 seeded 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 these episodes 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 continued 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 grew up - I'm from LA. And, you know, when the Lakers would play the Sixers or when I'd 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: 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 recorded last year. He's an executive producer, writer, director and star of the HBO Max series "The Pitt." Season 2 premieres tomorrow. On Monday's show, we'll speak with bestselling author Liz Moore. The settings of her novels range from a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood to the apartment of a 450-pound shut-in to a remote children's camp where a child disappears. She'll talk about creating her characters and seeing where they take the story she's writing. I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROY HAYNES' "GRAND STREET")

DAVIES: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/thisisfreshair. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts and iconic interviews from our archive.

FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Diana Martinez (ph). Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROY HAYNES' "GRAND STREET")

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.