If ‘The Pitt’ Has You Completely Hooked, These Are the Shows You Need to Watch Next

When a medical drama wins Outstanding Drama Series at the Emmys on its very first try, you know something special has arrived. ‘The Pitt’ earned five Primetime Emmy Awards in its debut season, instantly propelling it into prestige television territory.

The show’s genius lies in its structure, with each episode tracking exactly one hour of a punishing 15-hour shift at a Pittsburgh trauma center, giving viewers no room to breathe and no desire to look away.

The series had already been averaging 10 million viewers per episode on HBO Max before the Emmys, a number that climbed to 18 million after the show’s dominant awards-night performance.

If you have burned through both seasons and are desperately hunting for your next fix, the good news is that the television landscape has no shortage of shows built on similar raw intensity. The even better news is that some of the best options are not what you might expect.

The Blueprint: Medical Dramas Like ‘The Pitt’ That Started It All

No serious conversation about shows in this space begins anywhere other than ‘ER’. ‘The Pitt’ would not exist without it. In fact, Noah Wyle, John Wells, and R. Scott Gemmill actually attempted to create an ‘ER’ reboot before they landed on ‘The Pitt’ as their project, and were sued because of it. That lineage is impossible to ignore and makes ‘ER’ essential viewing for anyone who has not yet made the trip back to County General.

‘ER’ first aired in 1994 and was created by Michael Crichton, best known for ‘Jurassic Park’. It ran for 15 seasons and over 300 episodes, making it the longest-running medical drama until ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ eventually surpassed it in 2019.

The fast-paced ensemble storytelling and the balance of one-off patient cases against deeper emotional arcs is a direct ancestor of everything ‘The Pitt’ does so well.

‘The Knick’ is a different animal entirely, following the troubled Dr. John W. Thackery, played by Clive Owen, as he works in a fictionalized New York City hospital in the early 1900s.

Both ‘The Knick’ and ‘The Pitt’ put a similar emphasis on the physical and emotional toll that working in medicine takes on its characters. It is darker, stranger, and more stylized, but the unflinching commitment to the realities of healthcare connects the two series unmistakably.

High-Pressure Hospital Shows With an Edge

‘Nurse Jackie’ ran for seven seasons and starred Edie Falco as the titular Jackie, a nurse working in the ER at a New York City hospital. For fans of ‘The Pitt’, the show is a similarly unfiltered look at a hectic emergency room, though the series is somewhat more comedic than the HBO Max original. Falco brings the same lived-in exhaustion to Jackie that Noah Wyle gives Dr. Robby, and the show never lets the comedy fully cover the weight of what working in healthcare actually costs a person.

‘The Resident’ sets its tone immediately in its very first episode, with the Chief of Surgery making a mistake due to a hand tremor that leaves a patient dead. Its lead character, Dr. Conrad Theodore Hawkins, is a former Marine who suffers from PTSD, a trauma similar to what Robby carries from the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of his close friend. That willingness to hold its characters accountable, and to refuse easy heroism, puts ‘The Resident’ in the same moral universe as ‘The Pitt’.

‘New Amsterdam’ features Dr. Max Goodwin, who is similar to Dr. Robby in that both are pragmatic, dedicated doctors who wish hospitals could simply focus on helping people rather than the bottom line. Both shows explore the limitations and failures of the healthcare system through stories about families who cannot afford their medical bills or fall through the cracks of the system. It carries a warmer, more sentimental register, but the healthcare system criticism hits just as hard.

Real-Time TV Storytelling Beyond the Hospital Walls

’24’ and ‘The Pitt’ are very different shows, but their approach to storytelling and how they use their runtime is strikingly similar. In both shows, each episode covers roughly one hour in real time, while ‘The Pitt’ covers a single shift and each season of ’24’ equated to a full day. That formal commitment to compressed, unrelenting time is what makes both shows feel genuinely unlike anything else on television.

‘Hijack’, which returned for its second season in January 2026, is another series told practically in real time. Sam Nelson, played by Idris Elba, is a level-headed corporate negotiator who winds up on a flight that has been hijacked and takes the lead in trying to mediate the situation using clever tactics and intuition. The ticking-clock mechanics and the focus on one brilliant, burdened person thinking on their feet will feel immediately familiar.

‘The Bear’ also has quieter, emotional moments that shed the spotlight on trauma, as is the case with ‘The Pitt’ during Robby’s moments of reflection. The two shows are markedly different in their focus, but oddly cut from the same cloth, sharing the same pacing and overall themes of a high-pressure work environment and employees dealing with heavy life realities after a grueling shift. If you have not started ‘The Bear’ yet, consider this your final nudge.

Emergency Room Dramas That Go Deep on the Human Cost

‘Shrinking’ has a completely different tone as a comedy-drama delivering equal parts laughs and genuine emotional resonance. It offers another perspective on patient care, with lead characters who work as therapists dealing not only with the grief and challenges of their patients, but also the weight of their own lives.

With a cast led by Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Williams, the show tackles PTSD, grief, loss, and conditions like Parkinson’s disease that require consistent long-term treatment rather than emergency intervention.

‘Call the Midwife’, spanning 15 seasons as of this writing, takes a similar interest in the overlap between social issues and medicine. The critically acclaimed series tracks the evolving medical issues and social challenges faced by its characters across consecutive years, and has been widely praised for its portrayal of topics including cystic fibrosis, birth control, LGBTQ rights, and immigration.

For anyone who connects most with ‘The Pitt’ as a meditation on systemic failure and how medicine intersects with class, race, and policy, ‘Call the Midwife’ offers decades of that conversation set in a completely different era.

‘The Pitt’ refuses to shy away from how the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact an excessively burdened healthcare system, which is a choice that sets it apart from much of the television landscape. Every show on this list finds its own version of that honesty, and that is exactly what makes them worth your time while you wait for the next season to arrive. Which of these shows are you already watching, and which one from this list is moving straight to the top of your queue?