I think you're wildly underestimating the length of those "60 seconds." The Pitt employs approximately zero non-diegetic soundtrack and a lot of pretty long takes without any cuts -- those are not the strategies of a show that's trying to appeal to short-form content consumers, even if you're flipping between a lot of different cases at once. rather than allowing the viewer to pay half attention because nothing on screen really matters, it's trying to get you to pay full attention because everything matters, the way the doctors have to commit the whole of their faculties to every patient they see - split time can't mean split effort.
Good observations, and for my part a discussion of
The Pitt centering on its pace of storytelling, or much worse something called "misery porn" is not interesting or on target at all. I'll come back to the latter notion shortly...
The Pitt has as its primary raison d'être confronting an audience with what it has not seen and would for separate reasons look away from in the real world. This is exactly the kind of thing great art does and should do in search of meaning and importance. Narrative functions akin to a large set of short stories (probably 40 or 50, total) each of which confronts us with either forced horrifying and or moral decisions "on the fly" that grab our arm and take us into a separate world for us look at. The moral part of most value is bringing us face to face with the money --and money making-- part of living and suffering and dying that is mostly unique (in the civilized world) in the nightmare of American health care.
To touch on melodrama for a moment, this is often, in the modern world, seen reflexively as negative, meaning happy endings that ingratiate themselves with an audience in a phony or too-easy manner, and it's of course something great artists like Cormac McCarthy and Stanley Kubrick eschewed consistently. The general audience embraces it as escape, like say in
The Shawshank Redemption. But a happy ending, of whatever sort is not inherently an artistic problem if it is earned in a realistic way that does not deny the real world, or hide from it. With all those
Pitt stories, specific, narrow to patients, and character arcs broader in whole series scope (like Dr. Robbie), there was some melodrama that did not seem overly forced, and often quite real. This is what I meant above when I said the emotions of the finale of
The Pitt were earned. They did not strike me as a pacifier or piece of candy for the audience, they seemed real as an outcome of actual emotional struggle.
I don't think
The Pitt is anything all-time, in this modern age of prestige TV shows, but it was quite good, very well worth the time, as I have detailed above.
Back to misery, of whatever value in a narrative. It's "porn" in something like
Salo, for reasons, but let's
not digress there. Please. Here, this is something, of an opposite world kind, to what I said about melodrama. Is it real, is it "earned?" Do I need it to better understand the actual world I live in? Some people want to run from it in art, and that is fine (for
them, possibly). The harshest thing I have ever experienced in art is in the film
The Grey Zone (an actual confrontation with the Holocaust, like
Schindler's List is
not), and then quite possibly last year's
Warfare, which both were deeply disturbing to me. Both have the value, far deeper than shock, of showing me the real world, and a true degree of real human suffering. When I think of rejecting the experience of reality in these cases, because it's "hard on me," that selfish thought is exploded rapidly, because I think, wait, real human beings went through these things--the least measly me can do is watch it portrayed with honesty. So that is a real, but
far lesser value of
The Pitt, because we have not been shown this reality before.
