PLUS The Pitt spoiler discussion (and your regular postbag)

20:30Kay:You're absolutely not. Can we say, the terms for our listeners, I should point out, you know, when we say normies, normies are not civilians. You say that, James. Normies are not, I see, when you say people on the ground, I think you just mean, you just mean your average person who doesn't work in the industry but consumes television, right? Yes. So when I say a normie, I mean, to a certain extent, Kate, you are also a normie. I mean people who are not like well in the tank for all this mad sci-fi shit. So when I say normie, I just mean like a right-minded normal person as opposed to like an uber nerd.

20:58I always talk you to be, yes, I always thought it was a derogatory term. No, not really. About people on the ground. That's why I took Umbridge and I'd stand up for them. I'd say Pogs United.

21:07Kay:No, the normies, I think normie is actually definitely the more positive term. I don't know what the opposite is, but you know, I'm out. Are you thinking, you're sort of saying it loosely as like non-geek? Well, not even non-geek, just people like normal people like it's just my my the normies like people who just not james yeah jameses basically that yeah normal normal people normal people um i don't know how this conversation started or where it even went to but i've you know ironically i've forgotten uh right thank you steve uh let us see if we have time for another message and it is from luis and luis is following up a previous question luis says after i heard my message read aloud on one of the last part of the TV episodes.

21:47Kay:My words sounded much more harsh than I intended. I just wanted to vent my frustration about the show The Shards and not attack any one of you personally. I don't believe him. I think he was coming for you, Boydie. And I think you deserve it. Was this the one? Oh, it wasn't the person who said we flip-flopped. No. Was it? I don't know. I don't remember. Was that Louise? No, I think it was the... No, no, no. Might not have been. I knew there was... In one conversation, there was someone saying that we flip-flopped too much and should stick with our... And then there was another person who was talking about the show.

22:12It's probably... He's just centered on the shards. I don't think he enjoyed it, and Boyd was defending. I don't think we flip-flopped on the shards, did we? No, no, no. That's a separate thing.

22:20Kay:All right, okay. Yeah. Right. Here's another Reacher-related message. This comes from Graham. Graham says, My local Asda in Kendall, Cumbria, has a sign-up. I've enclosed a picture. And the picture basically says, Jack Reacher, born Asda Kendall, 1997. So basically it says Jack Reacher was created there. Supposedly, Lee Child took something from a shelf for a lady, and she said you'd be a good Reacher and the rest is history. Have you ever been anywhere or seen anything with the most tenuous link to something on TV? This, so this is, I don't think the story's... That's amazing. That is broadly speaking what happens according to Lee Child who uses this.

22:57Kay:Now, whether that is actually what happens He should know. Remains to be seen. Yeah, so we had Lee Child in for a web chat before the first Jack Reacher film that Boyd mentioned earlier as the apotheosis of all things Reachery. Thank you. And he did also tell us that story. Well, I hope Lee's got a good deal with Asda now getting just free groceries every, shopping every week. Yeah. I like that they've got a plaque up. That's great. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's very good. But I hope the plaque's really high. So you have to really just straight to see it. It's really high off the ground. That's very funny.

23:23Kay:We should have a plaque here once, Woody. Put it in one of the corridors and just say, Jermaine Clement and Nicola Walker were once lost here. 2026. Yes. Lost in the liminal space. That's right. Yeah. No, let's do it. But I don't know. have I ever been to anything that has an incredibly tenuous link to television? Only in that, like places where things are filmed. It's actually a film one. We went to the, you know the Avengers Infinity War, they have that sign, we will deep fry your kebab. And it's when they're shooting in, it's when they're in Edinburgh. Okay. And we have been to the kebab shop.

24:00Oh, right, right. Yeah. Of course you have, yeah.

24:03Kay:No, it's a simple. I can't imagine James eating a kebab. Oh, we didn't have a kebab. Oh, I can. We just posed outside the kebab shop. would you have one would I have a kebab I had many kebabs as a student I think I am in my post kebab era now are you yeah you're a new post kebab brat era good health let's be honest very few people think do you know what I'm going to go out for a kebab dinner I don't think anyone's saying they want to go out for a kebab supper though no I think that's I think it's a spontaneous thing after a night hour yeah it's like it's two in the morning you're walking down the Holloway Road and you're hungry and that's where kebabs come in deep fried or otherwise Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't.

24:41As a quasi-vegetarian, I'd be having...

24:43Kay:Oh, please. As a quasi-vegetarian who eats meat, you... Yeah. Chicken, specifically. I'd be having a filet of fish, sure. Delicious. A deep-fried filet of fish. Deep-fried filet of fish. Okay, great. Deep-fried. That is it, then, for the post-bag. We should move on to our pit spoileriness. Kay, have you watched any of the pit? No, so this is very much a pit stop for me. It feels a bit like... Do we try... Yeah, do you want to listen? Do you want to listen to us talk about the pit? I'm more than happy to listen. Okay, great. Well, let's do this thing. So we'll finish with a postbag question, but it's a pit-related postbag question, and this comes from Glenn.

25:20Kay:And Glenn says, Love the pot. Looking forward to your expertise and research going into answering my question. Research was in inverted commas. I'm re-watching ER after binging the pit, and I've decided that Carter is basically young Dr. Robbie. It feels like I'm watching him acquire all the experience and emotional scar tissue that eventually turns him into the doctor we meet in the pit. And, of course, that is kind of the case because that's how the pit started life. The pit started now, I mean, we should say, depending on who you talk to, so they were going to reboot ER. This was the idea that sort of like during the pandemic, Noah Wiley had lots of people contact him and saying, we need Dr.

25:57Kay:Carter, it's a really hard time for frontline medical staff. And they had a big conversation about, you know, should we, in fact, reboot ER? Like, can we do this? Could we go back to ER? oh, could we do this again? And the answer was, yeah, let's do it, except they could not come to accord with the Crichton estate. Michael Crichton, of course, created ER, and his widow runs the estate, and they, I think, let's just say, they couldn't make the numbers add up. So they decided not to. But they're gutted now, right? Well, gutted to the point where they're suing. So they're suing HBO at the moment because they're basically saying it's an unauthorized spinoff of ER, but the pit people are saying, well, no, we pivoted and went in another direction.

26:35Kay:Because he has a different name, you see? Pivot. But I'm sure some of Carter's DNA definitely remains there. I mean, he is a different character, but yeah, there's similarities. And also, it's Noah Wiley. He looks similar as well. He does look similar, yes. Let me say right now, they're going to lose that case. They cannot win that case because they've clearly... Because he's a different character. And are they saying, oh, this Noah Wiley should not be allowed to ever do a medical drama? Well, quite. You know. Doesn't have the same format. I'm no legal expert, but I'm saying they're not going to win that case.

27:08HBO can rest assured it will be fine.

27:11Kay:I'm inclined to agree with you, although apparently it's something to do with there's a bad faith thing, that obviously they wanted to do this as an ER reboot and they couldn't come to a deal, so they've gone off and done, in the estate's mind, they're saying it's the same thing, just with different names. I know, but... And they're saying, well, no, actually, we pivoted in another direction. No, I think it's flimsy. They're being open about it. Everyone knows the story, so it's not like they're hiding the fact to know why he was in ER. He's not wearing a prosthetic nose. He's telling you to be someone else.

27:39Maybe God,

27:41Kay:could have done that. So, let's get into it. The Pit, seasons one and two. Boy, do you remember anything that happened? Yes. The main thing, one of my main areas of interest with The Pit is that having watched the second season quite a long time after the first and kind of binged it in the end by the time I got my HBO account fixed. Yes. I viscerally felt it was even better than series one. Like it felt even more, like they pushed the boundary of the individual cases they have to deal with in the show. For example, episode two, the penis. Ah, yes. The engorged penis. The erect penis that will not go down.

28:30Yeah, sorry, Kay, for having to say engorged penis in your company. So, yeah, there is a close-up of this erect penis. Mighty phallus. Now, interestingly, right, now this is a moment that will stay with you if you've seen it, let's put it that way. But intriguingly, on Wikipedia, I know Wikipedia is not like the be-all and end-all of knowledge, but in the quite extensive plot breakdowns, it doesn't mention the erection. You're disappointed at the lack of erection, Jack. So then I had to remind myself, I'm Googling it in the office, I had to re-watch it. I had to re-watch it. And freeze frame. I had to Google it.

29:05I had to freeze frame it. And screen grab. But it definitely happened, right, in episode two. I mean, I've double-checked.

29:11Kay:Is this why it's the wallpaper on your phone currently? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay. But what, and then you have to endure the quite painful process they go to. The draining. The draining of the pain. Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. Okay, it's distressing. So, you know, it kind of, and there are many, many more really, really distressing incidents they have to deal with in the ER. And then on top of that, so I think they ratcheted up the medical emergencies. They also ratcheted up the fact that in the middle, they plonk in the fact that, A, all of the other local hospitals are sending all of their patients to the pit for reasons.

29:46Because of the cyber attack? Well, and separately, there's a cyber attack that means that the whole of the pit's electronics, computer systems and everything goes down. So they have to do it all on a big whiteboard. And luckily, one of the characters has a photograph. Photographic memory, yeah. So there's that to deal with. And then, of course, you've got the Robbie thing, where this is his last stint, his last shift before he goes off for three months

30:11Kay:to discover himself on a bike, on a motorbike, arranged by his ludicrous biker mate. Yeah, played by Jeff Kober. Amazing. Jeff Kober. So all of these elements make it even more dramatic and kind of incredibly addictive and fast-moving and hectic and compelling than the first two. My one, not criticism, but my one question is, have they gone almost too far? And is it becoming a little bit melodramatic and a little bit obviously manipulative in the way it deals with its cases and the way it deals with its characters? That's a little bit neat. Sometimes I sat back and this is all getting a little bit neat and tidy that they're, you know, he's on his last day, his supposed kind of substitute, the woman taking over him.

30:58Dr. Alashimi. She has issues. she suddenly has these moments where she kind of has a little mini breakdown seizure. It's all a very, and in fact, the example of the person who has photographic memory who can deal with all of it, that's handy, right? Clinky dink. Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff like that going on. But in the end, the show is so well done. It's so incredibly realistic and feels unbelievably authentic. And the character, the drawing of the characters is so brilliant. you know from like there's about 20 characters all of whom incredibly finely detailed and three-dimensional you believe in all of them pretty much all the way through that even when it does get melodramatic and relies on coincidence all that it kind of doesn't matter because it's so good that's my opening salvo there you go james uh i i think you're right i think but i don't take

31:47Kay:that as a bad thing. Like, this show, to me, is kind of like a prism on, I guess it's like deliberately a prism on American society, American culture, isn't it? Because like, they use that hospital setting as a kind of a front row seat to all of the various ills affecting America at the moment, from the cost of healthcare and insurance, to poverty, to underfunding, to, you know, the current political situation, ICE, you know, all of this stuff gets touched upon. Much more than in season one. Much more than in season one. And because all of these things feed into frontline medicine. So it's able to provide a really interesting sort of vantage point from which to critique that.

32:24Kay:But also, I think more than anything else, it feels like the theme of this series is like the cost, right? The cost of frontline medicine. Because every one of these characters, to greater or less extent, is that breaking point. And then some of them actively break. and it's just like you cannot do this job in this way and not suffer catastrophic consequences as a result of it like Robbie is like an absolute wreck he's suicidal and it's really well laid up like the very first episode of the second season you see Robbie driving into work on his motorcycle without a helmet on and obviously that's not an accident I mean it could well have turned into one but do you know what I mean it's showing that he is slightly suicidal but he's become reckless and he hasn't had the support he needs to deal with all of the stuff that he was dealing with in season one that he was dealing with from the pandemic.

33:12Kay:And I think that's really interesting. And the ways that these different characters fracture, like whether it be Langdon and his drug addiction, which again is really interesting he dealt with in the second season because, you know, him and Robbie, Robbie almost can't even look at him. And you've got Dr. Mohan who just realizes that she just can't hack it because she hasn't got the temperament for emergency medicine. So she's thinking of emergency psychiatry. She needs to move out of it for her own mental health. She can't deal with that. and so she's not coming back for the third season. Speaking of people who don't come back, Dr.

33:43Kay:Collins, she didn't come back for season two because she, and they don't really deal with that at all. It's not really touched on, which I thought was, I mean, I guess kind of an unusual, she's a big part of season one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're right, yeah. They don't deal with that at all. That's completely brushed aside. I know they've got a very large cast of characters, so to a certain extent they don't need to, but I felt like that I would have liked to have known why. I mean, known why within the universe rather than the fact that she didn't want to come back. But I think it's an incredibly good cast of characters, but all of this stuff works because of the real-time format.

34:17Kay:And, you know, the idea of having this incredibly long shift, that by the end of it, you're absolutely brutalized in the same way that they are. Like, it's exhausting going through it, which is why I think it lends itself to the binge format more than the week-by-week format. Because I think at the end of it, you want to feel exhausted. You want to feel, oh my God, like, how are we getting through this? Not in a TV sense way, but from a pure energy point of view. because I think by the end of it, I love the fact that the characters are all on their very last nerve. Yeah, it's gruelling. And because the unflinching gaze of the camera is what I think helps it make it feel so real and visceral.

34:51I keep saying the word visceral, I think. It's a good word. Thank you. So that those individual cases,

34:58Kay:I mean, you've got the woman with the impacted fecal matter. Could I just say? I'm just now partly listing the most traumatic things to see. but they really but the degloved finger was a particular high point no yeah exactly exactly um there's the but then there's there are the there's the occasional fun one which is where it reminds me of house because it kind of does what house did over like a 50 minute episode within about 50 seconds sometimes so someone will come in there'll be a debate about what's going on what the symptoms are and to work out the mystery of the of what they're suffering from like the one with the jaundiced woman do you remember the georgie swan who has a turmeric overdose she didn't taste too much turmeric like that it's like a wellness thing yeah she's like a wellness kooky wellness gone wrong yeah um so those kind of you do get some light relief but yeah you're right the much more than the first season the second season is is kind of like a litany of what's wrong in america and the way they deal with the lack of insurance the health insurance issue is heartbreaking the ice thing is infuriating and it it it handles those things and of course it's going to be accused of being woke bullshit but actually it's so again it's so well done that i think even you know the people you might think object to the the clear political messages that it has i don't feel there's a big backlash because it's just so good you know i mean it's sometimes something so even the accusations of being woke etc people people people who have that worldview still watch it it's still a massive phenomenon just because it's how can you not enjoy it it's incredibly compelling yeah i agree i think also they're quite it's not i don't feel like you're being beaten over the head with the politics because the ice stuff is quite quite subtly done like it's like it's a relatively brief but but powerful segment and also it's not talking about immigration policy it's talking about ice tactics on the street and i think regardless of your politics i that doesn't seem controversial to say that they are a little bit unchecked at the moment.

37:01I mean, without getting into it, I don't think Donald Trump would agree. Well, sure. And Donald, if you're listening, and I know you subscribe. He was annoyed. That's one review you don't need to leave, Dan. Yeah, he was annoyed when the subscription, the plus was late last week. He was upset. He did what he was saying.

37:18Kay:He didn't want ads in his Pilot Plus episode. Exactly. Make Pilot great again, he said. Let me ask you this. Who are your favourite and least favourite characters? Oh, that's a very hard one. Do you know what? In the first season, my least favorite character was Dr. Santos. Oh, same. Because she's so abrasive. She's so rude and she's kind of an asshole. But actually, I think, and this is why I love the show so much, there's demonstrable character growth across the board. And in the second season, A, she's softened a little bit, but also you start to understand her a little bit. You understand why she is the way she is.

37:53Kay:And I think she's, so actually, she has grown on me. I no longer hate her. I think Fiona Dourif is really good as Dr. McKay. I mean, the ankle monitor thread in Series 1, you could argue was a little melodramatic, but I actually liked it. I thought that worked really well. Catherine Lanassa is fantastic as Dana. Like, so good. She has such a unique way of speaking that sometimes I don't get her dialogue and I have to turn the subtitles on because... Because she's got quite a thick accent. She's got a very thick accent. It's kind of like a gravelly, almost like a gravelly, but she's so brilliant.

38:24she's so she's like superwoman really in a way but you believe that she is that empathetic she is like the most empathetic person in history and the assault storyline in season one

38:35Kay:which is brutal and the idea and obviously in season two she's still shaken by it because she's carrying a loaded syringe around with her which is mad also I love Mel Taylor Dearden who plays Mel King but there's only one answer oh god it's Whittaker Whittaker is brilliant and I love the fact that Geron Howell is a British like was a jobbing British actor and he's suddenly got this role and he's perfect for it you'd never know he's everything he's so American he's got that American slightly nerdy quality to him that is perfect he's so good in that role and he's so good in it I read a thing about where the creators were talking about how they wrote much more for him in series 2 he's kind of at the center of so many different bits and pieces in series 2 and he pulls it off so fantastically well I think he's genius he's very good the thing is but this is what's so good about the show.

39:24Kay:It's an incredibly deep bench of great characters and phenomenal performances where there's never a point where you are not interested in any of these characters. Such a deep bench, right? That Abbott, Sean Hattosi... This is what I was about to say. Yeah. He's not even... To go back to Wikipedia. He's not listed in the cast. He's not regular cast because he's in the night shift. And Sean Hattosi is amazing and he is so good in this. And he's such a hero. He spends his downtime. I know. He does medical army stuff. Oh, right? Love him. He seems to function 24-7 and somehow has nothing. He's absolutely fine.

39:56Well, he's also, he's like a massive adrenaline junkie, isn't he?

39:58Kay:Like he goes out with SWAT teams and stuff. Yes, exactly. Because again, you see all these characters dealing with these massive sort of emotional damage. They've got all this sort of trauma. And every single one of them is carrying some kind of incredibly heavy load. They're barely keeping aloft. I also thought one of the cleverest storylines, and Mel is absolutely phenomenal. And she's kind of like the female, or, you know, she's like the other version of Whittaker. I feel like her and Whittaker are like a kind of two different sides of the same coin somehow. I don't know, they feel like quite a little in common.

40:30But her dealing with her sister and her sister's love life was such a great storyline, I thought. They did that so well. Her kind of like anger at not being told about it and her kind of presumptuousness about her sister. I thought that was so well done. That could have easily become clunky and kind of cliched, I think, but I thought they kind of did that. Those kind of things it handled so well. On top of all the ultra-realistic, ultra-authentic medical stuff going on, it has these emotional storylines that work so well as well.

41:01Kay:Yeah, it's fabulous. Do you know what? We could talk about this for literally hours, except we can't because there is a DJ standing outside the studio giving me the evil eye, which shows me that we have run out of our allotted booking time for Pilot Plus this week. So we are unfortunately going to have to wrap up our pitch out there. but I will say if you have any questions about The Pit any spoiler questions or talking about which you would like us to discuss because obviously two seasons so many episodes there's a lot to get through send them into the postbag with a subject The Pit and what we will do is we'll have a separate little Pit Q &A where we'll deal with some listener questions on it maybe on next week's Pilot Plus but we'll be back in your ears on Monday with the regular podcast when we will be reviewing The Gentleman on Netflix and the new season of my favourite show and the show that loves me You invented it Colin from Accounts isn't that right Kay?

41:47yes James that's absolutely correct I don't know why you're even going to Kate on that one because she's never heard of it never seen it yeah she's done

41:52Kay:Kate you should really watch it it's a show it's Australian you're killing me you'll really enjoy it yeah I'll send you a link it's great you two are unbearable bring back Steph pilot's out