Streaming Services Are Rediscovering the TV Procedural

Making official what we first hinted at last month, Max this week confirmed a series order for The Pitt, a new medical procedural drama from ER veterans Noah Wyle, John Wells, and Scott Gemmill. The stellar collection of talent behind the show obviously makes it a notable piece of programming news, but there was something else in Tuesday’s announcement that didn’t get quite as much attention: Max has greenlit 15 episodes of the Warner Bros. TV-produced series, or nearly double the size of the chintzy eight episode orders which have become standard in the streaming era. That one detail could actually end up being a pretty big deal, and a sign of where we’re headed in the post-Peak TV era.

While Max’s press release didn’t make it explicit, multiple Warner Bros. Discovery insiders tell me that the current thinking is that those 15 episodes of The Pitt will air as a single season — and one which rolls out with weekly episodes debuting over the course of three-to-four consecutive months rather than as a binge release or separate batches of seven or eight installments. It’s possible the show could launch with two or even three episodes, or that producers could decide to make the season finale a two-episode event. But in essence, the experience of watching The Pitt every week will feel more like being a fan of a basic cable drama in 2005 vs. the whirlwind romance vibes given off by most modern streaming shows.

Making this sort of thing financially prudent for Max is another factor: Wells and Gemmill plan to produce The Pitt with a budget more in line with a broadcast or basic cable series than the sort of megabucks price tags which have become common in streaming today. That’s not to say the show will be cheap: Wylie is a major TV star, and the show’s studio, Warner Bros. TV, isn’t some indie upstart that’s going to make a piece of television that feels like it should be on a Hallmark Channel wannabe like Great American Family. But The Pitt won’t cost $12 or $15 million per episode, which is what so many prestige dramas in recent years have gone for. I don’t know exactly what the budget is for the show, but it will be a price point that allows Max and Warner Bros. TV to feel good about the prospect of this series building up a library of 75 or 100 episodes over the next five to seven years.

It’s at this point in the story that I am now legally required to bring up Suits, the USA Network blue sky procedural that blew up on Netflix last year and launched a thousand think pieces about Why Linear TV Was Good, Actually and how streaming killed everything that was great about old-fashioned television. While I think the Suits hype has been a tad overblown, in my contribution to the narrative around the show I made the case that streaming was facing a serious catalog crisis if it didn’t start finding ways to make shows with bigger episodic libraries. As one exec told me last summer, “If we don’t start building the library shows of tomorrow, we’re going to regret it.”

I’m guessing Max originals chief Sarah Aubrey and WBTV CEO Channing Dungey agree with that assessment, because The Pitt just feels genetically engineered to go the distance, make 100 or more episodes, and become the kind of comfort food programming audiences return to years after it drops its series finale. It’s right there in the official plot description: “The Pitt is a realistic examination of the challenges facing healthcare workers in today’s America as seen through the lens of the frontline heroes working in a modern-day hospital in Pittsburgh.” There’s no mention of a crazy conspiracy, a mystery that needs to be solved, or an Epic Adventure That Spans the Globe. If you cross out Pittsburgh from that logline and sub Seattle or Chicago, you’ve pretty much got the plot of Grey’s Anatomy, ER, or Chicago Med, three shows which collectively have churned out more than 900 hours of television over their respective runs.

It’s Not HBO, It’s TV

The other thing that’s so smart about the greenlight for The Pitt is that it’s a sign Aubrey and her Max Originals team, under the oversight of HBO and Max content CEO Casey Bloys, really are serious about (finally) living up the original mandate of the division: Making shows that you’d never expect to see on HBO. Max originals such as Hacks or my dearly departed fave Julia are great, but they’re also both series which, for me at least, easily could’ve been greenlit by the platform’s linear cousin. And as I’ve written before, that turned out to be a problem because Max already has a unit that makes HBO shows: HBO. Just before the launch of the old HBO Max, original platform chief Kevin Reilly had made it clear he wanted Max originals to serve audiences WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery) had essentially abandoned when it stopped making scripted shows for TNT and TBS. But that never happened. Instead, like just about every series development team at virtually every streamer over the past five years, Max became obsessed with making prestige TV at a premium cost.

While I’m all for the industry making as many good shows as possible, you can’t be a platform as broad as Max needs to be if you don’t also make all kinds of TV. For decades, networks like HBO and Showtime existed as add-on, premium channels: They were the fancy dessert to cable’s main offering of various niche networks. And yet while they were very successful, most cable homes actually didn’t pay for premium channels, or only paid for one. This doesn’t mean streamers should start making a bunch of mediocre or disposable TV. But they can’t keep ruling out entire genres of TV, like multi-camera sitcoms and procedurals. They need to experiment with everything, including shows which haven’t yet worked in the digital era. And if they do it right, it doesn’t have to be forgettable filler, either: Wells’ ER was a classic medical procedural that then twisted some of the conventions of the format, and it was not only one the most popular shows of the 1990s, it was also one of the best.

So What If It’s a Hit?

I’m not trying to set the bar too high here for Wells, Wylie and, Gemmill. While they’re getting (some of) the old team back together, ER was the sort of magic that usually only happens a few times a decade in TV. But even if The Pitt doesn’t change the face of television, it can still be a good show and one which also ends up changing the trajectory of streaming. By giving the show a healthy 15-episode order and likely a weekly release, Max is, either by accident or design, testing out the idea that the sort of formula which worked for decades on broadcast and basic cable can also work with streaming originals. Among the questions it could answer:

➽ Will audiences tune in every week for a show that won’t offer the sort of lavish spectacle seen in so many other streaming hits (including another upcoming Max original, The Penguin)?

➽ Will such a series get people to sign up for Max, or perhaps even more importantly, decide against canceling their subscription when a big tentpole like House of the Dragon ends its latest season?

➽ And if it makes it to a third or fourth season, will audiences who don’t watch week-to-week then binge 45 or 60 episodes of a procedural like The Pitt, demonstrating a long tail not seen with so many current streaming originals?

It’s obviously way too early to predict the answers to all those questions, particularly since not a frame of film of the show has been shot. The Pitt first and foremost has to be good, and Max will need to do a bang-up job marketing the show — not just ahead of its launch but week-to-week. The streamer is not Netflix and it can’t count on audiences opening the app daily and finding a new episode of the show every week. Max, and other streamers, will also need to make more than one or two of these kinds of shows, if only to avoid reading too much into its success or failure. We’re already seeing hints of that at Netflix: After finding success with semi-procedural The Lincoln Lawyer, Netflix earlier this year greenlit Pulse, its first real medical procedural, and like The Pitt, it has a linear veteran attached as a producer (Lost’s Carlton Cuse, who’s working with first-time creator Zoe Robyn). And in addition to The Pitt, there’s been chatter Max is actively considering ordering some multi-camera sitcoms, another form which has been underrepresented (though not entirely absent) on streaming. If Max’s multicams get 15- or 18-episode seasons, it will be another good indication the commitment to experimentation is real.

Should More Streamers Do This One Weird Trick?

As for other streamers, I’m also hopeful we’ll see more willingness to make non-premium TV. One of Prime Video’s biggest-ever hits has been Bosch and its spin-off Bosch: Legacy, and yet somehow the Amazon-owned streamer hasn’t used that success as an excuse to greenlight a dozen similar cop, medical, and firefighter shows and air them weekly. Similarly, while Paramount+ has had basic procedurals in its DNA since it was known as CBS All Access — and shows such as The Good Fight and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds have both done well — it has preferred to rent most of its procedural content from sibling CBS. Ditto Hulu, which fills its traditional TV quote mostly via ABC and Fox content licensing agreements. That’s not without some logic, but it’s part of the reason why formats which lend themselves to building large episodic libraries are still mostly the exception in streaming.

It’s possible streaming execs have been right to avoid such meat-and-potatoes programming, if only so their platforms could stand out from what’s on cable and broadcast. After all, a movie-like spectacle such as The Mandalorian was probably a better way to get folks excited to sign up for Disney+ in 2019 than, say, a spinoff of The Good Doctor. But streaming has evolved a lot in the last five years or so, and we’re clearly out of the industry’s startup phase. What seemed dumb in 2019 might be the right play in 2024 and beyond. Plus, the success of Suits on Netflix, as well as the continuing triumph of definitely-not-fancy streamers such as Tubi, suggest that there really is an audience for the kinds of shows which once packed broadcast and basic cable schedules. Thanks to experiments like The Pitt, we may soon find out.