“This is the most important person that you’re gonna meet today,” declares Dr. Michael Robinavitch, who is played by Noah Wyle, early in the pilot episode of the Max hospital drama The Pitt. He’s addressing some young docs and med students who have just clocked in for their very first shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department, and he’s gesturing toward a locked-in gal in scrubs. “This is Dana,” says Robinavitch, who goes by Dr. Robby. “She’s our charge nurse. She is the ringleader of our circus. Do what she says, when she says it.”
When Robby says this, it is only about 10 minutes past 7 a.m. in the windowless world of The Pitt, a 15-episode series in which each episode depicts one hour of Robby’s very long shift. But by that point, viewers have already seen nurse Dana Evans be the boss in multiple different ways.
There she is, saying there, there to a pregnant and barfing colleague. (And by there, there, I mean: “I’d like to say it goes away, but I had morning sickness for six months with my second daughter!”) There she is again, shooting things extremely straight with Dr. Robby in a way that suggests both that She Gets Him and also that He Respects Her like nobody else. And there she is, announcing ambulance arrivals and doling out beds and corralling staffers, moving like a maestro or an air traffic controller or, yes, a circus ringleader, keeping the elephants in order and the lions at bay.
Or, as Katherine LaNasa, who plays Dana, puts it: moving like a ballerina. “I think my dance background as a professional dancer really helps with this way that we work,” LaNasa, 58, tells The Ringer about the choreographed chaos of The Pitt. LaNasa went to art school as a teen to study the craft more intensively, and before she ever acted, she danced in ballet companies across the U.S. Now, as Dana, LaNasa says it’s all coming back. “And I find that sort of exciting,” LaNasa says. “It’s a little side part of my work that I like—I like making things work physically. Dana’s on the go, and we’re moving around a lot, and we’re moving around with the cameras.”
Working on The Pitt, she says, is “all a dance, really.” And like the best ballets, the result is lively and mournful all at once, a celebration of the human body and a recognition of the soul. And as for Nurse Dana? She’s on her toes the whole time, moving like a prima ballerina en pointe.
I’ve just watched the ninth and most recent episode of The Pitt when I speak by phone with LaNasa, which means it is now right around 4 p.m. in the show’s universe. And it sure has been one hell of a day on one hell of a show. Since The Pitt premiered in January, its hardworking nurses and doctors at an understaffed hospital have dealt with fentanyl overdoses, grieving families, drunk skunks, a mercury-poisoned beauty influencer, a vengeful incel, rats, exes, road rash, testicular torsion, hospital admins, and a stolen ambulance—that last one occurring right in front of Dana as she takes a smoke break and catches a rare glimpse of some sky. “It happens,” Dana says with a seen-it-all, ah-well smile, returning to all that other drama inside the building.
The Pitt is a no-nonsense hospital program that stars Wyle, is creatively led by a team that includes John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, and brims with a wide-ranging cast of isn’t that … ?s and fresh faces alike. If that sounds a lot like some ER sequel to you, well, you’re not alone! Earlier this week, the widow of the late writer and ER creator Michael Crichton was permitted to move forward with a breach-of-contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. and The Pitt’s showrunners, claiming that the project began expressly in the ER universe and rebranded only when talks between the studio and Crichton’s estate stalled. While the outcome of that legal dispute is still unknown, it hasn’t stopped Max from doubling down on The Pitt: Earlier this month, it ordered a second season of the well-received series.
For the time being, though, there’s still a lot of time left in this first season of The Pitt, which by my mental math won’t conclude until 10 p.m. show time. (We haven’t even gotten to whatever mass casualty event they’ve been hinting at all season long!) There are also a lot of characters—staff and patients alike—to keep track of. There’s Wyle, whose bearded, world-weary visage evokes Saul Berenson more than John Carter in his performance as Dr. Robby, the gruff longtimer who’s still not over the memories of a peak-COVID ER onslaught and the death of his mentor. (Season 1 takes place on that grim anniversary.) Robby’s deputies and students include, but are not limited to:
- Dr. McKay, a spitfire with killer bangs and a court-ordered ankle bracelet (played by seed-o-Chucky Fiona Dourif).
- Dr. Frank Langdon, a brooding, George Clooney–ish bro who knows he’s got the goods (played by Patrick Ball, whose entire IMDb page consists of The Pitt and one episode of Law & Order—not for long!).
- Dr. Heather Collins (Tracy Ifeachor), who began the series barfing and is now low-key bereft.
- Dr. Melissa King, who answers the question “What if The Big Bang Theory, but waaaay sadder and also there’s blood?” (That’s a compliment—I like The Big Bang Theory, dammit, and Taylor Dearden’s character work in The Pitt is divine. Her ole dad must be proud.)
- Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones, daughter of Jon Jon), who has already scalpeled one colleague and is fixing to raise hell on another.
- Dennis Whittaker, heir to the John Carter bumbling med student throne (thanks for the memories and all the scrubs changes, Gerran Howell).
And that list doesn’t even include Hot Nurse Mateo, Clueless Hospital Exec Lady, Cocky Surgeon Who Brings the Sexual Tension to the OR, Nepo Baby Doogie Howser Girl, Various Paramedics—and more.
It also doesn’t include Nurse Dana, who’s forever stationed right in the center of everything with her trusty claw hair clip and her bags of Primanti sandos and her elite set of skills, medical and civilian alike. Oh, and her yinzer accent, which comes out in full force near the start of this week’s episode as she stands in an increasingly volatile waiting room screaming, “This ain’t Philly!” and “You call yourselves adults?!” and, for verisimilitude’s sake: “Ya jagoffs.”
As LaNasa tells it, the roles available to her in recent years had been “really slim pickings” until, all at once, two new auditions came up. One was for The Righteous Gemstones, a role that kinda reminded the Louisiana-born LaNasa of Rose Brady, the Southern political candidate’s wife she played in Will Ferrell’s 2012 movie The Campaign.
The other was for The Pitt. LaNasa had been cast in bit parts on medical dramas before—she played an amorous mom on a 2002 episode of ER and a Munchausen patient on the second season of Grey’s Anatomy—but this was a much bigger opportunity. “I really felt connected to this part, and I knew it was just a huge get to work for John Wells,” says LaNasa of the man behind shows ranging from ER to Shameless to Maid. “It was just, like, a bucket list thing for me to work with him. He’s always just put really complicated, real women on TV.”
That desire to play Dana went up to 11 when LaNasa received a note written by Wyle to explain what the minds behind The Pitt were looking for on the show. Speaking to Variety, Wyle recalled the gist of what he’d written: “This is much more like being part of a repertory theater company or going to summer camp than doing TV, but bring your knitting, bring your enthusiasm, bring your creativity, check your ego, and come to play,” he recalled. “It was amazing how that letter went out and how it resonated with people who were just craving a sense of buy-in and a sense of ownership, and to really stretch that muscle.”
LaNasa was one of those people. Two things struck her about the letter. First, “They wanted this ‘top to toe immersion,’” LaNasa says. “They said that, and then they also said: ‘Leave your ego, bring your creativity.’” And second, she was intrigued by the unconventional ways The Pitt would be filmed to achieve its hour-by-hour vibe: Not only would the show be shot sequentially, but it would also be an all-hands-on-deck, documentary-like setup in which an actor’s work wasn’t finished just because their scene was and even the leads were expected to maintain a constant, active background presence. As Wyle put it, “You need to stay in your character in real time, all the time, in order for the camera to come back and find you where we need you for the storytelling.”
Reading Wyle’s letter, LaNasa thought: “Oh, I think they want me,” she remembers. “Like, I had this feeling that if I got to them, they would be happy with me. I think they want what I serve up.” For much of her career, LaNasa felt she’d existed in a difficult space: Networks found her too pretty to play weird girls but too weird-girl to play just another pretty face. As she saw it, The Pitt team “wanted all that weirdness. I didn’t have to suppress any of that,” she says.
LaNasa was out of town when she heard back about her audition tape. “I was interviewing a woman about a book she wrote about Appalachian women in the ’60s and ’70s,” LaNasa says. (She’s been writing an all-female play set in Appalachia as a side project.) “And I get this call: You have a meeting with John Wells on Zoom tomorrow. I’m in Palm Springs, I’ve got nothing to wear for Dana, I don’t have a ring light, I don’t have anything!” She pulled together something, and then once again it was time to play the waiting game—which was made both harder and easier by the fact that she had signed up to spend the better part of two weeks in a cabin deep in the hills of North Carolina as a counselor at a Christian camp for girls.
“I had, like, hundreds of people praying for me,” LaNasa says, laughing at the memory. “We were all kind of sweatin’ it.” When I ask whether her time at the summer camp involved teaching the arts, LaNasa has a whole lot of Nurse Dana in her response. “I would like nothing less,” she says with a twinkle in her voice, “than to teach drama to a bunch of girls under the age of 12.” Instead, she worked on the farm and garden team, which meant teaching a bunch of girls under the age of 12 things like: “That there’s lavender,” she says.
It wasn’t until her session had ended that she learned all those prayers had been answered and she’d gotten the job.
LaNasa’s performance as Dana embodies just about all of the things that make The Pitt rise above the median doctor drama. First and foremost, Dana has by far the best (platonic) chemistry with Dr. Robby of anyone on the show, able to needle and support him in a way that no one else really can. Wyle, LaNasa says, is “one of the easiest, most accomplished actors I’ve worked with.” And just as LaNasa is a testament to the great casting work on the show, she also shows off The Pitt’s dogged fidelity to medical truths, which has gotten even skeptical real-life medical workers on board. “If they told me the actress playing Dana was a former ER nurse,” wrote one impressed Redditor, “I would completely believe it. She reminds me of a couple I’ve worked with through the years.”
LaNasa says that to prepare for the role, she spent time shadowing some nurses in Los Angeles and used the experience to instill in Dana “this ability to be incredibly compassionate, but also be emotionally efficient.” In an emergency department environment, “you kind of can’t get caught up in everyone’s trauma,” she says, or you’d never get anything done. LaNasa’s preparation also involved looking up the dialect coaches responsible for those primo fluffya accents on the show Mare of Easttown and working with them on a more Western Pennsylvania–specific manner of speaking for The Pitt. As some yinzer viewers have noted, there aren’t many geographically specific accents in The Pitt—though to a degree, that makes sense: Most of the doctors presumably come from elsewhere. But “Dana is of a certain age, of a certain class,” says LaNasa. “She would probably have an accent. And my coach said: You would never go onstage in a play and play this character without doing a Pittsburgh accent, would you?”
As a woman with a well-honed ability to distinguish among various Southern accents, LaNasa was stressed about getting this new and unfamiliar Pittsburgh cadence right. “I really don’t like it if someone’s playing a Georgian and they have a Cajun accent,” she says. “I would go on hikes or out in the woods by myself so that I could practice by line, over and over and over again, to get the very different musculature in my mouth.” All that new musculature seems to have passed Reddit muster, at the very least: “I feel like [the] actress who plays Dana, the charge nurse, is doing the subtlest of yinzer accents,” wrote one user. “I love it, it feels like home.”
“She pronounced ‘Primanti’s’ very accurately!” wrote another. “I noticed that, too!” replied the original commenter. “Now we just need to find out how she pronounces ‘Carnegie.’”
Dana is a tough broad yet a tender listener. When she yells things like “fuck that fuckin’ stroller!” it is with genuine compassion. She combines roll-up-your-sleeves resourcefulness with brute charm. She knows just about everyone’s secrets yet isn’t some catty gossip, because who has the time?! “I think she’s an instrument of service,” says LaNasa of Dana. “She wants to serve the people in the department to help them keep their department going. And she wants to serve the patients.”
Years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I read Reddit threads in which moms-to-be fretted about nosy in-laws invading their hospital room during labor, and dozens of commenters gave advice like: “Just tell the nurses you don’t want visitors! They make incredible bouncers!” I think about that every time I watch Dana: She may not specifically be a labor and delivery nurse, but she is that exact kind of incredible bouncer—able to sense whom and what should be let in or kept out, emotionally efficient through and through.
Episode 9 of The Pitt, which aired Thursday night, was one of two that was written by Wyle. And it demonstrates, again and again, the personal toll that a job in the ER takes. As the episode begins, a custodial worker cleans a dead child’s barrette off the floor of the OR. Dr. Robby gives a close to emotional debrief of the sad case but is cut short by a new emergency. (“You just gave a speech titled ‘How to Literally Bury Your Feelings,’” Dana teases him later.) Several doctors try to self-soothe in the only ways they know how: by calling their kids just to say that they love them, or by sitting alone listening to meditation apps, or in Dana’s case, by heading out to the ambulance bay for a sweet, sweet cig. (A medical professional ripping darts just outside the hospital is one of the more realistic aspects of this entire production.)
“Don’t you know those things will kill you?” quips an EMT worker to Dana in an earlier episode. “I’m not that lucky,” she shoots back with ease, giving the impression that this exchange is one that’s repeated like clockwork every day.
At the tail end of Episode 9, though, Dana’s smoke break departs from tradition when a patient named Doug Driscoll, who is incandescent with rage after having spent all day in the ER waiting room, self-soothes the only way he knows how: by freakin’ sucker punching our beloved charge nurse. Now, viewers will have to wait to find out how or whether Dana will recover; LaNasa says that Drew Powell, the actor who played Driscoll, remarked to her after that scene: “I’m about to become the most hated man in America.”
On the show, Dana has been working at the same hospital for 32 years, a long waltz indeed. Asked by a young med student how she’s possibly done it for that long, she says, “I like taking care of everyone, especially the ones who fall through the cracks.” That reminded me of something LaNasa said about one of the nurses she’d shadowed in Los Angeles, who told her that “she wouldn’t even have been an emergency department nurse if it wasn’t at County [Hospital], because she wanted to help. If she was going to do that kind of work, she wanted to do it for people who really needed it.”
“Wow,” the young doc says to Dana on The Pitt. “Well, you deserve a medal.” Dana half scoffs, half chuckles. “Yeah,” she says. “I’d settle for a raise.” It doesn’t get more real than that.
