The Prestige TV Revolution Set Procedurals Back Decades

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Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor.

25 years before The Pitt resuscitated it, The Sopranos unintentionally whacked TV's greatest innovation: the procedural. Procedurals dominated television when David Chase's blend of crime and family drama changed the game, and now a quarter-century later, HBO is finally elevating what has become something of a lost art with its stunning new medical show.

The Pitt is back for a second season, after a critically lauded and captivating debut. The show has the potential to become a cultural phenomenon as it continues, on the level of Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or even Game of Thrones.

Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael 'Robby' Robinavitch looking at someone in The Pitt

Yet looking at that list of titles, it's hard not to think of how radically TV has changed in the 21st-century.

HBO's "The Pitt" Saves The Dying Art Of The Procedural By Elevating It To Prestige TV

Procedurals Have Languished As B-Tier TV For Decades

To be fair, procedurals didn't die after HBO reinvented television at the turn of the century with shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood. The procedural format did, however, suffer a serious fall from grace. In the 1990s, shows like Law & Order and The Pitt's spiritual predecessor, ER, perfected the procedural. From there, it was all downhill.

The dramatic revolution in early 2000s television did more than just raise the bar on what "good" or "great" TV meant. It fully redefined what a TV show could be, and how it could achieve greatness. It afforded TV creators newfound freedom to break tradition, subvert convention, and abandon pre-existing formats, like the procedural.

What makes The Pitt exceptional is that it takes all the right dramatic lessons of the "Prestige TV" era and applies them to the tried-and-true medical procedural format. It is an expert synthesis of contemporary and classic television. The important thing to note, though, is that The Pitt doesn't neglect its procedural aspects, which is key to its success.

21st-Century Procedurals Have Learned The Wrong Lessons From Prestige Drama; "The Pitt" Cures That

HBO Diagnosed A Problem And Fixed It

The doctors and nurses of The Pitt season 1 looking defeated around Dana on the phone

Of course, the procedurals of the past 20 years, from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to House, have tried to adapt to the new dramatic paradigm of television. Yet these shows have tended to learn the wrong lessons from their "Prestige" counterparts. SVU is a notorious example, having seemingly forgotten it is a procedural entirely for years at a time.

Procedurals require patience on the part of both writers and viewers. This has run thin on both sides in modern times. Many procedurals-in-name-only these days tend to gloss over the beats of the procedure. Detective shows lean too heavily on the "absurdly intuitive investigator" trope. The Pitt is the antidote to this.

The Pitt moves at a breakneck pace, but it relishes every one of its medical mysteries. It effectively balances these with vital character moments, but the centerpiece of each episode is the step-by-step process of saving lives. It took 25 years, but HBO has at long last brought the TV revolution it started with The Sopranos full circle with The Pitt.