NOAH WYLE AS “DR. ROBBY” IN “THE PITT.” | PHOTO BY WARRICK PAGE/MAX

Emergency medical professionals at Allegheny General Hospital gave a thumbs up to “The Pitt,” the new Max medical drama series that was partly filmed at the North Side hospital.

“It’s the most realistic medical show I’ve seen,” said Kathy Sikora, a registered nurse who is director of emergency services at AGH.

Dr. Bobby Kapur, chair of the AHN Emergency Medicine Institute who has practiced for 20 years, agreed. “Unfortunately or fortunately it really shows what’s going on,” he said, noting that he typically sees the vast variety of cases one after another on a typical day like they were presented in the premiere.

Related: Which ‘The Pitt’ Character Are You?

The emergency department is “a microcosm of what’s going on around us. There’s access to care issues, substance abuse, mental health issues, homelessness. I think they do a really good job in depicting what goes on.”

The two gave their comments on Friday after a viewing of the first episode of “The Pitt” for hospital workers and EMS leaders in the hospital’s MaGovern Auditorium. AGH was the backdrop for the show’s fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, and filming was done there for a few days in September. The interior shots of the basement emergency room were mostly filmed on a soundstage in Burbank, California. The series premiered on Max on Jan. 9.

THE FACADE OF ALLEGHENY GENERAL HOSPITAL | PHOTO BY VIRGINIA LINN

Creating a realistic drama of an emergency department was the goal of the show’s star, Noah Wyle, who appeared in a video discussion before the screening with fellow executive producer Michael Hissrich. Wyle said that during the pandemic, he was sitting at home, feeling desperate and useless. At the same time he was getting mail from all sorts of front-line health workers thanking him for inspiring them to go into emergency medicine from his earlier role as a doctor in the long-running NBC series, “ER.”

“THE PITT” EXEC PRODUCERS MICHAEL HISSRICH, LEFT, AND NOAH WYLE, WHO ALSO STARS ON THE DRAMA, JOINING THE FRIDAY PRESENTATION VIRTUALLY. | PHOTO BY VIRGINIA LINN

He took that mail and reached out to John Wells, an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University who was executive producer of “ER” (which ran from 1994 to 2009), and others to see what they could develop. Joining them as executive producers was fellow CMU alumnus Hissrich, who grew up in a Pittsburgh family of fire service workers.

Why is the show set in Pittsburgh? Wyle said both his parents were from Pittsburgh; his mom attended Chatham University, his father CMU. “I’m a product of a Pittsburgh union,” he said.

Related: Every Pittsburgh Reference We Caught in ‘The Pitt’ — Can You Spot Them Too?

He pitched Pittsburgh as the setting partly because of that connection but “mostly because it isn’t LA and New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston. We’ve seen a lot of these big American cities depicted before and they come with their own flavor. Pittsburgh offers so many different aspects: big-city environments, a great cross-section of people, different socio-economic classes, a blend of urban and rural cases…it made sense for so many reasons.”

Wyle emphasized that unlike “ER,” whose focus was patient-centric, “The Pitt” is focused on providers. The point was to present the show in real time, “showing a real shift and embedding the audience with these providers as they do a shift to give them a sense …of what you all go through everyday, what you take on emotionally, what you compartmentalize and not share with your families.”

Each of the 15 episodes in Season 1 cover just one hour of a 15-hour shift.

The show’s packed waiting rooms, stress faced by doctors and staff and even patients getting treated in the hallways were authentic elements in the show, the medical providers said.

THE AGH ER DOCS, STAFF AND EMERGENCY WORKERS POSED IN FRONT OF THE VIDEO SCREEN AT THE END OF FRIDAY’S PRESENTATION. | PHOTO COURTESY OF ALLEGHENY GENERAL HOSPITAL

At times there may be 30 or more people in the AGH waiting room, Sikora said, and on average 18% of emergency room patients are treated in the hallway. “That’s just the reality of our situation, right?” She also said that Wyle and the other executive producers were “absolutely committed to actually addressing within this series a lot of the real-life things that are happening in health care.”

“We know that health care providers have a 34% higher chance of suicide than other occupations…the [executive producers] promised to address in this series all of that plus workplace violence and all the other challenges that we face on a daily basis with our emergency department, not only here in Pittsburgh but across the country.”

She added: “I just have a feeling that there will be a Season 2, and they’ll be back.”