HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those £10 a month subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint.

Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called ‘the best medical drama on television in years’. This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as ‘most amusing form of cancer’ or ‘most ineradicable variety of testicular lice’. But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.

The fuss, basically, is that The Pitt looks as if it were tailor-made by the most cunningly manipulative AI intelligence to deliver to mass audiences all that they most desire in a medical drama. So: snappy, wise-cracking, edgy-seeming dialogue chock-full of abstruse, incomprehensible terminology; a handsome, capable, unflappable lead doctor (Noah Wyle as Dr Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch) and a Benetton team of diverse ethnicities and contrasty sexualities; urgent, terrifying, race-against-time pacing with a few lulls, periodically inserted, a bit like on a fox hunt, so that everyone has time to chill/be funny/reveal hinterland; gore........

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