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- [00:01]
NPR Host
These days there is a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family and your community. Consider this from NPR is a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, backstory and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider this podcast from npr.
- [00:24]
Dave Davies
This is FRESH air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, Noah Wylie is an executive producer, writer and star of the new Mac series the Pit, which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room. Wendell Stone, 52, chief rigger from Pitfest.
- [00:43]
Noah Wyle
Isolated Tom to the left chest when.
- [00:44]
Dave Davies
A speaker tower came down on him.
- [00:46]
Noah Wyle
Looks like multiple rib fractures.
- [00:47]
Dave Davies
Pulse 110, BP 130 over 85. Decent sats at 90 60s.
- [00:51]
Noah Wyle
Event in the field. Got it. How we doing, Mr. Stone? Mr. Stone is my dad. Just Stone.
- [00:59]
Dave Davies
The Pit has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue and well drawn characters. And it's gained a following of real life emergency room doctors who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wiley is a veteran of stage, screen and television who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs. He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series ER for most of its 15 seasons, where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series Falling Skies and the Librarians and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organization's Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World. The Pit is now wrapping up its 15 episode run and has been renewed for a second season. Noah Wylie, welcome to FRESH air.
- [01:52]
Noah Wyle
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:53]
Dave Davies
You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character maybe I didn't. He's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization and it's a teaching hospital. So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced. Residents in training and medical students on their first day, I believe in their rotations as this thing begins. So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character.
- [02:23]
Noah Wyle
Dr. Robbie I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple years ago. But like many practitioners post Covid felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with. He's kept working and it's taken a toll on him. He's seen a lot and done a lot and he's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today we are embedded with him for his entire shift. On the day that he's no longer able to do that right.
- [03:03]
Dave Davies
And things he runs into some rough seas, you know, he's surrounded by these young medical students and I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific.
- [03:14]
Noah Wyle
The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally. We found actors in Australia, we found them in England, we found them on the east coast, west coast. But we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.
- [03:48]
Dave Davies
And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance. And we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in. And then you hear this 1, 2, 3. As the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney. And then the team gets to work. Let's listen.
- [04:14]
Noah Wyle
23 year old Ben Kemper.
- [04:15]
Dave Davies
No helmet, got doored riding an E scooter.
- [04:17]
Unknown Speaker D
Neck versus handlebar, then faceplanted to the pavement.
- [04:19]
Dave Davies
Obvious facial fractures, but alert and oriented with good vitals.
- [04:25]
Noah Wyle
Here we go. One, two, three. How we doing, Ben? One.
- [04:35]
NPR Host
Back in my throat.
- [04:36]
Noah Wyle
That's probably from the nosebleed. Short Rapid Rhino, please. Tacky at 120. Pulse ox borderline at 90. We'll buy it 15 liters from now.
- [04:45]
Unknown Speaker E
Neck contusion, larynx shifted to the right.
- [04:47]
Noah Wyle
No crepitance.
- [04:48]
Dave Davies
Four of morphine.
- [04:50]
Noah Wyle
I'm gonna stick something in your nose to stop the bleeding.
- [04:55]
Dave Davies
No hemotypinem.
- [04:56]
Noah Wyle
Inflate the balloon.
- [04:59]
Dave Davies
How about now, Ben?
- [05:02]
Noah Wyle
Better.
- [05:03]
Unknown Speaker E
What's up?
- [05:04]
Noah Wyle
Good vitals. A and O. Let's have a look.
- [05:08]
Dave Davies
And that's a scene from the pit where our guest Noah Wiley is a star. Awfully intense.
- [05:13]
Noah Wyle
Tough to get the impact of that clip on radio but that was a LeFort 3 floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.
- [05:30]
Dave Davies
Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into this series?
- [05:41]
Noah Wyle
I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to. Thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board certified emergency room physician. He was a technical advisor and a writer on er and he is with us again and he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes. He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.
- [06:31]
Dave Davies
Yeah. You know, I watched this series with my wife, who's 25 years as a primary care physician. She gets almost all of it. I get maybe a third of it, but I don't feel like I'm missing much. But I did wonder you were a writer on the show. I know. I mean, do you think about maybe letting up on some of that or is getting all that in critical to the authenticity of it?
- [06:53]
Noah Wyle
One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings, or exciting here because we're using percussion. We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room be our cadence. And a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack in the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes the emotional equivalent of a score. And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about. It's competency porn.
- [07:39]
Dave Davies
Well, the Other thing that's interesting about those scenes is everybody's moving and all of these different actors are barking these observations and commands, and they've got to be careful not to talk over each other so much that you can't hear it. So it's got to be crisply delivered and well mic'd. I imagine this took some pretty meticulous rehearsal.
- [07:58]
Noah Wyle
The rehearsals are extensive, especially for the medical scenes. We often rehearse those 24 hours in advance of shooting them, so we can come in with it pretty well in our muscles already and then figure out how we want to photograph it on the day we shoot. In terms of how the dialogue is overlapped, that's intentional because that's real. You know, you've got four or five people in the room, all who are working simultaneously, trying to do their own thing and record their own thing in the medical record. So a lot of times the sound is really cacophonous.
- [08:28]
Dave Davies
The effect is impressive. You know, the origins of this show are interesting. As I understand it, during the pandemic, you began hearing from medical providers and first responders who were dealing with all this high stakes, stressful demand on them. Is that right?
- [08:45]
Noah Wyle
Yeah, yeah. I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders, and some of it was, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.
- [08:56]
Dave Davies
Carter was the character you played on er, right?
- [08:58]
Noah Wyle
He was, yeah. And a lot of them were sort of thanking me for inspiring to go into a career in medicine, but also telling me how hard it was at that moment. And I was sort of overwhelmed being a lightning rod for that at that time. And so I pivoted a lot of that mail to John Wells, who executive produced ER and said, outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever did with my life, because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives, lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though we said we'd never do it again, I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple years later, you know, after we saw how this broke down over socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here.
- [09:53]
Dave Davies
What was it like for you to put on scrubs and a lab coat and get back in a hospital setting again after all those years?
- [09:59]
Noah Wyle
It was wonderful. I think I spent 15 years avoiding, actively avoiding walking down What I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road. And then finally I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped that stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home.
- [10:17]
Dave Davies
But now you have a beard. I mean, you were a callow young kid when you started that show, and then you were eventually an attending physician, and now you're a guy with a lot of miles on you.
- [10:25]
Noah Wyle
Yes, yes. Ironically, I'm 20 years older than Anthony Edwards was playing the attending 30 years ago, so that makes me sound ancient.
- [10:37]
Dave Davies
Right, right. You know, I should just mention, it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of er, has sued, alleging that the Pit is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean, one of the differences between the two shows is that the Pit is. The entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER. There's an hour, essentially in real time. An hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day. So that's a real distinction.
- [11:10]
Noah Wyle
Very much so. Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road, and then it became an impossibility, and so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by. We have.
- [11:28]
Dave Davies
You're the lead attending in this emergency room, and in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast which includes a lot of, you know, much younger actors. Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people, learning the craft in a way.
- [11:46]
Noah Wyle
You know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and refamiliarize myself with how much has changed in healthcare, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be. By the time we rolled the cameras and John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. And then he sort of segregated us, where I was off by myself, and I ate lunch by myself, and then the R4s ate together. The R2s and 3s ate together.
- [12:18]
Dave Davies
That's fourth year residents. Second year residents.
- [12:20]
Noah Wyle
Yeah, second year residents, fourth year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know, and the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth, and I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything, but it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over. So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before, yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.
- [13:04]
Dave Davies
Was there a wrap party after you finished taping in which those barriers broke down or.
- [13:09]
Noah Wyle
Yeah, to a degree. I mean, I don't stand on ceremony when I work, and I try to create as much of an egalitarian and democratic environment as possible. And so I try to erase numbers on call sheets, and I try to erase barriers between. Between foreground and background or cast and crew and try to call the whole thing company and get everybody to buy into the same thing. And it's very hard to do that. It's very rare that you're successful. This one was. The stars aligned beautifully. Everybody just jumped in, which made it a real pleasure.
- [13:42]
Dave Davies
You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate. This is one I want to play now, where a man and a woman who are a brother and sister, played here by Rebecca Tilney and Mackenzie Aston, are at the hospital with their elderly father who has pneumonia. The father has left instructions. He does not want to be intubated. And they're talking to you as Dr. Robbie about it. Dr. Rabi speaks first. Let's listen.
- [14:19]
Noah Wyle
Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid. Can't you take the fluid away? Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the BiPAP works. And if it doesn't, then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine. We're still talking about it. Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing. Do not intubate. We're thinking try it for a week. That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated. He might need to be restrained because he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat, and he wouldn't really know what was happening. Elderly patients can often develop psychosis.
- [15:08]
NPR Host
But he might get better or it might get worse. What would you do?
- [15:14]
Noah Wyle
I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose. But he's not your father, and he.
- [15:24]
Dave Davies
Can recover from this.
- [15:26]
NPR Host
What my sister means is that we're.
- [15:28]
Dave Davies
Still deciding the best thing to do.
- [15:32]
Noah Wyle
Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.
- [15:41]
Dave Davies
And that is our guest, Noah Wylie, in a scene from the Pit, which is now streaming on Max. There are a lot of these scenes where you're dealing with loved ones who just can't accept what's happening. There's another one, two parents who just can't accept the fact that their son, who came in with a fentanyl overdose, is brain dead. You want to just say a little bit about preparing for these scenes.
- [16:02]
Noah Wyle
Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes, when you only have an hour to tell a story, that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours, it feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters. When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view. In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for wanting to keep their father alive that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are. And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.
- [17:15]
Dave Davies
The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is, you know, I mentioned before that this series, kind of the germ of it began during COVID when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robbie, during COVID lost a mentor, another doctor. And I believe this day that is the focus of the series is the anniversary of his death. Right. I think we learned that early on. And then you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks, his ptsd, if you will, is portrayed in the show.
- [17:52]
Noah Wyle
This is the five year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with. He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home, but today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them. And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms them. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood. And she came over for breakfast last Sunday and she came into the kitchen and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four year old. I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names and she's getting teary eyed and. And she finishes. And I said, my goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. I said, well, this one wasn't either. And she said, but it felt real and it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four year old, when was that? She said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me. And then I thought to myself, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework. Wow.
- [19:58]
Dave Davies
And she's carried that painful memory for all these years.
- [20:00]
Noah Wyle
That's 35 years that's been in there. Came out last Sunday.
- [20:04]
Dave Davies
We're gonna take another break here. We are speaking with Noah Wylie. He's an executive producer, writer and star of the new Max series the Pit, which is streaming now. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH air.
- [20:18]
Unknown Speaker D
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- [21:39]
Unknown Speaker E
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- [22:11]
Dave Davies
The next clip I wanted to play is a painful moment in the emergency room where a young child has died and in this case, she drowned, I think after jumping into a swimming pool to try and save her sister who survived, right?
- [22:24]
Noah Wyle
Yes.
- [22:24]
Dave Davies
Right. So after the child dies, you gather the medical students and residents into a room for a moment. And let's Listen to what you say.
- [22:34]
Noah Wyle
That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases, so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do? I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans. And day one, I got a kid, five year old boy, accidentally shot by his brother playing with dad's gun. Worried he was gonna get in trouble right up until he coded and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night. I was walking and walking, walking. And I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery. And I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts and I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's what I need. I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings in patients throwing punches in chairs. Okay, everybody, let's get back to it. Just remember, the employee assistance program is available, as are Kiara and myself, if anybody needs to talk.
- [23:42]
Dave Davies
What an interruption. You wrote this scene, didn't you? This was your episode, right?
- [23:46]
Noah Wyle
Yeah, that was one of the two episodes I wrote.
- [23:49]
Dave Davies
Your speech about how to overcome a loss like this is interrupted. It's because they say patients are throwing chairs and fists and it turns out to be two women who are fighting because one has in the waiting room, I guess one woman has asked another woman to mask her coughing child and the other mom calls her a fauci zombie and slugs her. This is one of the many topical issues that you get into in this series, which weren't even around in er. I mean, people listened to their doctors. They didn't, you know, resist vaccines and masks.
- [24:21]
Noah Wyle
Then, you know, we had a bit of a mandate. Let's not be too biased. You know, the fastest way to get people to turn the channel is if they feel like we're preaching to them or we're being dogmatic. So what we wanted was accuracy and realism. We wanted to just be presentational with what emergency rooms look like. I wrote that episode and I couldn't resist just taking one stance, which I thought was fairly benign, which is to talk about the efficacy of masks in cutting down the transmission of disease and germs, which shouldn't be a political statement and shouldn't even be called into question. And yet it has been the last couple years. And it's a great sort of metaphor for. For all the distrust that's been seeded between us and our Doctors. And it's really, I think, incredibly unfortunate. And I don't know if by the time this airs how much worse the situation is going to get, but there was so 20% of the NIH was just laid off. We're going to be seeing the tail of that decision making for years and years and years to come.
- [25:27]
Dave Davies
Yeah. And you do have an episode later about a measles outbreak.
- [25:31]
Noah Wyle
Well, that was what was so funny. We wrote these episodes almost a year ago. And so when we did a storyline about neurocystic circosis, we had no idea that RFK Jr. Was going to be diagnosed with neurocystic circosis. Nor did we think, when we did a measles storyline, that it was going to be as topical as it is right now. Nine months ago, it wasn't. But it wasn't hard to look into your crystal ball and see what was going to happen if vaccine rates continued to drop. And we live with an international community that travels all the time like we are as vulnerable as the next incoming plight.
- [26:06]
Dave Davies
You know, one of the things that I like about the show is that it is set in a real place. It's in Pittsburgh, and we're in Philadelphia. I've traveled around Pennsylvania a bit, and if you listen carefully, you can hear a lot of Pittsburgh stuff. I mean, Primonti sandwiches, which is a thing there. And when the charge nurse breaks up this fight between the two women, there's this moment where she says, what are you doing? What are you doing? Where do you think you are? This ain't Philly. It's a hospital. I really appreciated that.
- [26:34]
Noah Wyle
Oh, I'm glad I've gotten some mail from Philly that didn't appreciate it. I meant it as sort of a compliment because when I grew up, I grew up, I'm from la, and, you know, when the Lakers would play the Sixers or when I would see Rocky or the Broad street bullies, like, you guys were tough. They were tough.
- [26:51]
Dave Davies
Yes.
- [26:52]
Noah Wyle
So I just thought that's almost an homage to Philly to say the tougher of the two.
- [26:57]
Dave Davies
One of the interesting storylines in the pit involved the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which had been established by a group of black men in Pittsburgh. I believe it's really the first kind of 911ambulance services in the nation. And one of the patients, I guess, is a veteran of that. You want to tell us how that got into the story?
- [27:20]
Noah Wyle
Well, it actually circles back to what you mentioned before about trying to put as many details about Pittsburgh into the show. And in doing Our Pittsburgh research, we came across this incredible story that is now starting to get told about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which was a program started by Dr. Safer, who invented CPR, where he recognized that up until that point, if you lived in any neighborhood and you needed to go to the hospital, you had to call the police. The police would come and pick you up and you went into a paddy wagon and they took you to the hospital. But if you lived in the black neighborhood, that didn't happen. So the mortality rate in the black neighborhoods was just terrible in the late 50s and early 60s. And so this was an attempt to train high school, college age young black men in life saving techniques for the first time, deploy them in the field with that training and ambulances that could go to these neighborhoods and pick up people and bring them back. And it was the very first ambulance service, the very first 911 system in the country. It was incredibly successful. The mortality rate dropped considerably, and it got the attention of all of the city fathers who looked at this and thought, my goodness, what a great program. We should fire all these young men, replace them with white drivers and make this a national standard, which is what happened. And all those original drivers lost their jobs. Some of them stayed in health care and worked in health care and actually got to meet a couple of the surviving members when I was in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago. And so we brought in a patient who was depicting a guy who had been one of the original drivers. So we could just shed a little light on, you know, one of the.
- [29:01]
Dave Davies
Other things that you see in the series depicted is, and I think this was the kid who died of the fentanyl overdose. And the parents, once they come to terms with the fact that he is brain dead, agree to let him become an organ donor. And then when he's wheeled out, when the son is wheeled out to start his journey, the whole staff line up in honor of this contribution. It's an honor walk, I guess, is what you call it, right?
- [29:29]
Noah Wyle
Yes.
- [29:29]
Dave Davies
That's a real thing, right?
- [29:30]
Noah Wyle
That is a real thing. And I've seen films of it done. And it's just as moving as we depicted it, if not more so in real life. It's really beautiful.
- [29:42]
Dave Davies
Gonna take another break. Here we are speaking with Noah Wylie. He's an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series the Pit, which is streaming now. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH air.
- [29:55]
Unknown Speaker D
Hey, it's A. Martinez. Even as the host of a news show, it can be hard to keep up with the headlines. That is why we make the Up first podcast. Every morning in under 15 minutes, we cover three major stories with context and analysis from reporters around the world. So you can catch up on Lo Quetta Pasando while getting ready, making the sayuno or going to work. So listen to the Up first podcast from NPR.
- [30:20]
Dave Davies
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity.
- [30:29]
Noah Wyle
On Throughline, we take you back in.
- [30:31]
Dave Davies
Time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging and evangelicalism.
- [30:37]
Noah Wyle
Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from npr.
- [30:43]
Unknown Speaker E
Donald Trump has an extraordinary approach to the presidency. At the NPR Politics Podcast, we're recapping the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term, from his early promises to his policy decisions and what it all means for you. Politics may not always make sense, but we'll sort it out together over on the NPR Politics Podcast.
- [31:05]
Dave Davies
Let's talk a little bit about your own life. You grew up in Los Angeles, Right. Your mom was an orthopedic head nurse and you said an or nurse, too. Right. You had two siblings. And then I guess your parents divorced when you were pretty young and both remarried and had other kids. So it was a this is where.
- [31:22]
Noah Wyle
The tree gets very fuzzy. I understand a lot of people.
- [31:26]
Dave Davies
What was your, your childhood like? What kind of kid were you?
- [31:29]
Noah Wyle
Eclectic, you know, I'm one of seven children spread over a couple of marriages at the most. We had six under one roof sharing a bathroom. That's a lot of kids at the table. That's a lot of vying for attention. We had all sorts of, you know, we've had academics, we've had athletes. And I was trying to find my identity in the midst of all that, and I ended up the storyteller.
- [31:50]
Dave Davies
Right. You went to a private school about 100 miles away from LA, I gather, and got interested in theater there?
- [31:57]
Noah Wyle
I did. I went to a boarding school, the oldest boarding school in California, a school called the Thatcher school, founded in 1889. And when I was there my sophomore year, I auditioned for a play, kind of as a joke, intentionally to go and kind of make fun of the process, and ended up getting cast. And I just was took to it. I enjoyed the process. More than that, I enjoyed somebody telling me that I was good at it after the show. And that feeling of being told I was good at something was enough to make me want to continue doing it.
- [32:29]
Dave Davies
Yeah, performing is fun. Getting praised for it is better yeah.
- [32:34]
Noah Wyle
Also, growing up in Los Angeles, an acting career didn't seem like a foreign concept. You know, I knew that roadmap fairly well, so it all seemed within grasp.
- [32:43]
Dave Davies
So you spent a few years, you know, I assume you were taking acting lessons. Right. And going to auditions. And was that, I mean, that stretch where you were going to auditions and getting small parts, what did it feel like at the time? Was it frustrating? It can be tough, right?
- [32:57]
Noah Wyle
Yeah. But I mean, in retrospect, how long was that period of time for me? So short, so short that it's almost ridiculous that I could have been impatient. The truth is I started when I was 19 and when I was 20 or 23, I did the pilot for ER and never looked back after that.
- [33:15]
Dave Davies
Right. Which was a huge success from the beginning. It was a big project for NBC. Well, so this was like what, 1994 when it debuted. Right, the series.
- [33:22]
Noah Wyle
So that's when shot the pilot. 93, 94.
- [33:24]
Dave Davies
So that's when, you know, there weren't all these videos on the Internet and all that stuff. And people watched network television and NBC, they had a two hour special, I think, on Sunday night and then the next episode was on Thursday night at 10, where it stayed for 15 seasons. Quite a remarkable thing. Were you ready for that kind of success? What was it like for you?
- [33:47]
Noah Wyle
I'm really incredibly grateful to George, Anthony and Tony. They were all 10 years older than I was and really took me under their wing like big brothers, to a certain extent. Sherry and Julian as well.
- [34:02]
Dave Davies
But we're talking about the cast of ER.
- [34:04]
Noah Wyle
We're talking about the cast of ER, George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Eric LaSalle. So they were mentors and tutors to me in the early years. And I don't know how I would have handled all the success and the workload if I hadn't had such incredible role models around me showing me how to be professional.
- [34:21]
Dave Davies
Did you trust it? I mean, when you have that kind of huge success as a young person, it can give you kind of an imposter syndrome. Like, do I really deserve this?
- [34:29]
Noah Wyle
No, I think that's very true. Well, the work was being recognized as groundbreaking and it lasted a long time. I took for granted how well run the show was and how smooth it was produced and how well cared for I was in that ecosystem. And then I spent the next 15 years trying to recreate something that I thought was an industry standard without realizing it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And then I've been blessed by having lightning strike twice.
- [34:59]
Dave Davies
You stayed for 11 seasons. Right. By that point, most of the original cast had moved on. Right. And then you took a couple years off to have. Have kids. Right. And then came back for the last season.
- [35:10]
Noah Wyle
Yeah, I left and I called it a divorce with visitation rights. I left a certain amount of episodes in the balance, knowing that I wanted to stay part of the narrative. And also having had John Wells tell me that he wanted me to be part of the finale, that John Carter coming back to the emergency room as an attending seemed like a really lovely bookend to the whole experience from where the pilot began. So I wanted to be part of that.
- [35:32]
Dave Davies
Yeah. John Carter was your character who began as a med student. Right.
- [35:36]
Noah Wyle
Third year medical student, first day of his rotation in the emergency.
- [35:39]
Dave Davies
And over the course of the series, we see him mature, become a doctor, get stabbed and nearly die, become a.
- [35:45]
Noah Wyle
Drug addict, fall in love, almost become a father.
- [35:49]
Dave Davies
Yeah, A lot happens. You know, during the series run, you had a platform to connect with causes that matter to you, and you got connected with an organization called Doctors of the World that's distinct from Doctors Without Borders. You want to tell us about that relationship, what you did?
- [36:06]
Noah Wyle
Well, sure. During that period of time and subsequently, I was approached by a lot of different charities and organizations, a lot of them medical based, to use my celebrity to raise awareness or money for them. And I got very selective because you want to pick and choose, you want to make sure that when you go out and stump for something, it has some resonance in your own life and you can speak intelligently about it, passionately about it. And then I got approached by this group called Doctors of the World that was an American based version of Doctors Without Borders, which is French, that was doing frontline triage medicine in different war zones around the world. And I was really moved by it's a purely volunteer organization. Doctors GPs from America would go and volunteer their time to go halfway around the world and practice wartime MASH medicine in very harrowing circumstances. And I had an opportunity to go during the war in Kosovo and be in a refugee camp in Macedonia and watch firsthand the heroic efforts of these doctors trying to treat this refugee population. And came back really galvanized about helping this organization and ones like it do that kind of humanitarian aid. And it was catalytic for us doing the storylines in Darfur and the Belgian Congo that we eventually did on the show.
- [37:29]
Dave Davies
Right. You carried it into er. What kinds of things did you see in Macedonia? I mean, you weren't treating people, obviously.
- [37:34]
Noah Wyle
Well, I wasn't, but, you know, it was sort of an all hands on deck situation. There too, a bus would show up with, you know, maybe 50, 60 refugees of varying ages, mostly young children and old women, because any man that was of fighting age was fighting. So a lot of people had been on the road for a really long time. They were wearing everything that they could carry. So there was a lot of dehydration, dehydration and a lot of malnutrition and a lot of fear. And it began with taking people off buses and doing basic medical assessments. And then also there were lawyers and psychiatrists who would go and do interviews with the refugees and ask them about their experiences. And those became testimonials that were later used in the war crimes tribunal trials with Milosevic. But I saw in that moment the sort of hand in hand medical, psychological tandem treatment that was having an effect, both treating the body, but also treating the psychological damage of the trauma. And that led me to another organization called Human Rights Watch, which is a legal based advocacy group that does exactly that kind of work. They go around and they take testimony to try and effect social change. So those two organizations kind of defined 90s and early teens for me in terms of activism.
- [39:03]
Dave Davies
Have you stayed active in doctors in the world?
- [39:07]
Noah Wyle
It's been a long time since I've been in contact with them. I've been involved with a lot of other grassroots medical organizations over the years, Ones that do anything from feeding people in disaster zones domestically to international stuff. Obviously, the cutbacks in USAID and a lot of the NGOs funding that we're seeing are, are disastrous to the communities that I've become close with. And it's very, very troubling.
- [39:35]
Dave Davies
So what are your priorities today? As an activist?
- [39:39]
Noah Wyle
I tend to align myself with anything that involves human rights or civil rights. I'm right now extremely concerned about our healthcare system and its fragility to the next pandemic. I'm extremely concerned about the burnout rate of our practitioners and the overburdening that the nursing shortage and the boarding crisis is causing. You know, I can't express enough how interdependent we are as a population, how much we need each other. And yet it just seems like every day the seeds of division are being sowed to greater and greater degrees, and it's unsustainable. It really is.
- [40:22]
Dave Davies
Well, you have been renewed for a second season of the Pit, right? I mean, you've got your work there.
- [40:27]
Noah Wyle
Yes, yes. More bread and circus.
- [40:29]
Dave Davies
Well, I mean, it's not just that. I don't think.
- [40:32]
Noah Wyle
I don't think it is. I like to think that we're part of a lighthouse kind of light that's gonna keep everybody reminding everybody about what kind of country we really are at heart and how amazing the people that do this kind of work are. And that's the irony. You know, you can cut Medi Cal and you can take 80% of California's population off those rolls and you can kick people out of assisted living homes or out of old folks homes and you can force emergency room clothes. The practitioners will still take care of sick people. The aged will still be cared for. Children will still be cared for because these people won't let those patients fall between the cracks because that's who they are, which is why it's so infuriating to watch them be taken advantage of or worse, take it for granted.
- [41:17]
Dave Davies
Well, Noah Wylie, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been fun.
- [41:20]
Noah Wyle
Oh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you.
- [41:23]
Dave Davies
Noah Wylie is an executive producer, writer and star of the series the Pit, which is streaming on max. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan recommends reading from two witty women authors, one a long deceased legend, the other a debut novelist. This is FRESH air.
- [41:40]
Unknown Speaker D
Since Donald Trump took office in January.
- [41:42]
Unknown Speaker E
A lot has happened.
- [41:44]
Noah Wyle
The White House Budget Office ordered a.
- [41:46]
Unknown Speaker D
Pause on all federal grants and loans. The impact of the Trump administration's tariffs is already being felt in Trump's efforts.
- [41:54]
Noah Wyle
To radically remake the federal government.
- [41:57]
Unknown Speaker D
The NPR Politics podcast covers it all. Keep up with what's happening in Washington and beyond with the NPR Politics podcast. Listen every day at Planet Money. We'll take you from a race to make rum in the Caribbean.
- [42:09]
Dave Davies
Our rum from a quality standpoint, is.
- [42:11]
Unknown Speaker D
The best in the world to the labs dreaming up the most advanced microchips. It's very rare for people to go inside to the back rooms of New York's Diamond District.
- [42:21]
Noah Wyle
What you looking for? The stupid guy?
- [42:23]
Dave Davies
They're all smart.
- [42:24]
Unknown Speaker D
Don't worry about Planet Money from npr.
- [42:26]
Dave Davies
We go to the Story and take.
- [42:27]
Unknown Speaker D
You along with us wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:31]
Dave Davies
If you could use some humor right now, our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a couple of books she strongly recommends.
- [42:38]
NPR Host
As the saying goes, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And what better way to maintain stamina and mental equilibrium during tense times than a dose of Witness It. Two women writers, one a long deceased legend, the other a debut novelist, give readers reason to keep calm and smile on In My House. Every time the mail brings a dread notice from, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, one of us humans is bound to mutter, what fresh hell is this? If for nothing else but that line, Dorothy Parker is a demigod, but of course there's plenty else in her poems, short stories and surgical knife sharp reviews for magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Parker brought into being one of the signature voices of the 1920s, rye, risque and hard boiled, swaddled in a cocoon coat of humor. It's been said, rightly, I think, that Parker's wit can't be fully appreciated by reading her. You had to have been at one of those boozy Algonquin round table lunches to marvel at how quickly she whipped out one liners. But perhaps the closest we can come is reading her poetry, which, like so many works of the 1920s, is short. The Everyman's Library has just brought out a pocket edition of her work, culled from Parker's best selling collections, Enough Rope and Sunset Guns. A lot of her poems are rueful odes to how tough it was for a smart, celebrated literary woman to find love. So how fun to discover other lesser known poems that are sassier. Here's one called Fighting Words that veers away from female martyrdom. Say my love is easy had say I'm bitten raw with pride say I am too often sad still behold me at your side say I'm neither brave nor young Say I woo and coddle care say the devil touched my tongue still you have my heart to wear but say my verses do not scan and I get me another man. If Parker's voice embodies the wise, cracking ethos of the 1920s, the humor of British born novelist Camilla Barnes is more in the droll, psychologically astute tradition of a Barbara Pym novel. Barnes debut is called the Usual Desire to Kill. It's what two sisters here, Charlotte and Miranda, acknowledge that that's what they feel whenever they visit their eccentric, exhausting retired parents at their tumbledown farmhouse in rural France. Mum, a homemaker, is described by Miranda as looking like a piece of low slung Victorian furniture. Dad, a former philosophy professor, lives in his head. Here's Miranda talking about her father's way of relating to the ducks, cats, chickens and llamas who live on the farm. They were not pets. He didn't interfere in their lives in the same way he didn't interfere in his daughter's lives. He was just not very good at being interested in other living creatures, particularly if they only had two legs. The more legs the better, he would say. He would be happier living with a spider than with Mom. If the spider could cook a millipede would be paradise. The pair met in Oxford in the early 60s and married after their first real date resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. For more than 50 years they've been nattering at each other, sunk deep into a marriage that Miranda describes as a game of stubbornness versus pedantry. The constant pleasure of reading the usual desire to kill is Barnes unexpected language. A bed with a hard mattress is likened to sleeping on old toast. Dried eggs, which the father recalls eating during World War II, are said to have tasted a bit like dandruff. But as the story of their parents lives comes to the fore through old letters and other narrative devices, it's evident that much as Charlotte and Miranda have always felt unseen by their odd parents, they in turn don't really know those parents, not in full. None of us do. Given that we mostly only hear selective stories of our parents early lives, the sharpest humor is always grounded in some pain. Parker and Barnes both affirm that familiar truth. Reading these very different, very funny books boosted my spirits and lowered my tight shoulders.
- [48:01]
Dave Davies
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed poems by Dorothy Parker and the unyield unusual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky. He's spent years studying how democracies die. He argues that the Trump administration is pushing the US towards a 21st century form of autocracy where elections, opposition parties and independent media still exist but are weakened by the incumbent rulers abuses of power. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram. P R Fresh Air Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chala, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey. Nesper Ripper Ashorok directs the show for Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley. I'm Dave Davies.
- [49:15]
Unknown Speaker D
Climate change is drying up some water supplies and making others undrinkable. That's why Here and Now Anytime is covering the hunt for fresh water. From a pipeline in the Great Lakes to the science of desalination to extreme recycling that turns sewage into clean drinking water. That's Here and Now Anytime, a podcast from NPR and wbur.
- [49:37]
Unknown Speaker E
Having news at your fingertips is great.
- [49:39]
Unknown Speaker D
But sometimes you need an escape. And that's where Short Wave comes in. We're a joy filled science podcast driven.
- [49:46]
Unknown Speaker E
By wonder and curiosity that will get you out of your head and in touch with the world around you. Listen now to Short Wave, the science podcast from npr.
- [49:59]
Unknown Speaker D
On Trump's terms. We have followed the first hundred days of this administration.
- [50:03]
Noah Wyle
Tariffs very strongly.
- [50:05]
Unknown Speaker D
Work a trade war, get ready Elon Musk and Doge. We will make mistakes. Deportations, litigation.
- [50:10]
Dave Davies
I don't know who the judge is.
- [50:12]
Noah Wyle
He's radical left.
- [50:13]
Unknown Speaker D
Those first hundred days are coming to a close, but the pace of the news will likely continue. Follow NPR's coverage of President Trump trying to do things no other president has. On Trump's terms from NPR.