“The Pitt,” which premieres Thursday on Max, is set in the emergency room of a Pittsburgh hospital, a posh and chaotic environment with smart teachers and eager students, where monitors beeped, the bereaved cried and the waiting room grew increasingly crowded.

There’s an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, the elephant in the trauma room: Is this a sideways reboot of “ER,” only in Pittsburgh instead of Chicago? The show’s creative team includes “ER” veterans – its creator is R. Scott Gemmill, and John Wells is an executive producer and director – and stars Noah Wyle, who is also an executive producer. It certainly seems to want to be “HE,” but that’s no great vice; Shouldn’t everyone want to be “HE”? But it has fewer ideas, fewer movements, less energy, fewer specifics. In the 10 episodes made available for review (out of 15), “The Pitt” neither redefines the pace of television nor pioneers a visual language.

Instead, it’s a perfectly decent medical drama with promising episodes further down the line. There are worse things, and having Wyle as the star and beating heart of the series is a big step. He plays the boss and leader Dr. Michael Robinavitch, known as Robby, who is having a hard day because it is the anniversary of his mentor’s death and the first day for a new group of students.

These newcomers appear to come not from the “ER” folder but from “Grey’s Anatomy”: Here’s the one whose mother is a famous surgeon (Shabana Azeez); Here’s the sad guy who’s nervous and loses a patient on his very first shift (Gerran Howell); and here is the cocky meanie who covers up a bad childhood (Isa Briones). These versions of Meredith, George and Alex would also benefit from a version of Cristina and Izzie.

The show’s trick is that everything takes place during a 15-hour shift, with each episode of the show following an hour in real time. In “24,” this gimmick provided the story’s underlying urgency; In The Pitt, the emergencies themselves provide the urgency, and the clock aspect only undermines the realism of the show. Most hospital shows feature an imposing administrator who periodically stops by to complain about budget problems and berate our heroes. This happens here too, but several times a day.

This day is also the most didactically valuable change in human history, as it gives our characters the opportunity to correct the gender of a transgender patient in the computer system; Support a mother who has no home and fears she needs help. identify a potential human trafficking victim; Combating fatphobia in medicine; address anti-Blackness in medicine, particularly as it relates to the treatment of sickle cell anemia; Providing tailored services to an autistic patient; reject scolding as a pedagogical technique; and inform viewers about the Freedom House Ambulance Service.

But damn, if it’s good, it’s good. Robby’s advice to an adult brother and sister struggling with their elderly father’s final hours struck me with its pertinent, tragic beauty. In another scene, a mother cries over the body of her brain-dead teenage son, and her cry is so harrowing and violent that all the other patients turn to look, triggering a brief spell of united compassion. A tertiary doctor’s enthusiasm for corny puns adds a humorous touch to later episodes. When a colleague criticizes Robby for giving a patient’s family false hope, he shrugs his shoulders. “Hope is hope,” he says.

And although The Pitt looks like ER, to a huge credit, it’s not really a revival or remake. (The estate of Michael Crichton, the creator of “ER,” disagrees and has filed a lawsuit. Warner Bros. Television, the studio that produces “The Pitt,” has said the lawsuit is “baseless.”) So many times in this era of reboots I’ve thought, “Just do another show” – that the “reboot” aspect was cowardly and beside the point, that the fight to recapture the magic is a miserable, fruitless endeavor compared to trying new to create magic. I’d rather watch The Pitt figure itself out than watch an ER revival that presupposes Weekend at Bernie’s.

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