Recently, when I tried to tally how many hours of my life I'd sunk into watching reruns of hospital shows, I realized (to my slight horror) that it might be on a par with the amount of time the average applicant spends studying to actually get into medical school. This is not entirely my fault -- I was raised with E.R. reruns as background noise thanks to my mom, a fellow med-TV devotee -- but by age 11, I was fully bought into the froth, fun, and occasionally frantic energy that accompanied our culture's collective obsession with Grey's Anatomy.

I was by no means singular in my teen-TV affections, also devoting plenty of time to rewatching episodes of Scrubs and House when I should have been doing my Earth Science homework. But it was Grey's Anatomy that really hooked me. Not only did I pick up some medical lingo from the show (go ahead, ask me what a DNR is), but the show's "endless sexual and romantic drama occasionally interrupted by medicine" vibe was what consistently made me tune in to see who Meredith was kissing in on-call rooms and, later, what on earth would happen with Denny's...ghost? Sorry, but I'm still not over that particular plotline.

My TV-watching tastes may have evolved a little over the last two decades, but when it comes to hospital shows, I've long thought the soapier they are, the better. That is, until I watched the first episode of The Pitt, Max's new emergency room drama, which has drawn praise from real-life doctors for hewing spookily close to their lived experience. While a grizzled, older Noah Wyle is obviously the hottest man alive, I don't think that's quite what's drawing me to the show. Instead, I'm finding myself obsessed with the way The Pitt spotlights real -- and, in far too many cases, life-threatening -- gaps within the health-care industry.