I’ve never loved medical shows. ‘The Pitt’ is different.

“I’m in,” repeat the doctors and residents at regular intervals on “The Pitt,” the Emmy-nominated HBO series set during a tumultuous day in a Pittsburgh trauma medical center. By that they mean everything from intubation to a spinal tap, but by the end of this 15-part series—one episode for each hour of the shift overseen by the good-hearted but quietly anguished Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle)—I felt like these medics were also talking about the way “The Pitt” overcame my resistance and pierced my heart.

Why the resistance? I’ve never been one for medical shows, for one thing, and “The Pitt” often feels like it’s aiming to be the medical show to end all medical shows, with blood and guts to rival a slasher film and enough technical jargon to fill reams of paperwork. What’s more, the show’s writers—led by creator R. Scott Gemmill, a veteran of “JAG” and “ER”—are not shy about using this stage of teeming humanity as a platform for tidy moral dramas and timely political points. At times I could see the wheels turning a bit too clearly. This resident needs a hard lesson in humility, that intern surprises the veterans who mistrust her, and patients roll in as if to illustrate a raft of hot-button social issues: vaccine hesitancy, domestic abuse, fentanyl-spiked drugs, medication abortion, incel rage, human trafficking, a misgendered trans person….

But the show is meticulously well made, and there’s no arguing with competence—indeed, that’s practically the thesis of “The Pitt,” which wants to bear witness to the everyday heroism of these beleaguered sawbones. There’s a neat and gratifying symmetry in the way the show’s makers, including the actors, have risen to the occasion, as if the sprawling urgency of the situations they’re play-acting were real and every choice mattered. That kind of conviction can’t be faked, and on the level of emotional realism, “The Pitt” is a triumph.

Everyone here has upped their game, no one perhaps as much as Wyle, who also serves as an executive producer. The fresh-faced John Carter of “ER” has grown up into a bearded quasi-rabbi with kindly crow’s feet and an avuncular twinkle, but those plaintive brown eyes don’t lie: He’s in turmoil. The long hours and heavy losses tell on his body. While Wyle is strong at hitting the obvious highs and lows the role requires of him, his most haunting moments as Dr. Robby come later in the series, well after the worst of the day’s horror and trauma has subsided, as he stares somewhat blankly in a medical mask at a surgery in progress. Worse than burnout, this is a dark night of the soul.

I think this is where “The Pitt” touched something deeper for me. I had rolled my eyes, honestly, at some of the turns of the plot, particularly ones involving a hotshot intern, Santos (Isa Briones), whose brash iconoclasm is too often rewarded with victories that seem to come more from the TV writers’ room than from the show’s emergency room. And I was on guard against the show’s obvious time bomb: In the first episode, Dr. Robby’s colleagues are startled that he’s shown up for work at all, because today, wouldn’t you know, is the fourth anniversary of his losing a beloved mentor to Covid-19, right there in a pediatric room with colorful animals on the wall.

But that mentorship backstory has more heft than I’d imagined. When an elderly postal worker named Willie, wheeled in with a broken pacemaker, shows surprising knowledge of the medical procedures being used on him, the doctors question him. It comes out that Willie was also taught by Dr. Robby’s late mentor, Dr. Adamson, as part of the Freedom House experiment, a real-life initiative in late 1960s and early ’70s Pittsburgh that deputized the first EMTs and revolutionized ER practices. In this moment, the show’s didacticism and drama intersect gracefully.

The emotional breakdown promised by that opening “today of all days” premise, though it does arrive, also takes on disarming dimensions. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the climactic turn in the series comes in episodes 12 and 13, as the casualties of a mass shooting at an outdoor music festival pour in and the ER is transformed, in the words of one attending doctor, into a “MASH unit.” The grueling, gore-soaked scenes that follow are unsparing and unsentimental, but they powerfully communicate the show’s central message: that the matter-of-fact medical derring-do our lives can literally depend on shouldn’t be taken for granted. These episodes are also a master class in one of the oldest bits of storytelling advice: Show, don’t tell.

Of course, “The Pitt” also tells. A grumpy hospital flack shows up at inopportune times to berate Dr. Robby about the bottom line and “patient satisfaction scores,” which in turn gives him the opportunity for mini-rants about being understaffed. At one point, after the wizened charge nurse is sucker-punched by a disgruntled patient, the other nurses gather to inform Dr. Robby, in dialogue straight from a news headline, “Violence against hospital workers is a national problem, and it’s only getting worse.”

Elsewhere the telling is more in teaching-hospital mode. If the constant stream of patients provides the writers a readymade carousel of literal life-or-death drama, the presence of newbie interns and residents learning the ropes also gives ample opportunities for “this is why we do this” exposition. Much of this is illuminating and demystifying. I was perhaps most struck to learn that, at least in this fictional trauma center, the doctors gather for a moment of dignified silence when a patient has died. In the midst of a show overflowing with action and chatter, not to mention the persistent bleeps and bloops of medical machinery, a bit of reflective silence is welcome.