The morning after The Pitt won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, its props team is pumping a hyperrealistic prosthetic uterus full of white vinegar. The cast and crew are shooting the season-two finale’s big trauma scene, an emergency C-section performed on a woman with no history of prenatal care who has spiraled into eclampsia. In the hall outside the treatment room where the scene takes place, a prop assistant lines up the key prosthetics: the uterus and attached umbilical cord, which will be filled and inserted into the patient’s prosthetic torso before being cut out again in the process of filming, and the silicone baby itself, lying in the kind of aluminum roasting pan you buy in a three-pack the week before Thanksgiving. As I watch, the makeup team slathers the baby with a mixture of whipped cream cheese and a proprietary red jellylike goop, then performs a birth in reverse, slipping the baby feet first into the slick, flexible uterine sac.
Noah Wyle, one of the series’ executive producers who also won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama Series the night before, stands off to the side nearby, watching my impressed face as the realistic baby disappears into the plastic uterus and the crew tops it up with the vinegar-based mock amniotic fluid. “Are you a mom?” he asks me. Yes, I say, I have two daughters. “What was it like when your kids were born?” I tell him I was fortunate that their births were nothing like this trauma scene. Wyle tells me about the anesthesiologist at one of his children’s births who got so distracted being in the same room as Dr. Carter from ER that Wyle began to worry about his accuracy with the epidural needle. Later, he shows me a split-screen image of himself: in a tux holding up the Golden Globe on one side and wearing scrubs and covered in fake blood holding the silicone baby aloft on the other. The two photos were taken 12 hours apart.
