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The strongest proof of that lately is the Max series “The Pitt,” streaming on Crave in Canada. 

It hasn’t had the weekly water-cooler buzz of hits like “Severance” and “The White Lotus” — in fact, it’s downright old-fashioned compared to those — but viewers have flocked to “The Pitt,” which has been renewed for a second season, with critics giving it a very healthy 97 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score. 

I wasn’t completely on board after sampling the first episode but went back for more after hearing the raves, and was won over by the show’s balance of propulsive medical plots and relatable human stories.

It’s the most “ER”-like show since “ER,” arguably the greatest medical drama of all time (a fact that hasn’t been lost on the estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton, which has sued Warner Bros., claiming “The Pitt” is an unauthorized “ER” reboot).

It helps that “The Pitt” stars Noah Wyle (who’s also one of its writers and executive producers), who played Dr. John Carter for almost the entire run of “ER” (1994 to 2009). In “The Pitt,” he’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the compassionate, capable head of the emergency department at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital.

He’s surrounded by a mix of student docs, residents and nurses who handle a wide variety of cases — some of them truly heartbreaking — during a single 15-hour shift, with each episode representing an hour. After a shooting at a music festival led to a frenetic all-hands-on-deck mass trauma in the penultimate episode , last week’s finale tied up loose ends with a deeply felt mix of laughs and tears, and the threat of one MVP’s departure (no, not Dr. Robby).

If “The Pitt” is the apex of the current crop of medical dramas, “Pulse” on Netflix is the nadir. 

One episode was all I could stomach of this “Grey’s Anatomy” wannabe, which frames its medical cases with  the yawn-inducing romantic entanglement of a young resident and her chief, whom she has accused of sexual harrassment.

But it’s not like there aren’t plenty of other doctor shows to choose from: this year has also given us “Berlin ER” on Apple TV Plus (a doc played by Haley Louise Jones flees personal problems to take over the emergency department in Germany’s putative worst hospital); “Doc” on StackTV (internal medicine chief played by Molly Parker has to restart her career after suffering amnesia in a car accident); “Watson” on StackTV and Paramount Plus (Sherlock Holmes’ physician sidekick, played by Morris Chestnut, solves medical mysteries while tracking nemesis Moriarty); and “The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call” on Netflix (veteran South Korean surgeon played by Ju Ji-hoon shakes up a struggling university hospital) plus new episodes of “Doctor Odyssey” on Disney Plus (Joshua Jackson plays a doc who heads the medical team on a cruise ship amid comedic and romantic subplots); “Brilliant Minds” on Citytv (authority-averse neurologist played by Zachary Quinto takes a last-chance job in a Brooklyn hospital); and “St. Denis Medical” on Crave (a head nurse, played by Allison Tolman, and her co-workers mine their dysfunctional workplace for laughs). 

And, of course, older medical series like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Chicago Med” continue to air. 

‘The holy trinity of procedurals’

The thing is, there’s a medical show out there for pretty much every taste. 

James Nadler, who teaches screenwriting and TV producing in the RTA School of Media at º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøMetropolitan University, says doctor programs are part of “the holy trinity of procedurals” alongside police and lawyer shows. But unlike some cops and attorneys, doctors are “the good guys, the white knights.”

“Doctors are always on the side of good because it’s always good to save someone’s life,” he said in a phone interview.

There are exceptions — the morally compromised plastic surgeons in “Nip/Tuck,” for instance — but “even the anti-hero is a hero in the medical world,” he added.

Nadler dates medical series as far back as 1937, to a movie called “Internes Can’t Take Money,” which featured a young doctor named James Kildare, previously the hero of a magazine story. That film spawned a string of “Dr. Kildare” movies in the late 1930s and early ’40s.

TV’s first medical series, “City Hospital,” debuted in 1951, and featured both a male and a female doctor as protagonists. 

And most everyone has heard of the TV version of “Dr. Kildare,” which premiered in 1961 and made a star of Richard Chamberlain, who died last month.

Nadler’s personal favourites include “ER”; “House” (2004), starring Hugh Laurie as a misanthropic but insightful physician; and “M*A*S*H,” the 1972 comedy-drama set in an army hospital during the Korean War. He has also been watching “SkyMed,” a soapy CBC drama about nurses and pilots who staff air ambulances in northern Manitoba. Its third season debuts May 15.

‘Someone will die’

That selection speaks to the flexibility of the medical series to adapt to a wide variety of milieus and characters, and to encompass not just dramas but comedies like “Scrubs,” Nadler said.

“If you watched television in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, 35 per cent of prime-time shows were Westerns. There are no (traditional) Westerns anymore,” he said, because “as we move further and further from the Old West, (they) couldn’t adapt to new audiences.” 

Medical shows, however, “are reflecting our society in a way that Westerns couldn’t … the important thing about ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is not the stories or the writing, but the way that (creator) Shonda Rhimes insisted on a diverse cast … and that was kind of a breakthrough.”

Take the Canadian drama “Transplant,” whose main character is a Syrian refugee and trauma surgeon restarting his career in a º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøemergency department. Or “The Good Doctor,” — a show I find annoying, by the way — whose lead is a surgical resident with autism in San Jose, Calif.

There’s also a universal familiarity about a hospital setting that appeals to both viewers and producers, Nadler said.

“All of us have gone to a hospital because a parent is having a medical crisis or a child is having a medical crisis. So it’s a world we all understand.”

He added, “If you need an appendectomy, in most Western countries the hospital’s gonna look pretty much the same” — which means a producer can more easily sell a medical show in foreign markets.

None of that would matter, of course, if not for the human stories inherent in the best doctor dramas.

“The Pitt” isn’t just a bunch of actors spouting medical jargon and performing fakes procedures; it’s a collection of believable, sympathetic characters — not just staff, but patients and their families — navigating emotional peaks and valleys during one very eventful shift. 

“The stakes are always high in a medical show,” said Nadler. “Those kinds of high stakes, that someone will die, it doesn’t get higher than that.”