Stop Pretending You Need Another Prestige Drama. Watch “The Pitt.”

Entertainment is currently trapped in an escape room designed by a streaming algorithm: twelve platforms, forty-seven “must-watch” shows, and somehow every protagonist is a damaged genius who owns an enormous coat. My recommendation is to ignore the cinematic universe of sad billionaires and spend your evening in the emergency room.

Benny’s Picks

The Pitt — Max. This is the best network-style drama to hit streaming in ages, which is a sentence that sounds like it should come with a free tote bag. Set over one brutal shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department, it moves with the nasty, caffeinated rhythm of a real workplace: patients arrive, staff improvise, and nobody has time to explain the theme of the episode. Noah Wyle is excellent, but the real star is the show’s refusal to turn every trauma into a speech about healing. Sometimes the patient just needs a CT scan and everyone needs to stop yelling.

The Rehearsal — Max. Nathan Fielder remains television’s most committed freak, and I mean that as a compliment usually reserved for raccoons who learn how to open locked trash cans. His elaborate social experiments are funny, unsettling, and occasionally so emotionally precise you may want to hide behind a pillow. It is not “easy viewing,” unless your idea of easy is watching a grown man build a replica of a building to avoid having one difficult conversation.

Sinners — in theaters. Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie has atmosphere to spare, a pulsing sense of dread, and enough musical electricity to make you resent every film that treats its soundtrack like wallpaper. Michael B. Jordan is having a grand old time playing danger in duplicate, and the movie understands that monsters are always more interesting when they represent something besides “bad.” See it on the biggest screen you can find. Your television will not make the vampires less polite.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) by Japanese Breakfast — wherever you stream music. Michelle Zauner has made an album that feels like walking home after a party where you laughed too loudly and revealed too much. It is elegant, melancholy, and catchy without begging to be declared Important. Put it on when you want your sadness arranged beautifully, not cured by a podcast host.

Skip It

The Electric State — Netflix. It has robots, famous people, a huge budget, and the emotional texture of a hotel lobby. This is not a movie so much as a very expensive screensaver that occasionally remembers to have a plot.

Sleeper Pick

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin — Netflix. This documentary about a young gamer and the online community that knew him best is tender without being manipulative. It starts with pixels and ends somewhere painfully human. Bring tissues, but hide them under a blanket so the documentary does not win too easily.