Making extras matter too
This is from a NYT feature on The Pitt’s second season:
Every background performer you see,” R. Scott Gemmill, the program’s showrunner, said recently, “is a patient on a specific health journey that will be taken to the bathroom at a certain time, be fed at a certain time, go to CT or X-rays or the lab at a certain time. So it’s a second unit running in the midst of our main unit. It gives it this incredible texture and depth.”
As a fan of The Pitt, I found this nugget fascinating. You hardly think of the actors cast as extras in a typical show. They are there to add some semblance of realism to the scene. In this show, however, these extras have been used to not just bring in realism, but also to create a richness to mirror real-life.
The takeaway for me is how by paying attention to the small details, big things can happen in art.