Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Pitt” Season 2, Episode 1.
“The Pitt” took Hollywood by storm last year as it introduced a new brand of prestige TV in a familiar package, with a serialized 15-episode medical drama with compelling characters and attention to the issues plaguing the healthcare industry that won over both fans and critics.
The critical acclaim, which was solidified as the Noah Wyle-led series took home the Emmy for best drama series last September, might’ve urged another series to go bigger in its second season. But creator R. Scott Gemmill and EP John Wells didn’t want to change the format that fans fell in love with in Season 1, opting to lean in further to the high-pressure but grounded storytelling the HBO Max show had already established.
“People were saying, ‘Well, are you going to go crazy? Is it going to be bigger and crazier?’ And we said, ‘No, it’s going to be true to the characters and true to the original concept,” Gemmill told TheWrap. “It was really just more of the same … taking what we established and set into motion and following it through in terms of where these characters go in their lives.”
If anything, Wells noted moving into Season 2 with such an established fan base enabled them to ease off explanations of the show’s concept — showing 15 hours of one day in one season, with each episode playing through an hour of a tenuous ER shift. “At the beginning of the first season … a little bit more attention needed to be paid to really convincing everyone of what it was we were doing, so it’s a relief to be able to just do the storytelling [and] just start at another day,” Wells said.
The day Gemmill and Wells landed on was the Fourth of July, ten months after the events of Season 1, which was far enough away to enable the return of Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) following his rehabilitation program, explaining that the character couldn’t return as a doctor until he “took care of his drug addiction.” It’s also the last shift before Wyle’s Dr. Robby takes off on a sabbatical.
Within the time elapsed from the first shift captured in the freshman season, there’s been some updates in each of the characters work and personal lives, which is explained in some cases blatantly — like Supriya Ganesh’s Dr. Mohan dropping in Episode 1 that she accepted a spot at a program in New Jersey — while others are left for the audience to piece together across the season in an effort not to “overplay” that catchup, per Wells.
“You go to work and you don’t spend the whole time talking about the last months of your life every day when you see the same people,” he said. “I think it’s very respectful to the intelligence of the audience … that we don’t have to spell these things out, and part of the joy of it is watching and figuring it out, ‘Oh, now I understand what’s happened this person or that person’ as it comes forward without a bunch of exposition.”
As for those developments among the main cast, the next beats for each character came organically to the writers, with Gemmill saying, “When you create these characters, especially when they’re so well embodied by our actors, they take on a life of their own … it’s less pulling the characters with your writing as it is following the characters in terms of what we’ve put in motion,” likening the characters to wind-up toys.
For Robby, who spent last season tortured by grief from his mentor’s death during COVID that only compounded after a mass shooting, Season 2 explores how he’s since processed his PTSD. But he’s still thoroughly tested in Season 2 when he comes face-to-face with Langdon, who is eager to make amends for his betrayal upon his return.
Gemmill and Wells also amped up stressors and conflict for Robby by introducing Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a new attending physician taking over for Robby during his sabbatical who comes in hot to the Pitt with a number of proposed changes. “The ER — it’s Robbie’s baby … He’s large and in charge,” Gemmill said. “The idea is, what happens if they bring in someone else who’s at the same level as him, but has different ideas of how to do things?”
One of the instances that Robby and Al-Hashimi butt heads is with incorporating AI into charting and other processes in the ER, of which the team discussed the pros and cons with experts in the field as they incorporated the topic into Season 2.
“It’s so new to, certainly new to us [and] new to medicine and very much new to the emergency department,” Gemmill. “Like [any other] new technology, it has great benefits potentially, but it also has setbacks. And like anything new, there are people who embrace change, and there are those who are going to resist with kicking and screaming.” Gemmill noted the AI storyline sparked conversations in the writers’ room amid concerns the new technology could replace writers, but he said he’s “not too worried about that yet.”
Like last season, Gemmill and Wells also worked with medical professionals —including two emergency room physicians in the writers’ room, four doctors on the set and a number of nurses who work on the show in between their shifts — to extensively research various subjects plaguing the medical industry that could potentially become storylines.
“It’s what they talk about to us, and then that becomes the stories, because that’s what our character is going to be talking about too,” Wells said. “Rather than trying to find what’s the subject that might be in the news, it’s what’s the subject that the medical professionals that we deal with are concerned about or talking about now, a lot of the times those things coincide.”
Just as last season confronted violence against healthcare workers, the after-effects of COVID and “the PTSD that so many of the healthcare workers are suffering from that period of time” as well as violence against women, among a handful of other social issues, one topic that comes to light this season is changes to the Affordable Care Act, which could leave 8-10 million additional people uninsured. Wells notes the shifts are “going to have a profound effect, not only on rural hospitals, but urban hospitals,” and marks “a grave concern for the medical people are working in the field.”
After exemplifying violence against healthcare workers with the attack on Katherine LaNasa’s nurse Dana, Season 2 sees the guardrails put in place by both Dana as well as the hospital to protect its workers. ” It’s changed her in some ways that she was, she took time off and now she’s back,” Gemmill said. “She’s a little bit more guarded, and … she’s a little bit more protective of her staff, even though she always was.”
While last season addressed the issue of gun violence through a mass casualty storyline that took over several episodes, the creators revealed Season 2 won’t build toward another catastrophe for the fear of it becoming its own trope.
“We just came up with something to help extend the doc hours, but the truth is, even a doctor who’s working 12 hours, or a nurse is not there for 12 hours,” Gemmill said. “They’re there for about 15 because they’re charting and all the things that have to be done afterwards.”
Amid the success of “The Pitt,” HBO Max ordered two new drama pilots that would hope to emulate the longer episode order, modest budgets and annual release of “The Pitt,” which Wells notes might help satisfy the thirst of audiences to connect to their shows more often and for longer periods — if they provide a compelling story.
“Audiences really do want to have that connection to characters and see them again, but the narrative technique, the way in which you’re going to tell that story — whether it’s a family drama, whether it’s a police drama, lawyer drama show, a show about people going on vacation, whatever it is — it’s really just about the quality, the execution, the cast,” Wells said. “Will it be compelling enough for the audience?”
“The Pitt” Season 2 releases new episodes Thursdays 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on HBO Max.
