Sorry, fans of “The Pitt,” you won’t be seeing Dr. Collins in Season 2.
Tracy Ifeachor, who starred as Dr. Collins in the first season of “The Pitt,” won’t be returning for the medical drama’s upcoming second season, TheWrap has learned.
While Season 1 saw Dr. Collins as a fourth-year resident at the teaching hospital, she won’t be at the shift in Season 2, an individual with knowledge told TheWrap.
Ifeachor appeared in the majority of the first season of “The Pitt” as Dr. Collins, who kept her pregnancy a secret from her co-workers at the hospital. Dr. Collins helped a number of patients in early episodes, notably including a 17-year-old girl (portrayed by Abby Ryder Fortson) who came to The Pitt seeking an abortion.
As the season progressed, fans also learned that Dr. Collins and Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch were romantically involved prior to the start of the series. Due to the real-time nature of “The Pitt,” fans only got to see a few hours in a single day of Dr. Collins’ life.
This day proved to be incredibly challenging. At one point in a mid-season episode, Dr. Collins suffered a miscarriage, choosing to largely keep it a secret from the rest of the staff. She eventually confided in Dr. Robby, who then told her in Episode 11 (“5:00 P.M.”) to take a personal day for the remainder of her shift.
“Go home,” Dr. Robby told her. “Turn off your phone, turn off the TV, pour a glass of wine, have a bath. Go to bed. And if you need anything …” he trails off.
As the season progressed, fans noticed that Dr. Collins took the advice to heart. After a mass casualty event at the music festival Pitt Fest nearly overwhelmed the hospital staff, many fans expected Dr. Collins would eventually make a late-season heroic return.
Once Ifeachor walked out that door, however, she never appeared for the rest of the season. Now, it looks like fans won’t see Dr. Collins return at all — at least for Season 2.
Wyle went on “The Watch” podcast in April to talk about the first season of “The Pitt” with hosts Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald. The hosts brought this absence up with Wyle, poking fun at the “turn off your phone” line in particular.
“I know Chris was particularly motivated by Dr. Collins’ Do Not Disturb functionality on her phone,” Greenwald said.
“Deep sleeper,” Wyle joked. “Deep sleeper, that Collins.”
When the hosts asked if any behind-the-scenes reasons existed to explain Dr. Collins’ permanent disappearance, Wyle noted that the absence further pushed Dr. Robby into the depths of his season-long spiral. Dr. Collins is far from the only person Dr. Robby loses as a support system by the end of the season.
“The whole end of the season is just removing bearing walls from Robby’s life,” Wyle said. “He leans so heavily on Collins and Langdon, and then you take them both away. He leans so heavily on Dana, and then she becomes compromised. Then his one last relationship, to Jake, is severed when he can’t save his girlfriend. It really was more of a, ‘Let’s take away all of this guy’s support system and have him out there.’”
“If she had been there, I think she would have been maybe one of those voices that could have reached him,” Wyle went on. “We didn’t want him to be reachable.”
