The second season of The Pitt opens with its emergency physician hero, Michael "Call me Dr. Robby" Robinavitch, riding a motorcycle on a bridge across one of Pittsburgh's rivers. The city scenery looks beautiful. "Better Off Without You," by Pittsburgh band The Clarks, is blasting on the soundtrack. Robby isn't wearing a helmet — a foolish choice for anyone, but most of all for an ER doc, as many of the show's other characters will point out to him later — and he's rocking a pair of sunglasses as he races past an ambulance that's also on its way to Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.
Alan Sepinwall
So, yeah, The Pitt is feeling pretty damn cocky as it returns for Season Two. And why wouldn't it be? The medical drama's first season was a smash hit. It won five Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series and acting awards for Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa, and recurring player Shawn Hatosy. Season One expertly blended old-school broadcast network TV style procedural storytelling — Wyle and key behind-the-scenes personnel, including showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, worked together on ER in the Nineties and 2000s — with the more narratively complex serialized storytelling we've come to expect from 21st century dramas. (Each episode takes place over consecutive hours in the same hospital shift, unfolding in something close to real time.) And after two decades of TV seasons growing shorter and shorter, and gaps between them growing longer and longer, The Pitt's business model of producing 15 episodes each year is one that I'm hearing is likely to be imitated in the near future, and not just at HBO/HBO Max.
It was the best show I saw last year — multiple times, in fact. Its balance of unflinching realism regarding the challenges of modern medicine with competence porn made it enormously rewatchable. I quickly fell in love with many of the characters like Dr. Robby, still struggling with PTSD from Covid; LaNasa's superhumanly empathetic charge nurse Dana Evans; Taylor Dearden as sweet but anxious second-year resident Mel King, who the show implies is neurodivergent; and Supriya Ganesh as Samira Mohan, whose thoroughness with her patients frequently tested the patience of Dr. Robby. And the season's climactic arc, where PTMC was flooded with dozens of victims of a mass sooting at a local music festival, spectacularly demonstrated the skills of both its fictional doctors and its real-life cast and crew.