A review of this week's The Pitt — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I'm living through a Fast and the Furious movie...
Alan Sepinwall
The Pitt was originally designed to produce 12-episode seasons, to mirror the exact length of the shift Dr. Robby and company work. HBO Max wanted 15 episodes instead. It's a choice I'm very much in favor of — make TV seasons longer! — but it means that the show's creative team has had to figure out excuses to have the day shift docs and nurses stick around three hours past the end of their shift. Season One did that with PittFest. (Frankly, they could have stretched things at least another episode or two with that had they wanted to.) To avoid the diminishing returns of a Mass Casualty of the Season format, this year things have been a bit more mellow in terms of cases, with the shift to analog record-keeping functioning as the writers' attempt to recreate some of that PittFest-level chaos.
As the clock turns to 6 p.m., we reach the last hour of the day shift. The cyberattack problems seems to be on the verge of resolving, and things are calm enough that both Princess and Joy don't feel troubled slipping out by the end of the episode. But the show can't just abruptly switch to following Abbot, Shen, Ellis, and the rest of the night shift crew for three hours(*). So without an overwhelming crisis, our 12th episode has to establish smaller reasons for everybody to work overtime.