If you follow the HBO Max series, you know that season two is already a few episodes in and begins ten months later, on the 4th of July. Robby (Noah Wyle) meets the attending who will be taking over for him while he is on a three-month sabbatical. Two staff return from time away, and two medical students join the team. Already, from the start of the shift, the hospital is hopping. Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) is set to serve as interim senior attending. Baran promotes the use of AI-driven medical tools and tests them while supervising a procedure with Robby, Whitaker (Gerran Howell), and Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), assisted by new medical students James Ogilvie (Lukas Iverson) and Joy Kwon (Irene Choi). Patients in front of them include a homeless man and an abandoned baby. In the rush of it all, are medicos facing drug addiction (Patrick Ball’s Dr. Frank Langdon), and malpractice deposition (Taylor Dearden as Dr. Melissa “Mel” King). The season is off and running. Are you good to go for fifteen hours & fifteen episodes of the medical drama?
Noah Wyle touched on some situations to look for in Season Two when talking to Deadline. He says,
“We were looking to plot this 10 months into the future, so everybody could have had a little bit of time on the other side of that mass casualty event to absorb it. We wanted it to be on a busy holiday weekend. We wanted it to coincide with Dr. Langdon’s return from having gone through drug and alcohol rehabilitation, which takes about 10 months. There are all sorts of creative accidents that happen on the Fourth of July. You’ve got fireworks, you’ve got motor sports, you’ve got water sports, you’ve got all sorts of stuff going on.”
Admit it, part of the fun is seeing what shocking medical issues unfold. The other is getting invested in the characters. One big relationship to evolve in the sophomore year is the one between Robby & Langdon. Wyle states,
“Langdon really wants to be validated by Robby again, and Robbie really doesn’t want to have anything to do with Langdon. We think that it is because Langdon is the disappointment, you know, the student who betrayed him and lied to his face. And as the season progresses, you start to see that in some ways, Robby blames himself for Langdon’s behavior more than he blames Langdon, because he was the teacher, and it happened on his watch.”
Series creator and executive producer R. Scott Gemmill and fellow EP John Wells also spoke to Deadline.
DEADLINE: Robby looks a lot less burdened at the top of Season 2. Would you say that’s accurate?
GEMMILL: I wouldn’t say that he’s less burdened, but I think he’s projecting that. I think he’s as burdened [now], if not more so. As the season progresses, and the day goes on, you’re gonna see him unravel a little more, and this sabbatical of his becomes a concern for a lot of people.
WELLS: I think that he’s also excited, because he knows he’s leaving the next day. It’s like when you’re just getting ready to leave for a little while on vacation, you’re like, “Oh, I’ll get through this day.” Oh, boy, it doesn’t actually work out that way.
DEADLINE: So, we would be right to question whether or not this will happen for him?
GEMMILL: Well, that seems to be the sort of scuttlebutt around the ED, whether he’s really going to take the time off that he needs or not?
There are plenty more dynamics and cases to explore, as THE PITT is just a couple of hours into the shift. We hope these comments convince you to keep watching as the 15 hours unfold. Find THE PITT streaming on HBO Max with new installments each Thursday through April 16.
