This article contains light spoilers about plot points of The Pitt season two, premiering in January.
The first thing I see are the scrubs, waiting for me on the golf cart. I’ve just checked into the Warner Bros. lot, site of the immersive 18,000-square-foot set for The Pitt, HBO Max’s Emmy-nominated medical drama. Currently in production on season two, the show favors a comprehensive, 360-degree filmmaking style, wherein crew members or background actors might find themselves accidentally passing through a shot. Anyone hanging around for the day must blend in so as not to disrupt the flow. We drive from the WB gate to the production offices, where I change, then head to stage 22 and walk inside. It’s a hot day in Burbank, but the California sun fades like a distant memory as the cool AC and fluorescent lighting of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center take instant effect.
The vivid realism is palpable, but one reason why The Pitt has caught on so strongly. The 15-episode first season, which aired this past winter and depicted an especially chaotic day inside the hospital (with each episode covering about an hour), evolved into a streaming phenomenon, ranking among the top shows on Nielsen’s ratings charts and cultivating a rabid online fanbase. Starring ER’s Noah Wyle as a senior attending physician grieving the loss of his mentor, The Pitt recalled beloved medical dramas of a past TV era while forging boldly ahead, poignantly speaking to the perilous state of American healthcare post-Covid and spotlighting both the everyday heroism and the human flaws of the medical workers keeping the system afloat.
Created by R. Scott Gemmill, the show is up for 13 Emmys, including for best drama and best actor (Wyle), a major achievement that was celebrated by the cast and crew while they’d just started getting to work on season two—which will be set approximately 10 months after season one, over Fourth of July weekend. In other words, they went back to work under very different circumstances. “Last season, I came in with about a month’s notice, moved to America for the first time, had no idea what was going on,” says Shabana Azeez, who plays the wide-eyed medical student Dr. Javadi. “So this time, people looked familiar. Maybe they looked prettier to me because I loved them already.”
“Will the show have enough dramatic engine and built-in aggregate tension—and will the characters be just as gripping as what we gave the audiences last year? I hope so,” Wyle tells me from The Pitt’s waiting-room set, which is empty for the day. “You can’t do a major catastrophe every season without it feeling like a hospital is not plotted in reality. Hopefully, it’s the characters, the interactions, the behaviors, the nobility—the quotidian detail of the show that people really responded to.”
Inside this hospital, I’m first shuffled into video village. Typically on a set, this means going to a faraway room where crew members watch takes and give notes over headsets. Not here—it’s a makeshift system going from zone to zone (whichever is both unoccupied and safely out of the filming range), with the director John Cameron, writer Cynthia Adarkwa, and others crammed together. A “rate your pain” chart and a masking policy sign hover above us, lest we forget this room is usually used for fictional patient evaluations. They’re early in the process of shooting episode four, beginning the day with a long dialogue scene, the cameras roving between simultaneous conversations. The Pitt moves fast, but you also see the actors taking advantage of the authenticity of their space. Their movements are fluid from take to take.
“The set is the secret hero,” says Katherine LaNasa, a longtime character actor who was just nominated for her first Emmy for her portrayal of the indefatigable Nurse Dana. “It’s why the acting seems so good. You can actually really live in it.”
It’s almost torture to be a fan of The Pitt and watch a juicy scene like this out of context. At one point, Dana asks Wyle’s Dr. Robby if he’d like to pull Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) out of triage to help him out. “We are doing just fine without him,” Robby replies. This should pique any regular viewer’s interest, since season one ended with Robby refusing to forgive Langdon after discovering the young doctor had stolen doses of lorazepam and Librium. Season two takes place both on Langdon’s first day out of rehab and, Wyle tells me, on Robby’s last day at the hospital before taking a lengthy break.
What can Wyle tell me about what I’m watching, though? “Robby is going on a sabbatical tomorrow for three months on a motorcycle, and was really hoping not to see [Langdon] today—but something got screwed up in the scheduling, so they ended up overlapping,” says Wyle. “Langdon has walked the penitent road and he has done everything he needs to do to keep his medical license in check. He’s going to face his colleagues who may or may not know that he had an addiction problem. All of that is very commendable. But there’s a personal betrayal that Robby feels that is going to be even harder for him to get up and over on the other side of.”
Ball adds later, “In season one…[Langdon] is at the height of his confidence and at the height of his charm and his ability. And then he gets knocked good and thoroughly off of that.”
Other hints get sprinkled throughout this scene. Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) are playfully grilled about their dynamic as new roommates by Dr. Javadi. “We’re roomies, however begrudgingly it happened. There’s a lot of antics up ahead,” Briones later tells me. Howell adds, nervous about how much he can share: “They’ve spent 10 months together, so that can go one of two ways. We’re still roommates…!” There’s the revelation that new castmember Sepideh Moafi is playing someone who used to work at a Veteran’s Administration hospital—just as Taylor Dearden’s Dr. Melissa King did before she arrived at The Pitt. Connection, maybe? Who’s to say?
Finally, Dana is officially back. While LaNasa’s return has always been assured, the fact remains that season one ended with the ER’s charge nurse telling Robby she was planning on quitting. She was physically assaulted by an unruly patient and, like the rest of the staff, felt the emotional toll of responding to a mass casualty event. Those major incidents are addressed in the season-two production design, subtly and exactingly pulled off by the great Nina Ruscio. There’s new signage inside the hospital that says, “Aggressive behavior will not be tolerated,” while a plaque hangs honoring the victims of PittFest, the fictional music event where season one’s horrific shooting took place.
LaNasa felt freedom to fill in the gaps on how Dana processed the traumas of season one before making her return. “The guy punching Dana in her place where she has so much pride, it really ripped that from her—it was very humiliating,” LaNasa tells me. “I think it brought forth all of her grief, and so she had to deal with that. I imagine that Dana goes to her grief meetings now. And there are other new things that we’ll see in her.”
LaNasa speaks often of the set’s communal atmosphere, and it’s no joke. Between setups, I see Howell rapping to some improvised beatboxing with other young actors. Fiona Dourif, who plays Dr. McKay, says to Adarkwa as she rushes by, “I like your script! You have some great one liners!” At one point, Wyle breaks into a silly foot-tapping dance, making LaNasa hysterically crack up.
“He does that sometimes,” LaNasa says fondly of her costar. “He almost looks like he’s doing some kind of clogging or something. I don’t know what he’s doing. But we find the same things funny.” This sparks a memory. “Someone tried to set us up a long time ago,” she says. “The person kept telling me, ‘He’s got all this ER money’… I never said yes to it because it made me feel like a gold digger.”
Wyle approaches as LaNasa finishes up this story. “She’s still peddling that old tale?” he says with a smile. “It was a minute where we were both single. Many moons ago.”
A few notable actors are not on the set this particular July afternoon. Tracy Ifeachor has exited the show despite playing a leading role in the first season as Dr. Heather Collins. I ask Wyle if he’s feeling her absence, and he reminds me of the nature of making a hospital show. “I feel the absence of any character that we’ve become invested in no longer being with us…that’s certainly true of Tracy, and that’s certainly true of any character that’s going to rotate through here to keep this place looking like a place where people rotate through,” he says. “Someone said today, ‘I hope this show goes 10 years.’ I said, ‘Well, then I’m going to have to retire!’”
Also absent today is Shawn Hatosy, the veteran actor up for his first Emmy for his acclaimed recurring guest role as Dr. Jack Abbott, the overnight attending physician who returned to work early in season one to help with the deadly PittFest fallout. Hatosy appeared in five episodes total, and while there’s no word on the scope of his role for season two, he’ll be back. “I’ve heard snippets of what’s going to happen and it will be a surprise—I am really excited to see him on his feet again,” Hatosy tells me over Zoom. “I’m coming back a little bit later than maybe you expect, so I haven’t quite dug in yet.”
An alum of Southland and ‘90s films like In & Out, Hatosy came into The Pitt after a “low point.” He’d wrapped the crime drama Animal Kingdom and “was going through a bit of a crisis and a depression,” he says. “It was a lean time for me.” Dr. Abbott not only presented a “lifeline,” and a great new part, but a new way forward. “I was just hanging on to my youth, or trying to, and really worried about how I looked,” Hatosy says. “What is so surprising and special about Abbott is that people are responding to him, and it’s just a middle-aged guy who is not trying to be anything other than who he fucking is.”
The Emmy nomination makes him emotional as he reflects on it. “I didn’t realize how profoundly I was going to be impacted by this nomination because it just says that those people that I’ve been working with over this 30-year career are responding and paying attention and saying, ‘Hey, good job,’” he says. LaNasa felt similarly, as a TV mainstay going back 30 years, to her 1995 appearance on Seinfeld. “I thought maybe that this was for other people, but then I always saw women like Jacki Weaver or Margo Martindale or, back in the day, Olympia Dukakis—women who had these lovely, wonderful careers later on,” she says. “I was inspired by them. I thought, Well, maybe I’ll have my time. Maybe there’ll be a moment for me.”
For their younger costars, it’s been gratifying to see such industry stalwarts—also including Wyle, earning his sixth total acting Emmy nod but first since ER in 1999—receive such recognition. The Emmy news came during a morning on set for the cast and crew. “It was a really special moment and experience,” says Supriya Ganesh, who plays Dr. Mohan.
My afternoon at The Pitt goes from chatty to bloody. One half of the hospital set remains in a kind of limbo, outside of the camera’s view; background actors are reading novels by Rebecca Makkai and Viet Thanh Nguyen, scrolling their phones, napping on gurneys. One man in a hospital gown murmurs, “I have to pee so bad.” But the other side of the space gets into position for a truly gnarly sequence involving the arrival of a new patient reeling from a Parkour routine gone terribly wrong. Robby, McKay, and others trade rapid thoughts on how to handle the situation. Joe Sachs, the show’s writer-producer who also works as a real-life physician, leads the team in suggesting adjustments to ensure the injury and its treatment look just right. It’s all fake, sure, but the mood feels sufficiently severe.
Amid the intensity, the real world quietly hums in the background. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law by President Trump a few weeks before my arrival on set. The sweeping tax and spending bill included, among many other details, a significant 12% cut to Medicaid spending. The Pitt had tackled topics ranging from vaccination debates to teen pregnancy in its first season, and shortly after my time spent on the set of season two, creator R. Scott Gemmill revealed that the impacts of the bill would be explored in the show’s plot.
“I remember seeing a comment where someone’s like, ‘This is just another liberal BS show,’ and all I thought was, ‘Actually every emergency department has the exact same ideology around how medicine should be—talk to all emergency room workers and you’ll end up with the exact same worries,’” Taylor Dearden tells me after the news breaks. “With all the cuts, it’s just insane—if it’s a medical emergency, they go to a hospital, then they have to transfer, but they’re still not done with their care because it’s out of network. I take it as my character would hear the same news. It’s like, Oh God, it’s just going to make every shift harder. Cool.”
This all goes back to The Pitt’s potent relevance as scripted drama, presenting well-meaning, everyday people navigating an intractable system. They’re easy to root for because we know what they’re fighting for—and the closer it hits to home, the deeper it resonates. Wyle, who is also a writer and director on the show, wants to keep up. “A lot of things that are happening currently with healthcare, we are scrambling to try to figure out how to integrate—but it’s a challenge because the events are moving very quickly,” Wyle says. “We won’t be able to air these episodes for months. What will the world look like in all those months?” With The Pitt back on our screens, hopefully at least a little better.
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