Episodes of the lauded first season of medical drama The Pitt are still rolling out on HBO, but that hasn’t stopped its producers from teasing details from season two. As with The Pitt‘s first 15 episodes, the second run of the Noah Wyle-led show will focus on an explosive day in the ER—and this time, it’s a day that happens every year.
As you likely know, the premise of The Pitt is a simple one: Using a real-time format familiar to fans of 24, the show depicts a single shift in the emergency room of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, with each episode covering one hour. As Vanity Fair reported last month, show creator R. Scott Gemmill had initially intended the series to depict a standard 12-hour shift in the ER, but after the network requested 15 episodes, The Pitt‘s writers were prompted to raise the stakes.
“The question was, what would keep people around for another three hours?” asks emergency physician Joe Sachs, who co-wrote the show’s pivotal 12th episode with Gemmill. While the previous 11 episodes showed a dramatic but hardly unusual day in a big-city hospital, the last three show the aftermath of an increasingly common but still shocking event: a mass shooting at an area music festival.
The season one finale of The Pitt, which will presumably round out that story arc, will air on April 10. But how can its second season top what’s been some of the most intense, adrenalin-filled, and exhausting (do you have to go to bed right after watching? Because I do!) hours of television in recent years? Apparently, it’s by tackling one of the most-dreaded days for any ER staffer, the Fourth of July.
Speaking at Deadline‘s Contenders TV event Saturday, Gemmill revealed that The Pitt season two will be set ten months after the current season, “over a Fourth of July weekend.” Like season one, it will run 15 episodes, and will follow the same real-time format.
The choice of July 4 probably wasn’t made because some studio head demanded that Wyle’s Dr. Robby deck himself out in some Kid Rock at the White House-level garb. According to the Pew Research Center, visits to the emergency room spike on July 4 and 5, hitting the “highest daily numbers in the entire year.”
The reason for this uptick is primarily firework injuries, with Pew reporting that “more than half of all the fireworks-related injuries Americans sustain each year occur during the first eight days of July.” Does that mean The Pitt‘s second season will include scenes that rival the first episode’s iconic degloving (click if you dare)? How can it not?
Pew also notes that swimming-related injuries hit highs that weekend, though the series painfully explored the dangers of pools in season one. But ommatophobics should probably start bracing now, as Pew reports that eyeballs are the most commonly injured body part during that weekend, suggesting that safety glasses and fireworks fanatics are unmixy things.
So, an abundance of stomach-churning options for The Pitt‘s hard-working effects team, which might be why Wyle encouraged experienced crew members to join team Pitt. “We’re calling all pros,” Wyle said Saturday. “We want people who are good with props and who are used to working in a company, with an ensemble. We want creativity. We want passion. We don’t want ego coming to play. We have tremendous people showing up excited.”
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