Summary
The Pitt remains as effortlessly brilliant in Season 2 as it was when it debuted, at least if the first hour of the latest shift is anything to go by.
Some TV shows get a bunch of attention and awards because of hype, or because they’re arriving at exactly the right time at the forefront of some new prevailing trend or another. But some TV shows get a bunch of attention and awards because they’re expertly made on every level, and The Pitt is one of those. Nothing about it is especially novel; even the real-time gimmick has been done plenty of times before. But it just drips with quality and expertise and watchmaker-precise craft. And Episode 1 of Season 2 – the new shift starts at 07:00 A.M. – reassuringly suggests that the award-winning HBO hit hasn’t lost a single step during its hiatus.
Nothing has changed, either. The rhythm and pace are the same. Noah Wyle’s Robby is still our guide through the emergency department of The Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (PTMC). The faces we got used to seeing in Season 1 are all (mostly) back. There are brutal injuries and medical procedures immediately, but nobody’s especially phased by them, nor by the little girl with suspicious injuries, or the baby that someone abandons in the bathroom. These are people who have learned to expect the unexpected.
But some things have changed. AI is creeping into the emergency department, and Robby is trying to creep out. This is his last shift before a three-month sabbatical, and his replacement, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), is at the forefront of all the cutting-edge newfangled ways of practising medicine that don’t exactly jive with Robby’s maverick, laid-back approach. There’s a conflict between these two and their contrasting methods on the near horizon, I feel sure, but there’s plenty more of the season to get into that. For now, Al-Hashimi mostly just follows Robby around to get a sense of how he works, while throwing out suggestions for campaigning against PTMC being jovially – and accurately, in Robby’s estimation – referred to as “The Pitt”.
For his final shift, Robby has picked a doozy – the Fourth of July. Like Season 1, Season 2 of The Pitt will unfold in real-time across 15 hours, so even though Episode 1 mostly confines itself to patients with random injuries and old folks discovered during the morning checks at retirement homes, you can virtually guarantee there’s going to be some nasty firework business in the near future.
In the meantime, a lot of this premiere is about letting us see where everyone we recognise is at after the first season finale. Dana is largely unchanged, Mel is even more adrift than usual after being named for the first time in a malpractice lawsuit, something that is apparently a rite of passage but to her seems like the world is trying to swallow her up, and Samira’s phone keeps going off (it’s her mother).
But some of the changes are more significant. Whitaker is now a resident, mentoring two students, and seems to be morphing into Robby himself. There’s a very nice throwback bit when a patient from the nursing home with a DNR passes peacefully away, and Whitaker mandates a moment of silence while Robby, without his knowledge, watches from the doorway. Langdon is also back, but Robby is, admittedly, a bit less proud of him. He’s back from a period of rehab and is on an apology tour, confessing to repeat alcoholic patient Louie that he stole his medication. He takes the news pretty well, but Robby is going to be harder to convince.
It’s only “7:00 A.M.”, but we already have a handful of cases to occupy our attention. There’s a grumpy dude with a possibly broken wrist and a potential head injury who McKay is trying to treat; at the moment, it’s a little unclear what his injuries even are, but what’s for certain is that he doesn’t want to be there. There’s also a little girl brought in by her father’s new-ish girlfriend, who has a cut on her chin and a litany of other, older injuries that indicate potential abuse. Her urine sample is full of blood, which could indicate kidney damage caused by whatever left the giant bruise on her lower back or – gulp – vaginal damage. I’m not looking forward to this one developing.
Some cases are a bit lighter, or perhaps won’t be returned to – a nun with conjunctivitis offers incredibly believable looking make-up, but little narrative interest, and a very nasty-looking dislocation seems to be there just get a wince out of the crowd. But I’m already dreading the old lady with Alzheimer’s being reunited with her husband, who I’m pretty sure was the DNR patient that Whitaker held a vigil for earlier, and I suspect we’ll see a bit more of the very dirty unhoused man whose smell is so pungent that it clears out half the ED.
And then there’s the baby. Whatever’s going on there seems to deeply unsettle Al-Hashimi, whose by-the-book attitude may very well be tested by whatever those results say. We’re none the wiser until next week, though. Welcome to another shift at the Pitt. We’re all in it together.
