Following the emergency room staff in the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center as the doctors handle drug overdoses, stab wound victims and more, “The Pitt” is unlike any other show I’ve ever watched, medical drama or not. Now, it’s back for Season 2, and if there’s one word to describe it so far, it’s this: unrestrained.
Jumping forward about ten months after the end of Season 1, protagonist Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) rides his motorcycle (helmet-less, I might add) to work on the morning of the July Fourth holiday, ready for his final shift before heading off on a sabbatical. Ready to take the reins as the attending doctor on the hospital floor is Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who’s in the emergency room early.
Coming into Season 2, I was worried that I would see a reduction in quality as the new characters introduced in Season 1 were no longer new. I needn’t have worried. Through the released episodes so far, “The Pitt’s” veterans seem different but the same, in a good way. Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell), whom we last saw as a fourth-year medical student, is now serving his first year as an intern and seems much more confident, leading the new rotation of medical students. The pace of the show hasn’t slowed down at all, either: Without closed captions, I definitely wouldn’t catch the blood pressure readings or medical terms used (Someone tell me what “V-fib” means, please!) whenever a new trauma patient wheels in. As the doctors and nurses handle one patient after another, viewers get no breaks in the action, making the medical procedures all the more intense.
Thankfully, the visuals are more than enough to make up for what’s lost in the terminology barrier. The sheer detail put into the crafting of injuries makes it almost difficult to keep watching instead of switching to a more peaceful show like “The Wire” — and yet my focus is still locked on the disgusting maggot-infested wounds or the volatile condition of motorcycle accident victims. Going into Season 1, I had no idea that the amount of gore per episode was comparable to “The Walking Dead” and “Dexter” — the degloved foot set the stage for me. Twenty minutes into Season 2, a gruesome depiction of open heart surgery, complete with a lateral opening of the chest and a prosthetic beating heart, proves that the makeup department has not slowed down at all.
To make things even more hectic than the blood already does, the format of “The Pitt” shoves the entirety of its exposition and drama into 15 hours. Since each season encapsulates a single hospital shift and each episode corresponds to one chaotic, jam-packed hour of that shift, tensions escalate as the story moves forward without taking any breaths.
Season 2 has one slightly large pitfall thus far, though: the new medical staffers. Compared to Season 1, where the doctors and nurses all had their own unique dynamics and personalities, Season 2’s fresh medical students seem a little cliché. The know-it-all likeness of newcomer medical student James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) does not bring the same
air of intrigue as that of Nebraska farmboy Whitaker or veteran combat medic and amputee Dr. Jack Abbott (Shawn Hatosy). Hopefully, we’ll get to see some kind of development in that wheelhouse soon to prove me wrong, since Ogilvie and Dr. Al-Hashimi are a little one-dimensional as of episode 4.
New episodes of “The Pitt” release weekly on Thursdays at 6 p.m. PST on HBO Max.
