“And so it begins.” That’s how attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) greets a new shift at the bustling Pittsburgh ER nicknamed the Pitt. I felt the same kind of starter-line anticipation at the return of HBO Max’s breakout medical drama, which won the Emmy last year for Outstanding Drama and was, in a post-watercooler era, a surprise pop-cultural obsession. Could The Pitt really pull it off again?
This new season picks up roughly nine months after the first season, and, as with the first season, limits itself to a single shift inside the emergency room, with each episode running roughly an hour on the job. When Dr. Robby rolls into work at 7am – literally: he’s on a motorcycle, sans helmet, to his colleagues’ distress – it’s the Fourth of July and he’s a day away from starting a three-month sabbatical. These data points springload the shift for drama. There will be fingers lost to fireworks, and tension with Dr. Robby’s replacement attending, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi). The show writers intentionally kneecap Dr. Al in terms of audience sympathy – she’s an evangelist for AI-assisted technology, she wants to launch a campaign to stop calling the Pitt the Pitt, and she’s not Dr. Robby, which puts her at zero-for-three. By starting her at a deficit, she’s a more interesting character for it.
Much has been made about how The Pitt is a spiritual successor to the NBC heavyweight ER; The Pitt features carryover talent in front of the camera (Wyle) and behind it (including show creator R. Scott Gemmill and executive producers John Wells and Wyle, who also returns as a director as well as scripting episode 3 of the second season). But the comparison is more fascinating for the ways the two shows structurally diverge. On ER, cases were mostly contained to single episodes, introduced and resolved within 60 minutes, including commercial breaks, while relationship and other personal dramas unfolded over the course of a 22-episode-long season. By confining itself to one day, The Pitt cleverly flips the script, with cases carrying over into multi-episode arcs. Meanwhile relationship drama unfurls blinkingly, in extreme close-up. It turns the viewer into a forensic investigator: scanning for narrative crumbs, perking at an offhand mention of a toothbrush or at the way charge nurse Dana (Emmy winner Katherine LaNasa) casually hawks her Nicorette gum at a bush. We don’t have months to track a relationship or inner ache, we have a 15-hour shift, and a smattering of these off-the-cuff conversations and character tics to suss out complex dynamics. It’s a brilliant strategy to convert passive viewers into active ones, and narratively speaking, a real high-wire act mining high drama in the wings of the mainstage medical action. It’s like stretching a lunch order into a novella.
Where The Pitt goes old-school is in its weekly drops. (A new episode arrives every Thursday.) When I received an advance nine episodes from HBO Max, I heroically resolved to re-create the regular viewing experience and pace them out. That resolve dissolved by the end of episode one, which doesn’t even end on a cliffhanger – more like an ellipsis. Didn’t matter: It’s all so addictive. The medical mysteries, the jargon at once familiar yet inscrutable, the satisfaction in watching professionals moving about capably and crisply, the empathy and heartache as they try to do good in a broken system. I want this stuff injected in my veins.
The Pitt
New episodes stream Thursdays on HBO Max
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This article appears in January 9 • 2026.
TV Review: Another Shift at The Pitt
