[This story contains spoilers from season one of Max‘s The Pitt, including the finale “9:00 p.m.”]
Noah Wyle‘s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch ends his day at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center somewhat the same way it began: walking with his earbuds in, listening to “Baby” by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise.
But Robby is not the same as he was 15 hours earlier. In between those soundtracked journeys to and from the hospital, he has dealt with everything from numerous fentanyl overdoses to discovering both that one senior resident (Patrick Ball’s Dr. Langdon) is hiding drug use and that the other (Tracey Ifeachor’s Dr. Collins), suffering a miscarriage on the day, may have aborted the baby Robby didn’t know she was carrying when they were in a relationship. This is all before a mass shooting at a music festival plunges the hospital into chaos, with a deluge of patients and a shortage of blood, as the doctors and nurses literally work overtime treating the victims, including the girlfriend of Robby’s ex-girlfriend’s son, Jake (Taj Speights), who dies despite Robby’s dedicated treatment.
It’s enough that by the end of hour 13, Robby has a breakdown and ends up sobbing and collapsing to the floor in the hospital’s makeshift morgue.
When asked why it was this moment that caused the experienced physician, working on the anniversary of the death of his mentor Dr. Adamson, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wyle first quips of everything Robby’s been through, “Isn’t that enough?”
Turning serious, he explains why Robby can’t hold it in any longer.
“I think we’ve removed a lot of the bearing walls from from his scaffolding. Collins going home, Langdon’s betrayal, strained relations now with Jake, [his girlfriend] Leah (Sloan Mannino) dying, all happening in the room where Adamson died and he pulled the plug on him five years ago on this day — it’s just too much,” Wyle tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But it’s not these individual things. As as he starts to recount everybody who’s died on this day, he’s remembering everybody who’s died under his care. These things go into little compartments, and you hope that you can keep them separate, but on this particular day, at that particular moment, it is system failure, and they all come spilling out, and it’s the aggregate of all of his career coming down on him in that moment — everything that he’s trying to keep behind a professional mask and veneer comes spilling out, and it’s at the most inopportune time, which, for somebody like Robby, brings attendant guilt and shame and feelings of inadequacy and like he’s letting people down, or that he’s weak on top of everything else.”
Robby continues to struggle with these emotions in final two episodes of The Pitt‘s first season and, after he ends up crying on the roof at the end of hour 15, fellow attending Dr. Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) tries to provide some support, including gently offering to connect him with his therapist.
And by the end of season one, Wyle says, Robby can’t “go home and pretend to himself any longer that he doesn’t have a problem.”
“So it’s really a question for season two: problem identified, season two treatment,” Wyle says of what’s next for Robby. “Whether or not he buys into it, what mode he would buy into, what effect it would take — doctors don’t make the best patients. They’re really better at diagnosing problems. And we’re going to have a couple of doctors coming back and having to grapple with not only — Robby’s got Adamson, but now everybody’s got Pitt Fest, so to a degree, everybody’s got an Adamson that they’re gonna have to contend with. So how he goes about getting help, how we depict a physician seeking or accepting treatment, how the rest of our practitioners, who’ve now been through this crazy experience, digest it and synthesize it in their own lives and careers, is going to be a big focus of season two.”
Indeed, showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, who like Wyle spent years working on ER, adds that Robby grappling with his past trauma and a larger “journey of healing” will be part of The Pitt‘s already announced second season.
“I think the best thing that could have happened to his character was the meltdown, because until then, he wasn’t dealing with it,” Gemmill tells THR. “If no one had seen the meltdown, he could probably go back to his own ways, which is again, denial and avoidance. But because Whitaker saw him, and then ultimately we learned that somebody else saw him, so that even Langdon knows about it, so at that point, Robby knows his secret is out and realizes that he has to come to terms and deal with this and part of this second season will be about seeing Robby and what steps he’s taking to deal with his past trauma, and even the most recent, the mass shooting, but part of it is his journey of healing.”
Gemmill recently revealed that season two would take place 10 months after season one, over July 4 weekend. The time jump, for Robby and other characters, gives them some time to deal with the issues that emerged at the end of season one.
“When we come back a lot of story has transpired between our characters, and so we get a chance to catch up, whereas if we’d done the next day, everyone would still just be dealing with their PTSD and the grief about it, so we wouldn’t have as much story to tell. And this just seemed like the best way to re-engage the audience and let them play a little bit of catch up as they probably see some new faces.”
Beyond that, Gemmill teases of the July 4 time period, “There’s a holiday; there’s lots going on in the city, a lot of unique things to summertime that bring you into the ER, so we can tap into those with whatever we decide to do.”
And the summer setting was also borne out of a practical concern since the series’ exterior filming happens in September “for a number of reasons,” Gemmill says.
“It’s the best time to really shoot there for us. It’s not too late in the season. It’s actually kind of too early in the season for some of the best writer wise. Because whatever we write and shoot there in September, you know, like the scenes in the park, the scene on the roof with Robby and Abbot, the scene with the helicopter, the blood arriving, all those were shot in September. So you have to write the scenes that you think the show is going to end on without really knowing how you’re going to get there. So that’s a little tricky, but we didn’t want to be there in the wintertime, so September is going to have to match for anywhere from, say, April through November. We’d already done September, so we just picked July as a good midway point.”
With respect to the new faces, Gemmill indicated that would apply to the hospital’s medical staff.
“You want a bit of everything. I think the great thing about an emergency department is it’s a very vibrant, alive place, with people coming and going constantly,” he says. “And that’s not just workers and the patients, but, you know, you have med students showing up, you have med students moving on, you have specialists showing up. That allows us to keep it alive and keep it authentic, so, yeah, I think it helps to see some new faces. And new faces bring new characters and new perspectives. And what we always want to do is tell stories from different points of view as well, not just the ones we’re used to.”
The prospect of new characters comes as it remains unclear if at least two major characters — Langdon and charge nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) — will be returning to their roles at the hospital, with Robby sending Langdon home and Dana, who suffers the indignity of getting punched in the face by a patient, saying repeatedly that she’s “done” with working in the emergency room before packing up her things at the end of the day.
When asked about LaNasa’s future on the show, Wyle was quick to joke but noncommittal, merely highlighting her importance to the series, “Fan favorite Katherine LaNasa not come back? Come on now. But, yeah, it happens. Who knows? Who knows?”
Onscreen, Robby seems to think Dana won’t really quit.
“I think he hopes that she’ll be back,” Wyle says. “I think that he doesn’t want to entertain a universe where she doesn’t come back.”
Wyle, Gemmill and the team behind The Pitt have stressed wanting to make the series the most accurate medical show on TV, but going into season two they’re facing the challenge of trying to predict how high-profile changes in the health care industry, including layoffs and funding losses, play out.
“We’re talking to all of these people now, and we’re saying, ‘Can you do the impossible for us? Can you look into the future and and see how bad it’s going to get? And tell us what you’re going to do about it?’ Which is really unfair to ask these people who are literally losing their jobs or their funding every day and trying to shore up what is going to be this damage before it hits full force. So it is tricky,” Wyle says. “We got lucky in some ways. We wrote about stuff a year ago that wasn’t exactly in the headlines a year ago, but it’s certainly in the headlines now, and the measles storyline is a perfect example of that. I can’t believe how relevant that storyline is. It seems as if we did it in response to the cases that are rampaging through Texas as we speak, but we were just thinking what would happen if an under vaccinated population continued on this trend, and herd immunity was a thing of the past, and we continue to travel internationally. What do we think is going to happen here? You know, we’re going to see a lot of these diseases that we thought we’d taken care of and got rid of coming back in greater and greater numbers, and the more disinformation that’s out there, the more deaths that are going to happen. So that is very important, tough stuff.”
For season two, Wyle who also serves as an executive producer and writer, will write two more episodes than he did in season one and direct an episode.
And Gemmill is happy to keep going with The Pitt until someone tells him to stop.
“I think a very important part of my job is to keep a show on the air as long as possible,” he says. “Because this is still a business. The business has been hit pretty hard between COVID and the strikes, and I get calls. I even had a call today with someone who I’d worked with, and was looking, just trying to see where the next gig was. So I will always, I tend to, will work on a show until they take my chair away and shut the lights out, because I think that’s really important to give people the opportunity to work, and to work in Los Angeles and to work the sensible hours that we do. It’s really important. And so I don’t look to the next best, next big thing. I’m really dedicated to whatever show I’m on at the time and trying to make it last until people either don’t want to work on it anymore, or people don’t want to watch it anymore, and then we move on and do the next thing.”
As for what he would like viewers to take away from the series, Gemmill is focused more on emotional resonance than a political agenda.
“I would like to think that our show offers hope, not to give up, that there’s still really good people out there,” he says. “We’re in a time when the world seems very divisive, and it is. And yet, there are people, great people, working, 24/7 around the clock to be there when we need them, our first responders. And I would just hope that people respect that. And if there’s a sad episode where somebody dies and it makes you feel something, then use that opportunity to call your mom, hug your kids and stay reconnected with each other. I think that’s that’s the most important thing for us is just to provide a hopeful hour of television that maybe makes you think about being a little nicer or kinder to someone in your life. If we could do that, then we’ve done a good job.”
Season one of The Pitt is now streaming on Max.