‘The Pitt’ Season 2: A Postmortem

By now, more people have analyzed Season 2 of The Pitt than the Zapruder film. No season of any show has ever been more picked apart, stanned, despised, adored, satirized, or flat-out seen from as many angles as this one. In a time without appointment TV, The Pitt is an era-defining show for many reason.

The first, and most obvious, reason is the visceral one. The Pitt exists in real time, or at least gives the careful illusion of existing in real time. We watch and cringe and sweat as its medical emergencies unfold and the doctors and nurses have to make split decisions on the suture’s edge between life and death. They saw open skulls and slit open bellies; they irrigate wounds, compress chests, and intubate constantly. At any moment, patients, even seemingly safe ones, could pass away or flee the ER because of insurance issues. It’s constant, urgent medical realism.

Then there are the politics. The Pitt’s first season was almost laughably woke, clumsily inserting lectures about misgendering patients and sophomore-year women’s studies aphorisms into disease-of-the-week scenarios. It caused sympathetic nodding or extreme eye-rolling in viewers depending on where they stood on the ideology scale. It was the most overtly liberal American TV since The West Wing, providing gritty urban realism as a cover for its multicultural American fantasia.

But the first season was a late-Biden era show, where the creators figured they were just sanding over the leftover rough edges of MAGA. This season, The Pitt has layered a Trump re-election emergency over the ectopic pregnancies, sepsis cases, and broken limbs. Rural hospitals are closed, computer systems fail, the government cuts Medicare. Things are falling apart and the center cannot hold. And there’s a major culprit. As writer Mike Pesca points out on Substack, most of The Pitt’s “assholes” are white men. This is a narrative choice.

The show’s TDS panic, never named because it doesn’t have to name it, takes its most visceral form mid-season when ICE shows up at the ER, having thrown a nice illegal immigrant lady down the stairs. Their very presence causes half the waiting room, and a good chunk of the ER staff, to flee in terror. The ICE agents, once Dr. Robby makes them remove their masks, are actually Hispanic, which is both accurate to reality and disproving of Pesca’s thesis. Also, Jesse, the nurse who bodies an ICE agent and subsequently disappears for the rest of the season into custody, is a white man, an ally, as it were.

Orange Man Bad, sure, though to The Pitt’s credit, it doesn’t linger over any one political moment too long, and its point of view is often hard to peg. Two of this season’s dumber patients, a woman who develops liver failure because she overdoses on turmeric supplements, and one who almost kills herself and her baby because she wants to have a “wild pregnancy,” might be MAHA, might be Goop-subscribing dipshits, or might be somewhere in between. The Pitt’s doctors barely have a chance to tell them off because cars keep crashing and water parks keep exploding all over the place.

But The Pitt’s major draw, the one that keeps viewers obsessing, is the depth and richness of its characters, somewhat surprising in a show that devotes so much time to medical realism. All of the cast, and it’s a large, layered, ever-shifting diverse one, is layered, flawed, and deeply vulnerable. Our heroic doctors are also snarky and cruel, liars, cheats, addicts, and, yes, assholes. They make mistakes, sometimes fatal ones. They treat one another poorly and with disdain. But they’re also kind, warm, friendly, deeply competent, loving, and generous, and they throw off killer one-liners during surgery, just like Hawkeye Pierce and B.J. Hunnicut on M.A.S.H.

The people of The Pitt are deeply human, rendered in ways that TV shows often cannot pull off well. The best TV characters live with us so that we discuss them as though they were real people. The Pitt does that better than anyone else. As Nelson Algren once wrote about the city of Chicago, “like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Then again, would you actually find lovelier lovelies? Maybe The Pitt’s truest strength is that it’s the final boss of a television formula that’s been generating hits for more than 60 years: The Hot Doctor. Early-stage examples include Richard Chamberlin’s Dr. Kildare, James Brolin on Marcus Welby, and Gregory Harrison on Trapper John, M.D. St. Elsewhere featured Denzel Washington and Mark Harmon, ER had George Clooney, a young Noah Wyle, and Julianna Margulies, and Grey’s Anatomy had Patrick Dempsey, Sandra Oh, and dozens of other hot docs.

But no TV docs have ever been hotter in the aggregate than the hot docs of The Pitt. For those who like men, you’re not going to find a more beauteous triumvirate than Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, and Shawn Hatosy. And whether you are sapphic or straight, the women of The Pitt offer a rainbow of attractive skin tones, body types, and personal dysfunction. They can save us from our ailments and injuries, but we feel like we can save them from themselves. It’s a magical formula, TV worth waiting a week for, and we can all resume our crushes next year when the Hot Docs of The Pitt return for more lifesaving work and agonizing personal crises in Season 3.