‘The Pitt’ is back for another harrowing 15-hour shift. Is it even possible to up the ante?
When we first glimpse Noah Wyle’s Michael Robinavitch — aka Dr. Robby, of course — in Season 2 of “The Pitt,” he’s looking darned good, truth be told. The beloved ER doc is riding his motorcycle to work, wearing nice shades, hair rustling in the early-morning Pittsburgh breeze.
Wait — hair rustling? It’s only then we notice what’s missing. Can it be that Robby — dedicated, wise, overworked, charming and brilliant — isn’t wearing a helmet?
It’s such a jarring sight that, launching a Zoom interview with Wyle, it’s one of the first things we must inquire about. Did we remember that right? Were we supposed to notice?
Yes and yes. “You’re supposed to notice that he doesn’t wear it,” Wyle confirms. “But then, he tells people that he does. Which means, you know he’s lying. We don’t know what else he’s lying about.”
More broadly, it’s all part of the goal this new season, after an impactful, Emmy-winning debut that culminated with a mass shooting. There were worries that they wouldn’t be able to up the ante. Well, the idea is not to up the ante, Wyle says, but to more deeply explore characters and their issues.
“Our job isn’t to come up with another stunt that creates drama to be the catalyst for excitement on the show,” Wyle says. “Our job is to be faithful to the characters that we’ve initiated. To plot them in space and time in a real three-dimensional way, and allow their lives and what they’re going through to generate the drama and the tension.”
Hence the no-helmet scene — a last-minute decision the night before. They’d planned for Robby to wear a helmet. But Wyle says he suggested to executive producer John Wells that if he didn’t, “We won’t know what to trust and what not to trust from that moment forward, and the audience will be privy to a secret that the characters around him aren’t.”
“He dug it, so we went with that.”
Fans can relax: Frank and his dimple are back – and so is nurse Dana
The timing – July 4 – was hardly chosen haphazardly. Think holiday gatherings, fireworks, injuries we can imagine and worse ones we can’t. But also, timing is important for the characters — it’s been 10 months since last season’s events.
Dr. Frank Langdon has spent those months in rehab. The hard-driving senior resident with the much-noticed dimpled chin ran into serious trouble in the first season when he was caught stealing prescription meds to feed his addiction.
Well, Frank’s been given a reprieve, and he’s on his first day back. Robby, for one, is not thrilled.
But Patrick Ball, who plays Frank, is very relieved at his own reprieve. He’d been biting his nails as he awaited his character’s fate.
“Pretty much the entirety of my time on ‘The Pitt’ has been praying for a job and hoping I don’t get fired,” Ball quips. “I was sweating pretty hard.” He got the good news that he’d be back in a call from Wells, while walking on a rainy New York street.
Katherine LaNasa, who plays all-knowing charge nurse Dana, had a similar sense of uncertainty. She was a breakout star of the first season, winning one of the show’s five Emmys. But her character also seemed headed out the door, disillusioned by a brutal punch from an unruly patient.
“I’m like, really, please don’t get rid of me now!” LaNasa says she thought. Happily, Dana too is back, taking charge as her title implies, with that sassy but maternal demeanor.
“I think of her as like a basketball coach,” says LaNasa of Dana. “She’s looking at what’s going on, and what do people need to do their best? … I have children that are 24 years apart in age and so, I feel like I’ve just been mothering my whole life.”
A new doc, new technology, and lots of new medicine
A key arrival in the expanded cast is Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, who’s planning to take over from Robby as chief attending doctor while he goes on sabbatical (on his motorcycle!)
Played by Sepideh Moafi, Al-Hashimi is a big proponent of AI and new technology — something Robby’s deeply skeptical of. On top of that, they’re not used to sharing leadership roles, even for one day (or season.) “It’s a bit of a learning curve,” Moafi notes.
Talk about a learning curve: The actors, along with their characters, have absorbed a lot more new medicine.
“There’s a LOT more procedures,” pronounces Taylor Dearden, who plays Melissa “Mel” King, now a third-year resident. One of the first ones we witness is a doozy – a “clamshell,” in which surgeons cut across the chest to expose the heart and lungs. Cue Al-Hashimi’s line: “Convert to clamshell!”
As for Mel, who is neurodivergent, she’s dealing with a lot. “All the confidence Mel’s gained over the past 10 months is completely eroded … because she’s named in a malpractice suit,” Dearden explains. “It’s a really tough day for Mel, trying to bolster her own self-esteem when the odds are very much against it.”
The real world finds its way into the script
Wyle – who produces and writes as well as stars — says it happens all the time: People in the health care industry, who have roundly embraced the show, weigh in with stories. So do patients.
“We take case studies, anecdotes, stories people tell us and it gets woven into the fabric of the show,” Wyle says.
A key example of an issue the show aims to grapple with: health insurance. There are scenes where patients wonder if they can afford the ER care, argue about expensive procedures or get advice on payment plans.
Wyle says creators, trying to keep up with developments in health insurance as they were writing, “talked to a lot of experts and we basically said, give us six months out, 12 months out, 18 months out. Worst case scenario, what population gets hit the hardest?” And they asked themselves: “What can we put on TV that would be helpful as an informative guide?”
Doctors (and some actors, too) aren’t good patients
One key theme of this season, Wyle says: “Doctors make terrible patients.” A case in point is Robby himself.
It’s not just the helmet thing. It’s also how he advocates that his staff make use of mental health resources, while he won’t do the same.
“Instead, he’s created a sort of self-help version of a mental health plan where he could fix up this old motorcycle and take it on this slightly romantic, slightly literary odyssey-trip of self discovery,” Wyle says.
The fact is, Wyle himself is a pretty bad patient. Just ask him.
“I don’t go to the doctor,” the actor confesses, when asked what kind of a patient he is.
“In the same way that Robby’s not going to a psychiatrist, Noah doesn’t like going to doctors.”