‘The Pitt’ Season 2 review: Messily plotted but no less impactful

People are weird about The Pitt. This is, in part, due to the water-cooler nature of the series. That, and the long-running love affair with a good medical procedural. But it’s also, more pressingly, because people don’t know how to watch television anymore. Your favorite character shapes how you consume the series. Because of the show’s structure, which tells the story of a single day in the lives of a large ensemble, fans are left to fill in the blanks.

Robby (Noah Wyle) is being an asshole. He’s an emotional battering ram personified who is able to recognize that he is not okay, while not having the wherewithal to realize that his suicidal ideation is no longer passive and is manifesting in bullying tactics towards his coworkers. Langdon (Patrick Ball) did something very wrong in Season 1. He still earns the basic human grace of getting to move forward and away from his addiction. Santos (Isa Briones) bullies her co-workers routinely and bulldozes her way through situations that don’t call for it. And yet she’s still a very sympathetic character.

Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) is totally wrong about using generative AI in the workplace. But she’s right about so much else, and is a wonderfully engaging character. These are layered, nuanced characters. Characters who, through ugly, media-literacy-lacking online discourse, are being boiled down to their most basic personality traits. They’re being forced into a box of fans making. Fans who are led more by their own headcanons or rigid characterizations than by the story actually being told.

Imperfect as it is, The Pitt Season 2 remains a strongly written series with a diverse cast of characters. A series with riveting storylines that center on the pervasive erosion of working in health care, the stumbling way we all grapple with mental health, and the piss poor state of healthcare in the U.S. The series weaves together to create an unusually structured but no less effective character study. Sure, we’ve seen medical dramas before. But not like this. And it’s a shame that a fandom’s inability to reckon with complicated, imperfect characters and storylines that don’t need to be solved or mysteries to be unraveled is distracting from its overall consistency.

The Pitt Season 2 is a strong character study despite missteps.

And sure, yeah, I could also log off.

First, to get it out of the way. No, Season 2 is not as good as Season 1. But that doesn’t mean it’s reached a sophomore slump. We also weren’t somehow tricked into believing the hype of the debut season. Season 2 is a potent reminder of why the glut of streaming releases is so toxic to television storytelling. And, conversely, why good medical dramas will always maintain a vice grip on our interests. (Even if some of us are hiding behind our hands for 50% of each episode.)

By structuring the narrative around a single (albeit long and grueling) shift, The Pitt continues to exercise precise control over mounting apprehension. While Season 2 might not end on the emotional devastation of a mass casualty event like Season 1, which pushed all of the characters to the limit, it does, in its own way, find the same level of tension. However, while Season 1 found drama in an intensive sprint, Season 2 finds the emotional throughline in the exhaustive endurance test of medical workers operating in a thankless system.

It’s a slow-motion pile-up. Each new issue, each major event, all add to the relentless work these characters must endure on a day-to-day basis. From a character leaving and then injuring himself even worse as he worries about not being able to pay medical bills, to newcomer Emma being attacked by a patient, and ICE arriving on the scene, stirring up frenzied chaos and fear for employees and patients, the series pushes on our greatest wounds, the ones left to rot and bleed internally.

One of the more effective moments is when Dana and Emma work with a victim to get her to agree to a rape kit. The sequence is methodical, yet compassionate. And while Dana is the clear lynchpin of the moment, it’s Emma and Laëtitia Hollard’s sincere performances that do much of the heavy lifting. She’s observational without interfering. And it all mounts to the gut-punch moment where Dana realizes, furious, that previous rape kits were never picked up. It’s just another marker of a broken system that performatively offers aid without delivering on anything close to achieving an outcome.

If Season 1 was a sprint, Season 2 is a pileup.

There’s so much to The Pitt Season 2 that does work. So much so that, when it falters, it’s all the more noteworthy. Because so many of the shortcomings revolve around our main protagonist. Robbie, and the stories’ retroactive desire to reverse-engineer plots that all build to a certain desired outcome without doing the work to earn it. Robbie’s depression and suicidal ideation are a strong focal point of the season, especially as he grows increasingly self-destructive and volatile towards his (most often) female colleagues. As the hours pass he realizes he either must take a one-way road or face his demons. He becomes more reckless. In turn, he pushes cowboy-style medicinal impulses on others.

From chewing out Mohan for letting her personal life interfere with her work (hypocritical) to encouraging – if not downright pressuring – Javadi and Langdon to perform high-risk procedures (dangerous), he’s not in the right mental space. To then turn around and condemn Mackay for how she uses her time at work, and then trying to control Al-Hashimi and how she balances work and health, is a blend of the two, plus downright rude. It makes for a deeply unlikable, if empathetic, portrait of a man at the end of his rope. But I’m not sure it all works. I’m doubly unsure if the writers realize just how unlikable Robbie has become in their efforts to depict the ugliness of this work and how much it erodes the soul.

Because it’s one thing to depict a character’s slow descent through how he interacts with his co-workers. But the writing need to, in turn, offer those characters better narratives. They can’t just be a device to show how broken Robbie is. Characters like Mohan deserved better storylines. Mckay deserved one, period. Instead, she’s relegated to background support and emotional learning moments. Mohan is so wildly different from Season 1 that it feels less like the series trying to show signs of burnout and more like a writing room that didn’t care about consistency.

The Pitt has a Robbie problem.

There’s no doubt that Robbie is the center of the narrative. He is the shaking, crumbling pillar that the entire cast operates around. But the show misunderstands this key feature. It treats him not just as the foundation but as the most interesting element. And, unfortunately, the series has yet to truly recognize and embrace its genuinely fantastic ensemble. It’s less about dialing back screentime with Robbie. Though good God, the scenes with Duke were unnecessary, bringing episodes to a screeching halt. Instead, it’s about using Robbie’s character to better showcase the other generation of doctors and nurses around him and how they absorb or chafe against his teachings.

It’s why Whitaker is such a dull character in Season 2. He’s too happy to comply and is the “voice of reason,” a farmboy with a heart of gold who can do no wrong. Yes, the growth makes sense given the time that has passed. But one of the most charming parts of Whitaker’s character was that he was decent and very competent, but also clumsy and constantly trying to better himself. To see him shift so suddenly into teacher mode seems like a waste of potential and lazy writing. We should at least see him react to the clear warning signs that Robbie is giving off.

In contrast, Langdon gets one of the best moments in the season finale. The moment he dresses down Robbie and his impossible standards is necessary. It’s a great moment for the character, and Patrick Ball makes a meal of a small interaction. But it shines a light on how Supriya Ganesh deserved that same closure. Instead, her character faces an abrupt dismissal.

Embrace the strong ensemble.

Actors like Ball, Ganesh, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, Sepideh Moafi, and night shift characters like Shawn Hatosy, Ayesha Harris, and Ken Kirby are delivering emotionally poignant, hilarious, or a blend of the two. The cast is uniformly strong. Even characters you don’t gel with tend to have a spark of life that injects them with winsome charisma. It’s why it’s such a shame that performances such as Wyle’s and Katherine LaNasa’s don’t have the same impact. At least, not this time around. The former embody their characters with naturalism and unaffected, subtle shifts throughout the grueling shift. Meanwhile, Wyle and LaNasa both turn the dial up for bigger moments.

There’s a lot to gripe over in The Pitt Season. The overall narrative lacks a linking coherency. But episode to episode, it remains a wonderful, compassionate story. A story about people at their best and worst, doing what they can to help others on the worst days of their lives. And as the discourse rises in volume, some moments will stick beyond them. Emma grabbing Louie’s hand, for one, which is tear-inducing in its heartfelt display of care and how it transcends and transforms. Digby leaped out of the way, moving his hospital bed in an effort to let doctors save the life of another patient.

It’s the terrific performance of the character who, due to his weight, moves between hospitals before surgery, and his tearful reunion with his sister. More tears! More chills! There are hilarious reaction shots from characters in the background, consistently reminding us of the stealthy way the direction moves best to capture the controlled chaos of the hospital space. And there are the developing bonds, such as those between Langdon and Mel and, even more fun, Mel and Santos, that remind us these characters are people.

The bottom line.

Not every scene works, not every character gets their deserved narrative. Al-Hashimi, new to this season, alone deserves her own series, supported by Moafi’s tremendous, layered performance. But The Pitt Season 2 is still good television. And it’s compassionate television that mostly avoids overwrought teaching moments. It just needs to get out of its own way and remember that the strength lies in its tremendous ensemble, and write stronger, more propulsive storylines for them rather than letting them sit on the sidelines.

The Pitt Season 2 is available now on HBO. 

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Images courtesy of HBO Max.