Each season, Noah Wyle – the lead star, co-writer and co-producer of The Pitt – starts with a guiding idea.
“I had a personal thesis for the first season, which was, ‘the patient is the doctor,’” he says. “And in the second season, it’s ‘doctors don’t make good patients.’”
As the first episode begins, it has been 10 months since season one’s harrowing climax, and the effects are still present – even if they are largely hidden beneath the surface for much of the staff at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre’s emergency department.
“I really wanted to take these characters 10 months later, after having gone through a mass casualty event, and say: 'Who’s getting help, who’s not getting help, and who needs help?'” Wyle says. “Who would benefit from help? Who’s running from help? What would help look like for them – and for us?”
It is the Fourth of July, and Wyle’s Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the attending physician, is working his final shift before taking a three-month sabbatical. The decision, Wyle explains, comes during a crisis of faith – uncertainty over how long he can continue in the role.
“For me, the journey for Robby is about showing the difficulty of being in a leadership position while grappling with a newfound impostor syndrome,” he says. “You don’t feel like you can practise what you’re preaching.
“And moreover, that you may be training people to go into a life’s work that is ultimately unsustainable and, in many cases, debilitating.”
Being a medical professional in the US has become increasingly difficult. Nearly six years on from the coronavirus pandemic, the healthcare system remains under strain, facing coverage cuts and a growing lack of trust fuelled by vaccine scepticism and misinformation.
“I wanted to play with that reality – what the system looks like right now, with cuts to Medicare and funding and shortages,” Wyle says.
At the same time, the series is not interested in advancing a specific political argument. While real-world changes – from the Biden administration to the Trump administration – have clear consequences for the healthcare industry, the focus is not on causes but on material effects.
“We try to stay away from the politics of it and simply talk about the reality for the patients and the people on the ground,” says John Wells, producer and director of the series. “Not because we’re afraid of the politics, but because the drama of the character work is in the specifics of what happens to the human beings.”
R Scott Gemmill, the show’s creator and showrunner, adds: “Cuts to healthcare coverage end up putting people back in the ER because they aren’t getting preventive healthcare that they could have, or they can’t afford it,” he says.
“By the time they make it to the emergency department, they’re in such rough shape that doctors have to work even harder, spend even more money and more resources to try to save them. It’s a vicious circle.”
What, then, does Wyle mean when he says doctors do not make good patients? At its simplest, it is an acknowledgement that those with the job of helping others are often the worst at asking for help themselves. Throughout season one, Dr Robby suppresses his own psychological distress until it culminates in an emotional breakdown – one he fears could be witnessed, reported and used against him.
When viewers meet him again in the opening episodes of season two – airing weekly on HBO Max and OSN+ in the Middle East – he is receiving psychiatric care, but still struggles to open up and accept support. Nor is he alone. Dr Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), a senior resident, has returned from rehab, while charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) is still dealing with the aftermath of being physically assaulted by a patient.
“For season three, my guiding principle will be: ‘doctors should be patients,’” Wyle says.
“The toll that a career takes on practitioners is really unfair unless they have a way of offloading it somehow. What they take in – and what they take on – especially nowadays, is a lot. That’s why you see such high rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, divorce and suicide among the people who do this for a living.
“We wanted to show the trials and tribulations, and the aggregate toll that the work takes on these people, in order to increase the degree of empathy we have for those in these jobs – picking up our broken pieces and putting them back together again, attending the worst day of our lives four times an hour for 12 hours of a shift. That’s a lot.
“It’s a big deal, and what these people do for a living is really important. The fact that the relationship that used to be so sacred between patient and doctor has been called into question – that their expertise has been called into question – is maddening to me and disappointing. We wanted to address that dramatically and, hopefully, move the needle.”
The origins of The Pitt
While the first season of The Pitt aired in 2025, the seeds of the series were planted much earlier, during the pandemic. For 11 seasons between 1994 and 2005, Noah Wyle played Dr John Carter on ER – the show’s longest-tenured original cast member – and remained in contact with many of the medical professionals he met during that time.
As the crisis deepened, he began to realise just how far the influence of that work extended.
“In 2020, I wasn’t working, and I was getting a lot of mail from front line workers who felt that ER had been catalytic in their decision to go into medicine,” Wyle says. “They were calling to say they were grateful, or to say they were tired, or overwhelmed.
“And I felt inadequate. I felt without purpose in that moment. All I could really do was write John Wells and say: ‘I’m getting a lot of mail from people we used to know, and they’re not doing so well. There might be another story here to tell – even though we probably don’t want to be the ones to tell it.’”
Wyle set the idea aside, but it resurfaced during the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023, when he found himself on the picket lines outside the gates of Warner Bros, his former – and future – studio home.
“I started thinking: if I get the opportunity to work again, what would I want that to feel like?” he says. “Could I make it feel like it used to feel on ER, when we were one big family coming into a soundstage, telling a very personal story that reverberated around the world and inspired people to go into this line of work? Something creative, immersive and inclusive – different from how it had felt for me in a long time.
“And then The Pitt showed up, and it felt like an answered prayer.”
Wyle is not the person he was when he made ER, nor is he the same performer – which may help explain why his work is now receiving accolades that once eluded him. He won an Emmy for the role last year and is nominated again at Sunday’s Golden Globes.
“I feel that I’ve changed in the last five years, probably more than I changed in the 25 before that,” he says.
“I don’t know if that’s just being on the north side of 50, or crossing the 30-year mark in this profession, or having my confidence rattled during both the pandemic and the strike – realising this isn’t a birthright, nor something I’m guaranteed to do for the rest of my life. It’s a privilege.
“All of that has given me a stronger sense of intentionality, and a more proactive approach to my work rather than a reactive one. There are things I’m aggressively wanting to do, rather than passively.”
He feels that shift daily on the set of The Pitt, particularly as the show’s breakout success reshapes the lives of its younger cast members – many of whom joined the series without name recognition and are now navigating fame for the first time.
“I’m working with a young group of actors, and it’s fascinating to watch them come into their own,” he says. “To experience fame for the first time and negotiate what that changes – with your friends, your family, your relationship to everything: money, where you live, what you wear, what you drive.
“I went through all of that 30 years ago. I’ve already gone through trying to be a young father, juggling a TV show, divorce, raising two kids as a single father, getting remarried and starting a whole other family – all within that same time frame.
“After that, you come at your work completely differently than you do in your early days. It’s like that adage: you can’t step in the same river twice. You’re a different person, and it’s a different river – even if it looks the same.”
Wyle is proud of the person he has become on the other side of that hardship, and of what he and his collaborators have built with The Pitt. In many ways, he says, he has finally created the creative family he once longed for.
“Everybody who comes on to our stage usually leaves saying: ‘Thank you for building this beautiful place for us to come and play in,’” he says. “That was what I needed – to feel like I’m part of something creatively fulfilling that also has something to say.
“When the experience is meaningful for the people making it, it has this ripple effect. You end up presenting a family that people want to be part of, or want to know more about. I think what we’ve been really effective at is throwing a really good party for ourselves – and then having people want to come to it.”
The Pitt season two releases weekly on OSN+ across the Middle East
