The Pitt

The Pitt, critically acclaimed HBO medical drama television series that debuted in 2025 and chronicles the high-pressure workings of a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room. It stars Noah Wyle as chief attending physician Michael (“Dr. Robby”) Robinavitch alongside a large ensemble cast playing doctors, nurses, and patients. Several of the creators of The Pitt—including showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and executive producers John Wells and Wyle—worked on the immensely popular NBC hospital drama ER (1994–2009), on which Wyle played Dr. John Carter. Though not a direct spin-off, The Pitt inherited ER’s gritty realism, inclusion of real-world social issues, and portrayal of frontline health care workers as heroic, if flawed, people who nobly fight to save their patients amid chaotic circumstances. A particular emphasis of The Pitt is the long-term negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the medical industry and its workers.

Premise, setting, and production

Each season of The Pitt takes place over the course of one 15-hour shift in the hospital emergency room of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, whose waiting room is always packed to the brim with people needing care. Each episode depicts an hour in roughly real time and narrates the fate of many different patients. As chief attending doctor, Dr. Robby oversees resident doctors as well as wide-eyed medical students as they contend with an overwhelming workload and the constraints placed on them by hospital administrators, among others. Although the action stays firmly rooted inside the hospital, viewers also get hints about the personal lives and struggles of the main characters. The show is notoriously graphic, filled with blood, gore, and other bodily discharges. The producers strove to accurately represent the cases, treatment plans, and procedures found in real emergency medicine, and the script makes use of highly technical language (see Decoding Medical Jargon from Television Emergency Rooms).

Wyle has said that the show’s creators chose Pittsburgh in part because they were looking for a different setting than most TV series. “Pittsburgh is also a wonderful microcosm of the country. It’s got great diversity of population, a large socioeconomic range, and it’s both urban but surrounded by rural areas, so you’ve got a great cross-section of cases,” he told Pittsburgh City Paper in 2025. The Pitt has included references to the history and culture of its setting, such as featuring a patient who worked for Fred Rogers’s long-running children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001), which was produced in the city, and another who was part of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, a pioneering community-based sociomedical program (1967–75) staffed mostly by residents of the Hill District, a predominantly Black Pittsburgh neighborhood.

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The Pitt is filmed mainly on a set built on the Warner Brothers production lot in Burbank, California. In addition, a few scenes are filmed in Pittsburgh. This traditional studio production model is increasingly rare in television in the 2020s, a time when many prestige shows are filmed overseas and make use of extensive location shooting, computer animation, and flashy technological effects. Moreover, the show follows a network TV release schedule, with one episode being released per week and each season premiering in January. The show’s outstanding success using a traditional narrative format and production model centered in Hollywood has generated hope that The Pitt’s template could be replicated and help revive the television industry in southern California.

Season summaries

Season two

Season two is set 10 months later, on the Fourth of July. It is Dr. Robby’s last day before a planned monthslong motorcycle trip, and he and many of the rest of the staff are close to complete burnout. As NPR put it in a 2026 story, “There were times in the first season when [Dr. Robby’s] compassion and patience felt bottomless; they were not.” The framing event of the season is a cyberattack that forces the team to go offline and use analog systems to route patients and document their care. As in season one, the show continued to address pressing issues and events of the day, including the use of artificial intelligence tools, caring for homeless patients, funding cuts to medical research and Medicaid under the second administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, and providing care to undocumented patients in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Main characters

• Michael (“Dr. Robby”) Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) is the chief attending physician whose steady poise and composure crumbles as each season progresses. The name Robinavitch comes from Wyle’s 19th-century Russian Jewish immigrant ancestors on his father’s side.
• Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) is a Pittsburgh native who brings her decades of experience to bear as the tough-minded charge nurse of the emergency room.
• Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) is a cocky senior resident who is a favorite with many fellow staff and patients but has personal difficulties with drug addiction.
• Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif) is a resident doctor who is a single mother in recovery from drug addiction. Her background makes her especially empathetic and effective with patients who have substance use disorder.
• Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) is a wide-eyed Nebraska native who starts out as a medical student and is a resident doctor in season two.
• Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) is a combative, outwardly self-assured medical student, and in season two a resident, who clashes with Dr. Langdon and is interested in becoming a surgeon.
• Jack Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) is the attending physician on the night shift. He previously served as a combat medic in the U.S. military.
• Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) is a resident doctor whose nickname is “Slow-Mo” because she makes a point of spending a lot of time with her patients—to the point of irritating Dr. Robby at times.
• Melissa (Mel) King (Taylor Dearden) is a highly skilled and capable resident doctor who is neurodivergent and cares for her sister with autism. Dearden is the daughter of actors Bryan Cranston and Robin Dearden.
• Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) is a precocious 20-year-old medical student whose demanding mother is a respected surgeon upstairs in the same hospital.
• Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) is an attending physician who previously worked in a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital and joins The Pitt in season two, preparing to be Dr. Robby’s substitute while he is away. She is an advocate for technology, notably a computer application that uses generative artificial intelligence to help update patients’ charts.
• Heather Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) is a senior resident who is pregnant but concealing that fact from her colleagues. Her character did not return in season two.

Critical reception and awards

The Pitt has been a huge hit with critics and audiences, who praised its propulsive storytelling, compelling treatment of sensitive topics, and excellent cast. A 2025 review in Vanity Fair singled out Wyle’s characterization of Dr. Robby, writing: “Wyle is an endlessly compelling lead. Many years of playing doctors have trained him well; his bedside tone, personable and clinically distant at once, is a precise depiction of the guarded compassion of a real doctor. Wyle deftly manages the shifts in emotional temperature as each hour unfolds, selling us on the relentless roller coaster of it all.” The show also earned a rapturous reception from many doctors and nurses because of its accuracy and sympathetic portrayal of their profession.

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In 2025 The Pitt won five Emmy Awards, including a surprise victory in best drama series, where the show beat such heavyweights as Apple TV+’s Severance and HBO’s The Last of Us and The White Lotus. In addition, Wyle won an Emmy for best lead actor, LaNasa won best supporting actress, and Hatosy won outstanding guest actor. It also won an Emmy for outstanding casting for a drama series. In 2026 The Pitt received six Emmy Awards, including best drama series, best lead actor (Wyle), and outstanding casting.

Development and lawsuit

The Pitt arose out of discussions among Wyle, Wells, and Gemmill about doing a reboot of ER. Wyle had received multiple messages on social media from first responders during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. They relayed how Wyle’s beloved character on ER, Dr. John Carter, had inspired their career paths and how they longed for the comfort that character provided. Ultimately, Wyle and the producers decided to create a new show instead of a reboot, after Warner Brothers was not able to come to an agreement with the estate of Michael Crichton, ER’s creator.

In August 2024, months before The Pitt debuted, Crichton’s estate filed a lawsuit against Warner Brothers, Wyle, Wells, Gemmill, and others, accusing them of having created an unauthorized reboot of ER. In a court filing in October 2025, the defendants called the suit baseless. “The Pitt is no more a ‘derivative work’ of ER than is any other hospital drama,” the filing reads. “The Pitt involves different characters, a different plot, different themes, a different setting, and a different storytelling device.”