The Pitt swaggers back into action

If the first season of The Pitt came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest dramas on TV, the second season is swaggering through the saloon doors with all the confidence of a gunslinger who’s never lost a draw. A show that was already confident in its style, tone, and characters has, somehow, discovered even more confidence, doubling down on everything that made season one work so beautifully, while finding space to deepen characters and relationships in the overworked, underfunded, understaffed emergency department of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

Season two opens ten months after the events of season one. It is now July 4, a day known for emergency department chaos. Doctor Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle, really feeling himself as a leading man), is working his last shift before a planned three-month sabbatical. Everyone is giving him sh-t for his “mid-life crisis retreat” and his new motorcycle. Robby, though, just wants to get through the day with minimal fuss.

By the end of the first hour of his shift, it’s clear his final shift will be a tough one. As with season one, The Pitt maintains its “real time” affect in which each episode depicts one hour in a twelve-hour day shift at PTMC. That the season is, once again, 15 episodes long begs the question of what happens at the end of the shift to keep the story going. Will it be another overtime situation? Will there be a time jump? Will we follow some characters home? Will we get to stick with the night shift for a few hours? Who knows! Not me, as only 9 out of 15 episodes were available for review. (Although I am the one in the corner lighting candles and chanting “night shift spin-off, night shift spin-off”.)

Some characters from season one have departed, most notably Doctor Collins (Tracy Ifeachor), the senior resident who had history with Robby. But many characters are back for at least one more go-round in the pit, including Doctor Mohan (Supriya Ganesh); Doctor McKay (Fiona Dourif); Doctor King (Taylor Dearden); and Doctor Santos (Isa Briones), all of whom are continuing their residences in the pit. Student doctor Javadi (Shabana Azeez) is doing another rotation through the ED, while Whitaker (Gerran Howell) is now a fully-fledged doctor and an intern in the pit. Whitaker clearly matured and grew through his experiences last season; his humanity, kindness, and confidence marks him out as Robby’s natural successor—you can easily see Whitaker someday running the pit with the same competence and grace as Robby.

Then there is Doctor Langdon (Patrick Ball), working his first shift after completing drug rehab and counseling. His relationship with Robby is in tatters, and much like Santos—who is positioned as Langdon’s foil—his confidence has taken a hit and it’s a humbler Langdon on his first day back. Robby is very much in “get me out of here” mode on his last day, and Langdon attempting to work his 12 steps is not what Robby wants to deal with.

Though what makes season two hum is Robby’s fractious relationship with his fellow attending, Doctor Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who has been hired to run the pit in Robby’s absence. They could not be more opposite, Robby’s old-school ways challenged by Al-Hashimi’s preference for new technologies and a desire to reshape the pit in Robby’s absence. Al-Hashimi is deliberately positioned to push some audience buttons, and The Pitt has a way of telling you about yourself given how you react to specific characters. But there is clearly more going on with Al-Hashimi, and her calm, kind presence is a nice foil to Robby’s gruff mentorship style.

The nurses, meanwhile, get a bigger presence in season two. Dana (Katherine LaNasa) is still the anchor of the nursing staff, but Princess (Kristin Villanueve), Perlah (Amielynn Abellera), and Donnie (Brandon Mendez Homer) each get stand-out moments of their own. They are joined by newly minted nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard), who watches the denizens of the pit with a kind of macabre fascination. A couple of new med students are also along for the ride: obnoxious know-it-all Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson), giving genius Javadi a run for her money, and the wildly disinterested Kwon (Irene Choi), who is pathologically detached from everything going on around her.

This is a huge ensemble cast, but just like season one, season two finds room for everyone. There is little exposition, sometimes a single line is all we get to make the leap over ten months of development for these characters, but it’s a huge reason The Pitt feels so real. These characters do not stand around stating the obvious to one another, they’re operating from a place of understanding what each other has been going through over the months. When exposition does happen, it is generally blended into grounded conversations that make sense between specific characters, though most of the heaviest character development comes in subtle, quick moments that demand attention and consideration from the viewer.

The Pitt season two is an incredible achievement. Forget a sophomore slump, there is only more of what made the show great right out of the gate. Though there is a funny slant to some characterizations that feel like the writers leaning into the particularly online reception of the show—this is not the kind of show you would expect to have a thriving online fandom, but it does—but that just makes for some of the show’s most fun moments, including Doctor Abbot’s arrival into the pit, the most “Hollywood movie” moment in the first half of the season. There is also a splendid Community-style visual gag involving Abbot, Mohan, and Robby that feels destined for a million supercuts.

As with season one, there are a lot of sad situations, and some truly terrible traumas happening. The Pitt remains focused on the pressures breaking the US healthcare system apart, while also dealing with biases ranging from individual doctors to how audiences view certain characters (like I said, this show will tell you about yourself). But The Pitt never feels hopeless, that these characters keep plugging away despite the failures and losses surrounding them gives the show a strange sort of romanticism. The compassion, competence, and kindness of the characters ensures that for all its gore and depiction of systemic failure, The Pitt is oddly comforting. It’s a warm-blanket show in trauma-drama trappings.

The Pitt season two premieres January 8, 2026, on HBO Max. New episodes premiere each Thursday.