The Pitt Season 2's July 4th Setting Isn't Just About Fireworks Injuries

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Anyone who's a fan of "The Pitt" knows, by now, that the show employs a very particular framework, taking place across one shift in a busy emergency department in "real" time (in that each episode takes up an "hour" of each day). The first season, which became one of HBO Max's biggest success stories to date and earned the series an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series right out of the gate, takes place on a relatively unremarkable day ... but season 2 is centered around July 4, known in the United States and the world at large as America's birthday. So, why pick this day?

In a cover story for Empire Magazine, Katherine LaNasa — who scooped up an Emmy of her own for playing the no-nonsense charge nurse Dana Evans — laughed about this specific choice. "It's kind of amateur hour, right? The night people get drunk and do really stupid sh**," she joked before calling the holiday "a day-long extravaganza of drinking and idiocy." (She is not, as it happens, wrong.) "It's interesting to view the problems with American society through a lens on the day that we celebrate America," she noted.

According to showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and his longtime collaborator Noah Wyle (who stars on the show as trauma attending Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch and also won a long-awaited Emmy for his second turn as an on screen ER doc), that's precisely the point. Calling American emergency rooms "canaries in the coal mine" where "all of U.S. society's ills always show up," Gemmill explained, "By spending a little bit of time in any emergency department, you can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in the country. We just wanted it to feel real." So, how has that worked in season 2 thus far?

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A particularly interesting way that "The Pitt" has already addressed the American holiday head-on is through one particular patient, Yana Kovalenko (Irina Dubova). An older Jewish woman of Eastern European heritage, Yana, as it turns out, dropped a samovar full of boiling hot liquid and severely burned her leg; though she tells Robby and nurse trainee Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard) she put honey on the burn to try to soothe it, it didn't work. (Emma is deeply confused by this, but as Robby correctly points out, pure honey can have antibacterial qualities and is a natural treatment for burns and abrasions. Unfortunately, Yana's injuries are too severe for honey to do the trick alone.)

That's when we learn how and why Yana dropped the samovar and got injured in the first place. As she tells Robby, she goes to the Tree of Life synagogue in the show's setting of Pittsburgh; while the hospital depicted in "The Pitt" isn't real, Tree of Life very much is, and it was the site of a devastating and deadly mass shooting in 2018. Yana reveals that while she escaped the scene without injuries, she was physically present ... and then, she tells Emma and Robby that a local kid was setting off fireworks and firecrackers, which startled her and made her drop the samovar.

Yana has apparent PTSD from the shooting and was so horribly scared by the noise of fireworks and firecrackers that she believed the noises were gunshots — which is a genuinely gutting statement on the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S. So, what else is happening in "The Pitt" season 2 that accurately reflects what's going on in the country? A lot, actually.

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Elsewhere in "The Pitt" season 2, Robby, Dana, and their various colleagues have had plenty to deal with ... and I think we can confirm, partway through the show's sophomore season, that their cases have done a great job of reflecting the status quo of these United States without being preachy or "too much." (In that Empire piece, Noah Wyle clarified, "We try to be really careful not to be polemical. We just try to present all the factors," meaning they use a lighter touch and approach.)

Throughout the season 2 episodes that have already aired, we've seen an unhoused man whose name turned out to be Troy Digby (Charles Baker) get cleaned up and treated by The Pit's staff, pointing to the very real and very serious homelessness crisis in the U.S. at present. (Another unhoused patient is also treated for potential tuberculosis.) Meanwhile, a new doctor, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), has encouraged residents to use AI for their charts, creating minor havoc with Robby looking on disapprovingly. (Currently, AI regulations across careers are ... shaky at best.) Finally, an inmate has been treated after an attack, with doctors like Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) arguing with his police escort to take his handcuffs off so he can be treated more effectively. (The U.S. notably has the highest incarceration rate in the world.) Then, when Dana realized that the inmate, played by John Lee Ames, was malnourished thanks to his insufficient diet in prison, she manipulated the situation so she could admit him.

These are just a few examples, and we'll surely see more as season 2 of "The Pitt" continues to drop new episodes on Thursdays at 9 P.M. EST on HBO Max.