‘The Pitt’ Season 3 Will Balance Medicine and Character Just as Season 2 Did

One of the many good things about “The Pitt” is that it’s part of an increasingly rare cohort of TV shows that return year after year, rather than being held up for years on end by the entropy of streaming. When creator R. Scott Gemmill joined the IndieWire Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast to talk about the show’s work on Season 2 earlier this year, he and the writing team were already in the thick of work on Season 3. 

Another good thing about “The Pitt” is — for all of its rightfully celebrated and rigorous medical accuracy and the team of advisors who help make one very long shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center unfold in near-continuous time — that the work of season-building is deep character work. 

If you’ve ever wondered whether hospital dramas start with a collapsed lung, onset of DKA, or Revolutionary War-era musket wounds as an interesting problem to confront their characters with, it’s actually the reverse on “The Pitt.” Gemmill and the writers do have a well of ideas for medical issues, but those come into play as episodes are being broken down. 

“We have huge whiteboards with individual episodes on them, and then there’s our pool of ideas of things — it may just say ‘dog mauling’ or something. Or do we see Polio come back, or something? We pick and choose from there sometimes,” Gemmill said on the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “Whatever story we’re telling medically, it’s always to support something else, story-wise, for the character, and then we build the medicine around it.” 

That was very much the case with the final episode of Season 2, where Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), staggering through one last Day Shift that is derailed by, among other things, a cyber attack that forces all hospital systems to go analog and requires the ER, among other things, to bring a writers’ room number of whiteboards. Of course, Robby stays late to overlap with Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) and his night shift — Gemmill at least thinks the idea of a “Mateo (Jalen Thomas Brooks) After Dark” night-shift-focused spinoff is funny in the abstract. And of course, Robby is pulled into a difficult case of a pregnant woman with pre-eclampsia that suddenly becomes eclampsia, even as he’s grappling with the specter of his own potentially suicidal thoughts that creep in outside of his work. 

“We knew we wanted to do some sort of trauma that would pull everyone in and force Robby to interact with Abbott,” Gemmill said. The hope was that for the season finale, the writers could craft something that would require a lot of hands and create a sense of “full court press.” They landed on a situation where the doctors would be trying to not only save the mother but also the baby, and there could really be a lot of people in the room, creating multiple lines of action. 

“Once we decide we’re going to do that, we have to plan quite a while in advance because we have to mold the actor who’s gonna play the pregnant woman. A lot of those prosthetics will take eight weeks or more, so a lot of times we’re casting that person two months or more before they’re going to actually play the part. And then, the nature of it is you open up the uterus, and you pull the baby out of the amniotic sac, but once we goop the baby up and put it in the amniotic sac, all the amniotic fluid was washing all the goop off, so the baby was coming out all shiny,” Gemmil said. “Those are things you never plan on having to figure out — well, my special effects team had to figure it out, but they did a great job.” 

Noah Wyle and Ayesha Harris in ‘The Pitt’Courtesy of Warrick Page / HBO Max

There’s a sort of virtuous cycle that works throughout this beat and every episode of “The Pitt.” Opportunities for character interaction, conflict, growth, or flaws lead the show towards specific situations, and those situations then help sculpt character dynamics and growth. The birth sequence doesn’t just put Robbie and Abbott together; it also leads Robbie beautifully into his final scene of the season, soothing the baby Jane Doe and himself. 

“We’re in that process now for Season 3 and, like I said, the medical cases are usually chosen to reflect something either that’s going on in the characters’ lives or to challenge them, to see a flaw,” Gemmill said. 

The tight-knit group of collaborators who make “The Pitt” are also always trying to challenge each other, and make sure they’re not resting on their laurels — and/or Emmys. “We try to push ourselves to do the best work we can and to be really honest with the writing,” Gemmill said. “Our first job is to entertain, and we really take that to heart, and that’s what we try to do.”

“The Pitt” Season 2 is streaming on HBO Max.