Should you watch "The Pitt"? Of course you should!

Trust me on this one. Bing watch season one if you haven't seen. Then get started on season two.

‘The Pitt’ Season 2 Review: Max’s Medical Show in Good Health

Noah Wyle returns as a Pittsburgh emergency room’s attending physician in HBO Max’s smart, gripping medical drama.

By John Anderson, WSJ

Jan. 6, 2026 4:12 pm ET

One of the better TV reviews ever was delivered by someone I just happened to know, the head of emergency medicine at a major New York hospital: “Have you,” he asked me early last year, “seen ‘The Pitt’?”

My response was probably “Is it real?” and “Is it true?” and he probably said “Close enough” and “We’re all watching it.” But my questions would have been the wrong ones. Reality is overrated. “The Pitt,” now entering its second season of 15 episodes, could probably have made the goings-on at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center terminally boring, if the editing weren’t so sharp, the acting so right and the characters both fresh and familiar. Facts are hardly the cure for dramatic stasis, or Ken Burns would be Quentin Tarantino. Is “The Pitt” an accurate portrayal of emergency-room medicine? I have no idea. But I raced through season 2 like an ambulance on fire.

A multiple Emmy-award winner, “The Pitt” has found what may be the perfect remedy for people with short attention spans, a weakness for pathos and a hunger for detail of the modern-medical variety. Many things happen, never for too long; all kinds of maladies, medications and melodramas are involved. And despite all the cutting-edge diagnostics, it adds up to holistic storytelling.

The opening scene of season 2, just for instance, features Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) en route to work on his motorcycle, wearing no helmet. If he weren’t a trauma doctor, you might chalk up the missing headgear to romantic imagery and an homage to “Then Came Bronson.” But the betting here is that a viewer will be preoccupied by thinking about the multitude of head injuries someone like Robby would encounter in the E.R., and why he doesn’t wear a helmet himself. Which may lead one to wonder about his job satisfaction and general happiness. Especially when it’s revealed that he is on the verge of taking a three-month sabbatical, helmetless, to the Badlands of South Dakota.

Or is he? Nothing is careless about “The Pitt”—when a biker arrives, DOA, a few episodes later, you know people are thinking. But if one had to guess—and this viewer has to, given that only nine episodes were made available for review—Robby’s exit is going to be postponed. It’s July 4th, a holiday weekend; another local hospital suddenly has gone belly up and is sending its patients Pitt-ward. The good doctor is getting involved with his cases and his colleagues, and the dream of an Upper Midwest vacation may have to be put on life-support.

Meanwhile, the cases stack up, among them the minor and the tragic. A baby is abandoned. A little girl is suspected of being abused. A grown man has taken too much E.D. medication: The treatment of his persistent edifice, overseen by four female doctors and residents, is certainly graphic. But not unfunny. Elsewhere in the warren of cubicles, a stabbing victim undergoes surgery that is open-heart and in-your-face. The scalp of the aforementioned biker peels away like the shell on a shrimp.

The gore is fairly restrained given the milieu, where the banter has the same kind of rhythms that infected Mr. Wyle’s old show (“ER”) but is considerably smarter, especially about making itself less obvious and more about character development. When the veteran charge nurse Dana Evans (the piquant Katherine LaNasa) cozies up to a shy new nurse by asking “Ever kill a man in a bar fight?” it’s exactly the kind of thing Dana would say. What develops into a battle of intellects between the brilliant young Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) and the (equally?) brainy new and obnoxious med student James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) suggests dueling chatbots. Their clash is mirrored, on a higher level of the food chain, by that of Robby and Baran al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who is to fill in as attending physician while Robby’s away, and has the social skills of a Portuguese man o’ war.

The introduction of Dr. Hashimi into the existing and highly functional choreography of the Pitt exemplifies the intelligence of the show, created by R. Scott Gemmill. Hashimi charges into the breach with a head full of “improvements” she plans to make before Robby has even gone off duty. She insistently champions AI (“almost intelligent,” says medical student Joy, played by a very tart Irene Choi). The tsunami of eye-rolls she inspires among the staff are silently eloquent. But so is her disregard of her colleagues’ personal space. The direction of bodies in space tells us much: Hashimi is constantly running into people, notably Robby, and although an ER may be a crowded place, Hashimi’s violations are flagrant. Like so many of the characters in “The Pitt,” she’s a person you know. She’s oblivious. She’s the type who barges in through an exit. If this were a restaurant, she’d be fired. But, needless to say, you wouldn’t want to eat here either.