‘The Pitt’ creator breaks down season 1 finale, teases season 2

This article contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of The Pitt, “9:00 P.M.”  

The doctors at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center made it through their grueling 15-hour shift — barely.

In the season 1 finale of The Pitt, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) grapples with the senseless loss experienced in the emergency room that day and his reaction to the chaos, while Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) tries to remind him of all the lives they saved. On the hospital’s roof, where Robby found Abbott in the premiere, Abbott tells his friend, “I think I finally understand why I keep coming back now. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we do, we can’t help it. We’re the bees that protect the hive.”

The interns are left reeling from their first day (Javadi cracks that she might be turned off medicine altogether), and we get a bit of comedic relief when Santos (Isa Briones) invites Whitaker (Gerran Howell) to be her roommate after discovering he’s living in an abandoned hospital room.

At the same time, viewers are left with questions surrounding Dr. Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) drug use and whether Robby will report him. And though we learn that police have apprehended Doug Driscoll, the angry patient who attacked Dana (Katherine LaNasa), it seems as though she really is done for good.

Below, Entertainment Weekly speaks with series creator R. Scott Gemmill and executive producer John Wells about the season 1 finale and what we can expect from season 2. 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you decide to bring Langdon back in for the mass-casualty event?

R. SCOTT GEMMILL: It just seemed like something he would do. Langdon’s been in denial a little bit about his problem. A lot of what he has said to Robby is true, that he’s been trying to wean himself off. He knows that he shouldn’t be doing this. Benzos are also very, very difficult to kick. It’s a lot harder than some other drug addictions, which is why it’s taken him so long. And in his mind, one, they did need him. It was a mass casualty; he would’ve shown up whether it is his day off or a child’s birthday. And then in some ways, he’s hoping against hope that Robby will see how good he is and this might color Robby’s decision whether to report him or not, because at one point he even says to Robby, “None of this will happen unless you report me.” Which is, for him to even ask that of Robby, really uncool. So he’s hanging on desperately to the one thing that really means a lot to him, and that’s his medical career.

We see Robby really struggling and other staff members making comments like, “Is Robby seeming okay to you? What’s going on with him?” We know that it’s the anniversary of his mentor’s death. We see the Covid flashback, so we kind of know. But is there anything else going on that might be adding to his distractedness, especially in the finale? 

GEMMILL: I think it’s the aggregate of the whole day. This was a day he normally doesn’t work, but he’s going to come in and then it’s complicated by the events of the day. He finds out that his star pupil is a drug addict. He finds out that a former relationship he had may have resulted in a pregnancy that was aborted that he was never privy to. Then you have the mass casualty. He’s getting a lot of pressure from above to improve his patient satisfaction scores. And there’s a threat of the hospital ER even being taken over by a multinational.

And then the closest thing he has to a family, which is Jake [Taj Speights], essentially turns on him when he can’t save Jake’s girlfriend. So Robby’s whole thing is he’s never addressed the Covid of it all and he just keeps swallowing it. He’s very good at giving advice, not so great at taking it, thinks he has it under control and these things do. You can bury them for a long time, but eventually they want to get out. The monster wants out and, unfortunately, usually gets out at the least opportune moment, and the cracks today all start to trigger it until he has no control over it and it gets the better of him in the end. It’s probably the best thing that could have ever happened, but that remains to be seen. 

Can Robby and Jake’s relationship be repaired, or do you think there’s no coming back from what they went through? 

GEMMILL: I would like to think any relationship can really be repaired if everyone puts in the work, but I think Jake’s also very young. Trying to rationalize something with a teenager is different than trying to rationalize something with one of his cohorts. So I think there’s some growing to be had on Jake’s part, for sure.

It must have taken so much strength for Dr. Robby to just walk away without saying anything when Jake tells him, “You’re not my dad, I was never your friend.”

GEMMILL: Yeah, that’s really harsh. I think Robby also knows that that’s the pain, that’s the pain and frustration and sadness that Jake needs to get rid of, and when he’s purged that from himself and the maturity will step in. And I’m sure that’s a relationship that will continue and perhaps strain for a while and maybe different, but I think that relationship will remain. 

Should we be pretty worried that Dana doesn’t return? We see her taking the photos off her desk and when Robby says, “See you Monday,” she doesn’t respond. 

GEMMILL: Yeah, I was even thinking we should have had her flip him off, but that was the bridge too far. But I think Dana — I think the thing about this show is you should never get too comfortable with any one character because the nature of the business and the world is that life throws things at you unexpectedly and things can change in a heartbeat. So I think when Dana leaves, she’s very intent on leaving for good. That’s why she takes her photos. That’s why she doesn’t admit to Robby whether she’ll be back Monday. And I think she has to take some time and think about things. And I would guarantee if next season took place the next day that she wouldn’t be there. So when we do come back, we’ll have to see. But she’s a trooper and that place is her home and she’s kind of like the den mother. So I think it would be hard for her, difficult for her to stay away as well. But when she does come back, I imagine she would be a little bit different.

Now that I know Whitaker was living on that upper floor, I feel like there were kind of signs throughout the season, but I was still very surprised. Was that something that was based in a true story you had heard about? I’m interested to know where that came from. 

GEMMILL: Well, I sleep in my office sometimes, so it’s kind of based on a real story. No, I mean part of it is medical school is extremely, extremely expensive. And Whitaker comes from a family that’s not necessarily of means. They’re farmers. So they’re facing their own challenges. Whitaker is the kind of guy that is a little bit pragmatic and sees that he’s working in this hospital all the time. He works long hours and there’s a perfectly good bed upstairs in an empty wing that he could crash in one day between a shift, and then why not? And he doesn’t have the money really to find a place. 

It’s not really based on anyone I know of or we know of, but it’s based on the reality of young people in that profession who are not coming from a place of means. And that’s why when they leave, some of them have student loans in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is a huge burden. Especially when next year would be the first season that Whitaker as a character would even get a paycheck. 

Now that he and Santos are going to be roommates in season 2, can we expect some buddy comedy out of them?

GEMMILL: I would expect a lot of buddy comedy out of those two. As much as we can muster. 

Will season 2 follow the same 15-hour format that season 1 did? Will we maybe see some of the doctors outside the hospital?

JOHN WELLS: It is going to be a single shift. The intent here is to let us follow and understand and feel what happens to emergency room physicians and all the other medical personnel during those kinds of shifts. We’ll get senses of what their lives are outside and we’ll get information based on what’s happened in their lives outside, but within the workplace. It’s a workplace family, and that’s where we’re going to learn about our characters. They come to work and they clock in and they stay until they’re done. So this isn’t a show that’s going to end up following a lot of people home and seeing them for Thanksgiving dinner. 

Will we see the same doctors next season, or will it be a new shift? Will it be the night shift? 

GEMMILL: We’re going to stick with the day shift next season just for a number of reasons. Eventually, maybe we’ll go to a night shift, but that would be down the line. We may see some new people. I think that’s the nature of the hospital, that there are always people that come and go. We’ll see some of the regulars and we’ll probably introduce some new people as well. Not everyone works the same shift every week, so we may see some new people and some others who we’ve come to know might not be working that shift, but it doesn’t mean they’re gone for good.

WELLS: It’s also, they do overlapping shifts. So there are also people who come in later and leave later or come in earlier and leave earlier. So you may see a certain amount of that, but it’s about the workplace.

It’s not going to be the next day. It’ll be — a significant amount of time has passed when we come back.

Do you have a certain number of seasons plotted out for a certain story you’d like to tell? Or are you just going season to season, shift by shift?

GEMMILL: I only think of a season at a time. We do talk about things where, oh, it’d be nice to introduce something here that might not feel like we could justifiably get there in this season. So that way, maybe, we set some stuff up for down line, but I think it’d be a little pretentious to me to think of six seasons worth of work. I don’t think that far ahead, but we do think of things for some of our characters and if we need to lay something in with the hope that there’s a season that follows.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Pitt season 1 is streaming now on Max. 

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