HBO’s “The Pitt” Bringing Esoteric Healthcare Issues to Mainstream Audiences Amid Cascading Accolades

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column features spoilers for the current season of The Pitt, and the sentiments reflected therein are the author’s own – not necessarily reflective of those of RACmonitor or ICD10monitor. Artificial intelligence (AI) was not used in its composition.

Dwindling staff and surging volume in an acute-care hospital’s emergency department, contributing to ED boarding.

Verbal and physical abuse of frontline healthcare workers.

Use of AI for drafting actual clinical notes.

Each is a topic covered during recent years by a RACmonitor or ICD10monitor article published online.

Each is also a topic covered during an episode of HBO’s hit television series “The Pitt.”

As the show continues to act as an awards magnet and a driving force of pop-culture zeitgeist, it’s also doing something far more understated: bringing a broad range of real issues facing the providers of contemporary American healthcare to a much wider mainstream audience.

With its Season 2 finale coming up this Thursday evening, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at precisely how and why.

A Hit in the Making

If The Pitt’s success feels familiar, there’s a good reason. All three of its executive producers previously teamed up to create “ER,” the NBC drama that ran for more than 300 episodes across 15 seasons from 1994 to 2009, becoming the most-awarded medical TV show ever made and rocketing George Clooney to A-list fame.

The format for The Pitt isn’t really all that different; each season is comprised of 15 episodes covering 15 hours in a fictional Pittsburgh hospital’s ED. The genesis for the show was, of all things, social media: a star of both ER and The Pitt (and one of the aforementioned three executive directors, Noah Wyle) reportedly noticed during the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic that he kept receiving heartfelt direct messages from fans who credited ER with sending them into the medical profession (and sharing anecdotes from the unique challenges and stressors they were being exposed to in the present era).

When the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike ended, work on the new show began, with Wyle himself drafting a mission statement for the purposes of casting, according to a Variety article published last year.

“This is a very specific type of show,” it read. “It’s intense. It’s fast-paced. It’s like theater. We are a group of players. If you can be a team player who is ready to lock in with a family, then this is the place for you.”

Members of the nascent cast received real medical training – a reported two weeks with three ED physicians, picking up lingo, techniques, even bedside manner – and the first season debuted last January. Thirteen nominations at the 77^th Primetime Emmy Awards followed, including five wins (Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Casting, and three acting awards).

What the show arguably does best is seamlessly blend seemingly obligatory dramatic storylines with a starkly realistic and unrelenting breakneck pace of medical assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. The former is highlighted by the very obvious yet apparently undiagnosed PTSD afflicting Wyle’s Dr. Michael Robert “Robby” Robinavitch in the wake of his mentor’s death from COVID during the early stages of the pandemic – plus a colleague’s drug addiction, the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the ED, and the aftermath of a mass shooting (the last surely hitting close to home for the actual city of Pittsburgh, where 11 people died in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018). The latter is highlighted by a dizzying succession of diagnoses; interestingly, both healthcare news sources (like Sherringford) and entertainment news sources (like Screenrant) have compiled long summaries of fictional patient information (the first one listed in Sherringford’s is none other than rhabdomyolysis with secondary acute renal failure and uremic pericardial tamponade experienced by a 31-year-old triathlete presenting with muscle soreness and shortness of breath, rapidly progressing to cardiac arrest.)  

Renowned Realism

So, just how realistic are the scenes involving medical treatment?

A January 2026 NPR article sought to answer just that by interviewing Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.

“I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care – the highs, the lows and the frustrations – The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created,” he said. “And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.”

It’s legitimately difficult to find criticism of the show from the real-world medical community that doesn’t sound nitpicky or hollow (one gripe that the CPR seen in the show doesn’t quite resemble the real thing was met by a healthcare worker – and an executive producer – noting that they literally can’t realistically depict the actual procedure without exposing an actor to serious injury).

The show being situated in an urban environment means it also depicts a variety of topics germane to the social determinants of health (SDoH) – and it generally nails those, too.

“As I watched episodes back-to-back-to-back, absorbing more and more medical ‘expertise,’ I couldn’t help but notice how many storylines intersected with my *actual* job at the National Women’s Law Center,” that organization’s Counsel for Health Equity and Justice, Lex Rummel, wrote in a piece published last April. “The Pitt tackles real-life issues faced by women and girls navigating the health care system, and doesn’t shy away from emphasizing that certain populations, like women of color and women with fewer financial resources, face notable barriers and disparities.”

Nowhere was that more poignantly depicted in the show than by construction worker Orlando Diaz, a patient portrayed by William Guirola. His first appearance in the ED, early in Season 2, is prompted by a minor fall and nasty blood-sugar spike that is only moderately improved by treatment before he leaves against medical advice – in the wake of a series of emotional conversations with his family about their lack of health insurance or ability to cover existing medical bills (despite its initial success, he orders his daughter to take down a GoFundMe post meant to help).

Hours later, toward the end of Season 2, Orlando reappears, this time after a 20-foot fall at his construction site, leaving him in far worse shape. Whether it was a legitimate accident or a suicide attempt to provide his family a life-insurance payout to cover his medical bills is left deliberately ambiguous (prompting the pitch-black quip from Dr. Robby, overheard by a horrified colleague, that “not picking a higher spot to jump from” was his “mistake”).

The big-picture stuff is well-balanced by the nitty-gritty details. If casual fans had no clue what a patient being “tachy” meant midway through Season 1, surely they’ve picked up on it by now, without ever even needing Google. Earlier this year, the show’s social-media feeds featured a 27-second video in which members of the cast were asked which medical terms tripped them up the most during repeated takes (“intercellularly” was featured prominently).

Looking Ahead

If the show’s overarching storylines share a single common thread, it’s a tendency to portray emerging trends that will surely only grow more relevant as the digital age continues. To wit: the hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) is taken down by IT in response to a ransomware attack early in Season 2, prompting a whirlwind of activity relating to dry-erase boards, hard copies of notes, and yes, even fax machines – bringing the generational divide of the ED staff into occasionally comically sharp relief.

An article by Wired Culture Reporter Zachary Siegel, published in February, did a deep dive into the advent of AI in healthcare, as portrayed in the show.

“Dr. Al-Hashimi is introduced this season as a ‘clinical informatics expert’ who demonstrates for the student doctors how she uses a ‘generative AI app’ to record doctor-patient interactions and then, in seconds, populates the patient chart,” he writes. “In Episode 6, the app hallucinates an appendectomy, confuses medications, and mistakes ‘neurology’ with ‘urology,’ royally pissing off a surgeon operating off clinical slop.”

That’s a natural fit to generate dramatic friction with the painfully more old-school Dr. Robby. When he references using one’s “gut” in diagnosing a patient, Dr. Al-Hashimi is initially incredulous.

“It’s this thing AI will never have,” he explains.

“In the swirl of clinical vignettes, case after case shows how treating patients is still a deeply human endeavor that requires clinicians to rely on their own instincts, memories, and experience of the world to make on the fly decisions,” Siegel wrote. “In The Pitt, medicine is a blend of art and science.”

As for the future of the show itself, it was renewed for Season 3 a day before the current season debuted – generally a good sign. It’s difficult to envision HBO giving up on it anytime soon, given its budget – at a reported $4 to $6 million per episode, with regular recycling of sets, props, and costumes, it’s a steal, in the context of the industry. And Forbes reported in February that it saw its season-over-season viewership numbers rise by 50 percent (it also recently passed a key benchmark threshold of more than a billion minutes viewed).

As notably, though, the show has become thought of as a welcome antidote to the pattern of hit streaming television series routinely featuring lapses of two to three years between seasons (if you were a big fan of the first season of Pluribus, the excellent Apple+ science-fiction series from Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, I wouldn’t recommend checking on the latest news regarding when Season 2 might arrive). Likewise, its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace is a welcome reprieve from the growing number of so-called “second-screen” shows (with plots and dialogue so simple, they’re intentionally designed for viewers simultaneously engaged with a second screen, i.e. a smartphone or tablet).

If it stays on its current trajectory, The Pitt is all but certain to remain culturally relevant while also prompting desperately necessary discussion about the big-picture sociopolitical underpinnings of the various challenges it depicts – all circling back to the utterly bewildering reality of the U.S. being the only developed, industrialized, high-income country on earth without universal healthcare.

I certainly hope the ones making the decisions about those sorts of things are paying close attention.

References

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/noah-wyle-the-pitt-er-sequel-lawsuit-1236362824

https://www.sherringford.org/post/medical-diagnoses-in-the-pitt-a-comprehensive-review-of-medical-conditions-in-season-1

https://screenrant.com/the-pitt-season-2-patients-explained

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5671156/pitt-season-2-tv-show-medicine

https://nwlc.org/how-the-pitt-sheds-light-on-real-life-health-equity-themes-like-black-maternal-health-fertility-care-and-abortion-access

https://www.wired.com/story/the-pitt-finally-offers-a-stark-warning-on-ai-in-medicine

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2026/02/26/hbos-industry-the-pitt-and-seven-kingdoms-viewership-numbers-explode