“The Pitt” became one of 2025’s hugest pop-culture sensations, piling up award-show hardware, endless fan-fics and some of the most feverish anticipation for a sophomore season in years. (And, of course, Noah Wyle’s 10-storey face gracing seemingly every building in Los Angeles this month.)
“It was totally unexpected,” Ontario-born showrunner R. Scott Gemmill laughs. “What was unique for us was, we had shot the whole show before it had aired, basically. We only had one show left, so we had no feedback whatsoever. The show could have come and gone for all we knew.”
We checked in with the creators and cast for some behind-the-scenes intel on how this fast-paced marvel gets made along with a peek at what’s on the board for Season 2 of the hit.
The studios had just one note for the team — who promptly ignored it
Despite its commitment to ultrarealistic medical procedures, there’s one thing you won’t see on the show — or, rather, hear: music. At first, the studios balked at this choice, but the creators fought for it and HBO Max came around. “When you’re in the ER and you get bad news, there’s nobody playing a violin to make it even more impactful,” Gemmill said.
“I think it is a big part of how the realism works,” added director and executive producer John Wells. “Because we’re not trying to highlight or tell you how to feel through melody or rhythm. You’re experiencing exactly what you experienced if you were there.”
The show is filmed as close to real time as possible
“The Pitt” is also rare in that it’s shot in continuity, meaning they make the episodes in order. Every minute of it is laid out so that they know what’s happening with all the patients who are in the ER at every moment, including all the background actors, according to Wells. During the writing process, they create maps of the ER to ensure that each character moves at the speed a professional would in real life, down to how long it takes to walk from room to room or procedure length. Actors are warned before they’re hired that their procedure might take six episodes, but three of those “hours” might just be waiting around for someone to show up and X-ray them.
“I’m really just gonna sit there?” Wells remembered them asking. “And I go, ‘Yeah, ’cause you’re really in the emergency department.’”
Each season begins with intensive consultation with physicians, nurses and experts in various medical fields, discussing the issues that worry them the most these days; the show also has working doctors and nurses on staff that they can consult for each script, and each episode has a designated doctor.
“You throw a penny on the set and you hit an actual health-care worker,” laughed Fiona Dourif, a.k.a. Dr. McKay.
Now “The Pitt” is even infiltrating the actual medical community; Supriya Ganesh recently learned that a medical school had been showing clips of her compassionate Dr. Mohan to demonstrate expert bedside manner. “No pressure at all, right?” she laughed.
Sometimes the writers want to compress a procedure down to 30 seconds, but the pros will kibosh it, ensuring that it takes the full six minutes or whatever it takes IRL, Gemmill said. “We don’t cheat the medicine.”
The pace is just as fast behind the scenes
Almost all the actors are hired from a theatre or dance background, Wells said, giving them the flexibility and endurance to match the intensity of the pace and content, with the main actors going through a multi-week medical boot camp.
Once shooting starts, the pace is unrelenting; it’s not uncommon to only get a script on the day of the table read and then film it a couple of days later, according to Isa Briones, who plays Dr. Santos.
Most of the lights are built into the set (versus being set up differently for each shot), giving the set a real 360-degree feel, so “there’s not a lot of sitting around, it moves very, very fast,” said Shawn Hatosy, the actor behind fan favourite Dr. Abbot, who is on his fifth show with Wells.
“As a performer, it brings an immediacy; it keeps your adrenalin up and it feels very real.”
Gerran Howell, a.k.a. Dr. Whitaker, enjoys the choreography required in the more frenetic sequences. “You’re saving a life, so you can’t improvise in a trauma scene,” he said. “It’s almost like dance steps and we’re going through it and it’s very quick and it has to look good.”
Co-star Katherine LaNasa, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of charge nurse Dana, found unique ways to keep the energy up during shooting: “I had to do a lot of pushups … to just keep my body kind of revving a little bit!”
The new ‘day’ promises plenty of fireworks
Season 2 is set on the notoriously wild July 4 weekend. “People are off work, people are barbecuing, people are consuming alcohol, using things with gunpowder,” Gemmill said. “So it’s basically a recipe for disaster and it just lends itself to a lot of fun, a lot of visuals; there’s a lot of barbecuing, there’s a lot of people out on the water, and Pittsburgh has a lot of rivers around it, so it’s just lends itself to mishaps that may send you to the ER.”
Season 2 of “The Pitt” debuts Thursday at 9 p.m. on Crave with new episodes streaming Thursdays.
