A Surprising ‘The Pitt’ Season 2 Update As It Takes On Trump

The Pitt was unabashedly progressive in season 1 when it came to issues like treatment of certain patient populations (overlooking conditions that disproportionately affect black patients) or larger scale issues (extolling the efficacy of vaccines). Now, it’s plainly stated that the show is going to be incorporating current Trump-era policy changes in season 2.

A new interview in Variety with The Pitt star Noah Wyle, Dr. Robby, who might be about to win an Emmy for that part, has him discussing how The Pitt will take on these issues in season 2:

“You’re not making value judgments. You’re just painting a picture, and if it’s accurate enough and it’s representative enough, it becomes a bit of a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see in it and you draw your own conclusions from it. If it looks like the system is untenable, unfair and skewed towards one population over another, maybe it is.”

Executive producer John Wells spells out specific issues that will be brought up, some of which stem from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that went into effect this year:

“The Medicaid changes are going to have a significant impact, and you don’t have to take a political position to discuss what the impact is actually going to be,” Wells says. “I don’t want to have an argument about whether or not they’re appropriate, what Congress did or didn’t do. But they’re going to have on-the-ground, immediate consequences in emergency rooms, and nobody’s arguing with that. That’s a bipartisan agreement. You’ve got very Republican senators from Missouri like Josh Hawley agreeing that this is going to be a problem.”

The article also goes on to say that issues like undocumented families and ICE raids may play into season 2 as well. That said, The Pitt season 2 is already filming, so much of that writing is already in place no matter what Trump does next.

The Pitt was accused of perhaps being overly “preachy” with some of its progressive aspects in season 1, pausing in the middle of the action to lay out of a series of talking points, no matter if they are in fact accurate. Doing checkboxes of modern day political issues does seem like a recipe to perhaps turn off some audiences.

However, those may be audiences that need to hear it. Wyle says they have a responsibility to 10 million viewers to lay facts bare about the current situation in American medicine. As someone deeply embroiled in that community, I can tell you that yes, without question issues like Medicare availability and vaccine denial are enormous problems that plague doctors and staff, and it does make sense the show would reflect that if it’s aiming to continue to be a realistic depiction of medicine.

I do expect all this to be controversial when The Pitt is released next January, a year into Trump’s term and based on very real policies that have been put in place over that time period, rather than just larger, structural issues the way we saw him year one. We’ll see how everyone reacts then.

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