{"id":519356,"date":"2026-06-05T03:02:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T03:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/519356\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T03:02:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T03:02:16","slug":"the-pitt-r-scott-gemmill-interview-writing-season-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/519356\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Pitt’ R. Scott Gemmill Interview \u2014 Writing Season 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many good things about \u201cThe Pitt\u201d<\/a> is that it\u2019s part of an increasingly rare cohort of TV<\/a> shows that return year after year, rather than being held up for years on end by the entropy of streaming<\/a>. When creator R. Scott Gemmill<\/a> joined the IndieWire Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast<\/a> to talk about the show\u2019s work on Season 2<\/a> earlier this year, he and the writing team were already in the thick of work on Season 3.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another good thing about \u201cThe Pitt<\/a>\u201d is \u2014 for all of its rightfully celebrated and rigorous medical accuracy<\/a> and the team of advisors who help make one very long shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center unfold in near-continuous time \u2014 that the work of season-building is deep character work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"THE<\/a> \"Lord<\/a> <\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever wondered whether hospital dramas start with a collapsed lung, onset of DKA, or Revolutionary War-era musket wounds as an interesting problem to confront their characters with, it\u2019s actually the reverse on \u201cThe Pitt.\u201d Gemmill and the writers do have a well of ideas for medical issues, but those come into play as episodes are being broken down.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have huge whiteboards with individual episodes on them, and then there\u2019s our pool of ideas of things \u2014 it may just say \u2018dog mauling\u2019 or something. Or do we see Polio come back, or something? We pick and choose from there sometimes,\u201d Gemmill said on the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. \u201cWhatever story we\u2019re telling medically, it\u2019s always to support something else, story-wise, for the character, and then we build the medicine around it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That was very much the case with the final episode of Season 2, where Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle<\/a>), staggering through one last Day Shift that is derailed by, among other things, a cyber attack that forces all hospital systems to go analog and requires the ER, among other things, to bring a writers\u2019 room number of whiteboards. Of course, Robby stays late to overlap with Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) and his night shift \u2014 Gemmill at least thinks the idea of a \u201cMateo (Jalen Thomas Brooks) After Dark\u201d night-shift-focused spinoff is funny in the abstract. And of course, Robby is pulled into a difficult case of a pregnant woman with pre-eclampsia that suddenly becomes\u00a0eclampsia,\u00a0even as he\u2019s grappling with the specter of his own potentially suicidal thoughts that creep in outside of his work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew we wanted to do some sort of trauma that would pull everyone in and force Robby to interact with Abbott,\u201d Gemmill said. The hope was that for the season finale, the writers could craft something that would require a lot of hands and create a sense of \u201cfull court press.\u201d They landed on a situation where the doctors would be trying to not only save the mother but also the baby, and there could really be a lot of people in the room, creating multiple lines of action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we decide we\u2019re going to do that, we have to plan quite a while in advance because we have to mold the actor who\u2019s gonna play the pregnant woman. A lot of those prosthetics will take eight weeks or more, so a lot of times we\u2019re casting that person two months or more before they\u2019re going to actually play the part. And then, the nature of it is you open up the uterus, and you pull the baby out of the amniotic sac, but once we goop the baby up and put it in the amniotic sac, all the amniotic fluid was washing all the goop off, so the baby was coming out all shiny,\u201d Gemmil said. \u201cThose are things you never plan on having to figure out \u2014 well, my special effects team had to figure it out, but they did a great job.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'TheNoah Wyle and Ayesha Harris in \u2018The Pitt\u2019Courtesy of Warrick Page \/ HBO Max<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sort of virtuous cycle that works throughout this beat and every episode of \u201cThe Pitt.\u201d Opportunities for character interaction, conflict, growth, or flaws lead the show towards specific situations, and those situations then help sculpt character dynamics and growth. The birth sequence doesn\u2019t just put Robbie and Abbott together; it also leads Robbie beautifully into his final scene of the season, soothing the baby Jane Doe and himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in that process now for Season 3 and, like I said, the medical cases are usually chosen to reflect something either that\u2019s going on in the characters\u2019 lives or to challenge them, to see a flaw,\u201d Gemmill said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The tight-knit group of collaborators who make \u201cThe Pitt\u201d are also always trying to challenge each other, and make sure they\u2019re not resting on their laurels \u2014 and\/or Emmys. \u201cWe try to push ourselves to do the best work we can and to be really honest with the writing,\u201d Gemmill said. \u201cOur first job is to entertain, and we really take that to heart, and that\u2019s what we try to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Pitt\u201d Season 2 is streaming on HBO Max.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the many good things about \u201cThe Pitt\u201d is that it\u2019s part of an increasingly rare cohort…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[18,117,42867,19,17,90166,194677,45766,128],"class_list":["post-519356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-noah-wyle","tag-r-scott-gemmill","tag-the-pitt","tag-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116695279670601617","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}