Noah Wyle and John Wells on making another season of TV sensation The Pitt

Public service used to be something to aspire to. Not necessarily literally in terms of working in a government department.

But to be of service to the community, to the people in our lives. To be a force for good, to do good. Like Superman. Like The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet. Or the doctors and nurses on The Pitt.

Perhaps that’s why The Pitt has resonated so strongly in an era where extreme individualism and self-first values reign. The medical drama set inside a metropolitan hospital’s frenzied emergency department represents an idealism that is in short supply in the real world.

One of the show’s characters, charge nurse Dana Evans, says midway through The Pitt’s second season, which starts this week, “We do what we can to provide the best care to traumatised people on their darkest days”.

This line of dialogue isn’t accompanied by soaring, cloying music with a big “important moment” neon sign. It’s said matter-of-factly, as if good intentions, compassion and professional competence were perfectly unremarkable.

Much has been written and said about The Pitt being almost a throwback to old-fashioned broadcast TV given its medical procedural genre framework, its episode count of 15 a season and weekly release, and that it’s returning bang on one year after its premiere.

But maybe the nostalgia it’s evoking is not just in its structure and format, but in the core of what it stands for – a commitment to public service. Helping other people doesn’t make you a chump.

When The Pitt was announced to be in development, the presiding narrative around it was that it was Noah Wyle and producer John Wells’ ER follow-up, and the biggest story attached to it then was a still-pending lawsuit from the estate of ER creator Michael Crichton.

As soon as the series actually arrived, that changed. What everyone was talking about was the excellence of the show itself, and how it exposed a desire for longer-form, character-driven storytelling, a reprieve from the plot-forward eight-episode miniseries that had become the norm in the streaming era.

The run-up to seasons one and two couldn’t be more different. Before its first premiere, the marketing and publicity was relatively tame. Wyle had been wheeled out for some limited press, but there was no tour, not even a premiere event. It was strong reviews and week-to-week word-of-mouth that drove its popularity.

A year on, the series returns to considerable fanfare. It won Emmys for best drama as well as acting nods for Wyle (his sixth nomination and first win) and Katherine LaNasa, and just this week, a trio of Critics Choice gongs.

The first season actually built viewers as the series went on, attracting that other old-fashioned concept in TV, water-cooler conversation. More and more audiences were watching and talking, including healthcare workers on TikTok who gave their approval, especially about the realism of the show.

Shabana Azeez, the Australian actor who plays the ensemble’s youngest doctor, Victoria Javadi, liked the grittiness of The Pitt. “It feels almost British to me,” she said. “The commitment to realism, the lack of shine, nobody is wearing make-up, everybody is wearing loose scrubs.

“We’re not very sexy.”

The Pitt started small but Fiona Dourif, who plays Dr Cassie McKay on the series, noticed that as it went on, she was getting recognised every day.

“‘Why is the barista being so nice to me?’,” she recalled thinking. “But the coolest thing is that most of the time, the people who actually come up and say something were medical professionals who have embraced the show and feel really seen.”

This time around, Warner Bros, the studio which owns HBO Max, the streaming platform which The Pitt calls home, did a full-court press junket for not just Wyle but the ensemble cast, many of whom were not big names before The Pitt.

“I’m amazed we’re going a two-day junket for a TV show,” Wyle told The Nightly. “I haven’t done TV shows the past several years that had big junkets.”

The filmmakers, which includes Wyle who also serves as an executive producer, and writes and directs episodes, were already working on season two as the first season was gaining traction. But the praise and accolades didn’t change the plan, they knew what they needed to do.

“John Wells alleviated us from the anxiety of the sophomore slump by basically saying, ‘You don’t need to make it bigger, faster, stronger and scarier,” Wyle said. “You just have to do it again, you need to remember what you were trying to do the first time and do it again faithfully.

“So, it took a bit of pressure off us to (not have to ask) how we outdo ourselves with a bigger mass casualty event. Well, an air-show disaster? No, no, no. We just need to take it back to an average day, maybe a little bit more than average because (season takes place) on a holiday weekend, and show the aggregate toll of what the shift can take on these people.”

The writers and producers did a post-mortem after production wrapped on the first season to look at what worked and what didn’t, what themes they wanted to revisit and expand and what new ones they could explore.

They consulted with new experts in the field, and one of the elements this season involves how AI and advanced technologies fit into an emergency department, both the benefits and the pitfalls.

There are a handful of new cast members in the fold, including two more student doctors, a nurse on her first day, an attending doctor that creates a bit of tension with Wyle’s Dr Robby, and a slew of different patients and cases.

The new characters are introduced to the audience the same way the original ones were – patiently and organically. It’s one of the great strengths of The Pitt’s writing and performances in that it’s a believer in show don’t tell.

There’s no quick exposition dump in the first two minutes or other lazy narrative devices. Each character has to earn your investment, and the experience is richer on both sides.

That was one of the advantages of HBO Max giving the series a 30-episode, two seasons of 15 chapters each, order from the beginning. The writers knew they had the time and space, and that’s not something you always get.

“A lot of times, they want everything upfront,” Gemmill explained. “They want to know everything about everybody, and they don’t understand that then you don’t have a show anymore. You’ve just told everything.

“(The studio) was more patient with us, and we were able to tell the stories. What we tried to do was be authentic. When you go to a new job and you meet someone, they don’t tell you everything about their lives. You have to piece together what they drop throughout the day.”

Wyle, Wells and Gemmill all worked together on ER and that earlier series came, to different extents, to define their careers.

That The Pitt is being feted as rejuvenating that old-school version of making TV – the high episode count, the weekly release, a new season every year, a familiar environment – has a lot to do with the fact audiences trust this team because they’ve done it before.

Wyle revealed there had been some earlier push-back to the decision to release episodes weekly rather than all at once, a tactic Netflix popularised. “That’s the water cooler conversation that used to take place at the office or at the garage, and you’d have to wait a week before you got the next instalment.

“That six days of conversation in between episodes, that percolation you see online as people break down the episodes, talk about the characters, create memes, whatever.”

We had also trained ourselves out of associating streaming with shows that could last more than a couple of months. Wyle said he had people call him after episode eight and thank him for a great season, “and I’d say, ‘You’re only halfway!”.

“This idea that we were giving you more than you’ve been given for so long was really exciting, and then to be able to say, ‘no, you don’t have to wait three years before it comes back, we’ll be back on your TV in January’.

“We’ve just got to write it and shoot it real quick. Seems almost impossible in this day and age, and given how tired we all are right now, it may kind of be impossible.

“But it’s great for all of us that like working to be able to stay in it, and to keep these relationships, which are right now so fruitful and collaborative, going 12 months a year is exciting.

“It feels great to be able to give viewers who have been so loyal in how they received the first season, another season before it fades from memory.”

There may be a fuss over The Pitt’s revival of TV as TV, but Wells is almost amused by that particular aspect. For the man who was also showrunner of The West Wing, this is a no-brainer.

“We did it on network television for years,” Wells said. “What’s remarkable is that everybody seemed to forget about it for a decade in this competition to get people to sign up for streamers by doing bigger and bigger, and dropping them all at once.

“The audience has always been very clear about how they would really like to watch a lot of their programs. It was kind of right there, in front of everybody, for 50 years.

“We want to be connected to community, and part of our community is what we watch, what we read, what we want to talk about. The cliché is the communal fire, being around it and talking about something.

“That’s something that we want as human beings. It’s not unique to what we’re doing with this show, but it’s nice that we are part of reminding people that’s actually what everybody wants.”

We also want characters such as Dr Robby, nurse Dana and the ensemble of The Pitt. They’re not angels, they all have flaws, foibles and personal baggage, but they work as a unit to treat and help people in need.

At a time when the political and business powers-that-be want you to believe that to be of service to others is to be a fool, it’s even better that we get to watch these characters and these values across 15 hours, week in, week out, year in, year out.

To marinate in the world of The Pitt for longer isn’t just good television, it’s good for the spirit.

The Pitt season two starts streaming on HBO Max on January 9