The Pitt's Noah Wyle on how Dr. Robby meets his match in season 2

The Pitt‘s debut run took place on one of the most stressful days of Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch’s life. So much so that towards the end of his 15-hour shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency room, while covered in the blood of his stepson’s dead girlfriend, he broke down in tears and had a panic attack after treating gun violence victims. So how can season two of HBO Max’s hit medical drama intensify his circumstances? By taking place on the Fourth Of July, of course. Robby (Noah Wyle) now seems shockingly ready to take a break from his hectic workplace. Or perhaps his attitude is just a front, considering he’s still reluctantly dealing with a lot of problems, like the return of prodigal son Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball). 

This season’s premiere reveals that Robby’s last day before going on sabbatical coincides with his mentee’s first day back after a rehab stint. Frank tries his hardest to have a meaningful conversation with Robby and apologize for stealing the pills, but his mentor is simply not having it. He’s got other problems to deal with, primarily in the form of the attending doctor taking over his leadership role for three months. Sepideh Moafi joins the ensemble as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, who strides into the ER with a plan on how to improve the way Robby ran things and a distinctly different teaching style. 

Robby and Al-Hashimi’s back-and-forth in “7:00 A.M.” is merely the tip of the iceberg for the duo. The rest of season two will continue to explore their fraught yet fascinating dynamic. Moafi tells The A.V. Club that while “initially there’s judgment from Robby because he doesn’t want to change the system, Dr. Al brings something new to the table, so they come to respect each other.” She also notes that joining The Pitt was intimidating because the show turned into “a cultural-zeitgeist piece,” but it “felt calm and chill once [she] met and began working with [her] co-star.” As for Wyle, the actor spoke to us about stepping back into Robby’s shoes as well as his roles as a writer and director this season. 

The A.V. Club: What was your approach to depicting Robby’s evolution after Pittfest and what he’s been up to the last 10 months ? 

Noah Wyle: It’s one of those things we wanted to start planting early on for both the audience and the characters around Robby, the sense that something might be up with him and that he’s not being forthright about it. The quickest way to do that was to show that he’s been working on this old motorcycle and he’s going to go on a sabbatical tour with it. But he’s riding to work without a helmet and telling everybody he does wear a helmet and is staying safe. So if he’s lying about that, then what else is he lying about? What he is masking becomes an interesting question that we keep checking in on as the season progresses. You begin to question the motivations of this trip and what it really represents for him.

AVC: Was the opening scene in which Robby nods at the ambulance driver while riding to work improv or was it part of the script? 

NW: I think they came up with that on the spot for us, actually, the thinking being it was professional courtesy from a doctor to a paramedic in that moment. 

AVC: Can you talk about bringing Sepideh Moafi into the show and the purpose of giving Robby a counterpart with whom he has this type of friction? 

NW: Sepideh is an amazing addition to the cast. What her character represents for the show is pretty significant. I don’t think Robby would willingly give this emergency room over to just anybody in his absence. So, having somebody who represents a completely different methodology and approach to medicine provides a lot of good antagonist tension between the two of them as they try to get on the same page. Dr. Al-Hashimi is very charming, intelligent, confident, and attractive, so it goes positive-negative between micro-flirtation and microaggression between the two of them as they figure out what makes the other person tick.

AVC: One of the causes of a clash is her insistence on using an AI, which Robby vehemently opposes. You’ve spoken up about this type of tech before. 

NW: AI and what it represents as a technology is pretty impressive when you apply it to diagnostics and suddenly put all of the brain scans that we’ve ever taken into it, and it can do predictive analytics on seizures before diagnosis, or the detection of cancer cells before symptoms, or even just the efficiency of it. That’s the type of AI that Dr. Al-Hashimi is preaching so that it can free up a doctor’s hands and eyes away from a screen to be able to interact with the patient, and increase that sense of intimacy between them. 

Now, Robby’s point-of-view, much like my own, when you apply AI to our industry, is that these efficiencies come with redundancies. They put people out of work who have been in these positions for a long time. You may be able to do the job faster and cheaper, but at what human cost and does it improve the art? If it’s not making the art any better, it’s just making it cheaper to produce. So then, is that really a technological advancement, or is this more of capitalism run amok? The jury is still out, but I don’t want to discount the benefits when applied to aspects of medicine, because it really is an incredible learning tool. 

AVC: Robby is reluctant to talk to Frank in the premiere while he is making amends. Can you tease how their dynamic will play out and maybe force Robby to introspect?

NW: I think Robby was hoping not to see Langdon at all and go on his sabbatical before he ever came back. The fact that their shifts are going to overlap is an inconvenience for him. In terms of why there is friction between them, Langdon obviously is coming back and working the steps and walking the penitent road and trying to find acceptance and validation again. He really wants Robby’s validation and forgiveness. It’s fairly clear at the outset that Robby feels a sense of betrayal, a sense of a breach in the trust of their friendship. But as the season progresses, you’ll begin to see that Robby takes a lot of responsibility for Langdon’s lapse as well and has a sort of guilt about the moral failings as a teacher that are heavier than this failing of his student. He burdens himself, maybe unnecessarily, with a lot that we start to unpack in season two.

AVC: You also wrote season two’s third episode and directed the sixth. How does wearing all these different hats affect how you view or contribute to the show overall? 

NW: Those jobs feel very different, but they’re really not all that different. Writing is the most challenging one because you’re creating something from nothing. You’re taking something very dry, like a data point or a headline, and trying to put it into flesh and blood and into characters that will have an emotional impact on the audience. And while it is collaborative in the room, the actual writing of it is fairly isolating. It’s like a personal experience that I enjoy a lot. Then you get on the set to act and to direct, and that’s a very collaborative experience to try and figure out what’s appropriate and the most efficient and elegant way of executing it. 

As an actor, I’ve always had this ability to be focused on my little wedge of the pie but also see the pie in its entirety. Directing is just doing the opposite. It’s looking at the pie in its entirety first before I look at my little wedge in the pie, but I’ve done it enough times now that it doesn’t distract or throw me. The concern is really whether my directing the show will be distracting or problematic for the people around me. I was really gratified to have the support of the cast and crew and have them feel like it was such a natural progression of events after season one that we could maybe do it again and succeed. 

Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.   

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