In one of the least surprising shows of TV network confidence in recent memory, HBO president Casey Bloys announced tonight, at the premiere event for season two of HBO Max critical darling The Pitt, that the series was also being renewed for a third installment.
This is not, to put it lightly, much of a shock: The show is less than three days out from winning a Critics Choice Television Award for Best Drama, which will presumably fit in snugly with all the other statuary it’s hauled home since debuting back in January of 2025—including, prominently, Emmy wins for Noah Wyle, co-star Katherine LaNasa, and for Outstanding Drama Series. The show’s second season, meanwhile, is already an overwhelming critical success, as advance viewers have raved about the series’ ability to raise the stakes in a Pittsburgh emergency room without losing its emotional core. (The A.V. Club‘s own weekly episodic coverage of the series will kick off on Thursday, alongside The Pitt‘s second-season premiere.)
In other words, there was really no reason to think Bloys and HBO wouldn’t immediately order another season of the show, which was created and showrun by ER alum R. Scott Gemmill, working with his old collaborators Wyle and John Wells. Sure, it’s hypothetically possible that audiences that turned up in droves to watch the hour-by-hour drama of the show’s first season—which also starred Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, and Shabana Azeez—will suddenly lose interest in the second, at which point Bloys and his team will have to content themselves with merely having another season of one of TV’s most critically well-rated series on their hands. But reviews for the show’s second season have made it pretty clear that its first was not a fluke, making this one of the easier decisions we imagine has crossed Bloys’ desk in a hot minute.
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