Finished The Pitt season 2
It's good! I think it's better than the first season. I liked it a lot! This post is going to contain spoilers for it!!
I'll say that the PSA/after-school special stuff continues for part of the season... but the second half is again much more about interpersonal conflict between the cast. After the Big Twist of the season hits, there are much fewer moments where a whole room full of people start doing public health comms Greek chorus style.
Each of these seasons relies on that surprise event raising the intensity of the ER and forcing the cast into conflict. The first season had a mass casualty event... this one brings its twist in earlier, around the halfway point, but picks something a bit less intense with the cyberattack. Because it's less intense, they prevent the story from feeling slack in the last few episodes by having fully half of the cast line up for 1 on 1 scenes where they beg Robby not to kill himself. (It feels repetitive, but by the ending you're bought in for these characters, and I didn't hate it.)
Structurally, it makes a lot of sense for a modern streaming TV show like this to put some kind of rising threat into the last third of the season. But... who or what else can they throw into peril without making things feel like a retread of the first two seasons? I trust they can work around it, but I feel like the show did already pull the two most obvious tricks it was possible for them to pull. Another mass death would feel like a repeat of the first season. Having a cast member completely crack under burnout could feel like a retread of this season.
I think literally killing someone in the cast during an episode would jump the shark for this show, and given the tone they've been hitting, I don't expect them to try something like that. But it feels like this - or onscreen romance, which similarly feels out of scope for this story - are some of the only remaining ripcords they could pull.
I'm putting in my bet for a very specific escalation: pathogen terror! Robby will survive until season three... but will we see him and Dana confront their barely-hidden COVID trauma? Perhaps an extremely sick patient needs to be quarantined, and the most fucked-up cast members must return to and overcome the worst traumas they introduced in season 1. This is my best guess for how the show could ratchet tension without doing a complete retread.
I'm sure that if I worked in healthcare I'd be able to think of ten or twenty surprising and unique things they could do, though. They're clearly trying to depict real hospital crises that regular people don't know much about. Excited to see where they go!