In Season 1, “The Pitt” showed its prescience when the writers included a measles outbreak storyline that aired around the same time an actual measles outbreak was ongoing in West Texas in January 2025.
“I think when you do this for as long as we have, part of our job is to be proactive in terms of stories,” said “The Pitt” executive producer R. Scott Gemmill (“ER”) at the end of Season 1. “It’s just basically looking at what’s going on in the world and extrapolating. … People have to realize we write these months in advance of when we shoot them, so if you’re looking ahead in terms of what’s happening in medicine, what’s not working, what could go wrong, it’s just a matter of time before you know some of those things come to fruition. And we’ve had measles outbreaks in California over the last few years in unvaccinated progressive preschools primarily.”
That prescience on the part of “The Pitt” writers is on display again in this week’s episode, but this time the issue is the arrival of ICE agents in the ER and the impact their presence has.
Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) replies with a profane exclamation the minute he sees the two ICE agents, one of them masked.
ICE agents bring in a woman who they say “took a nasty fall” and injured her shoulder.
“You said she fell?” Dr. Robby asks, a note of incredulity in his voice.
Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) asks the woman if there’s anyone she wants them to call.
“No phone calls,” one of the ICE agents says.
“I don’t want these guys here any longer than they need to be, so let’s find X-ray and fast-track this one,” Dr. Robby says. “We treat her injury and that’s it.”
The storyline plays out over the next several episodes and depicts some hospital staff and patients leaving Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center out of their fear of ICE.
“You’ve been nothing but a distraction and a disruption since you’ve been here,” Dr. Robby tells an ICE agent. “I’m already short-staffed, and I just lost five nurses and half my environmental service team because you walked in. Patients come in here for help because they’re either sick or they’re injured and documented or undocumented, they have a right to emergency care. … Please, for the love of God, can you go over there and wait in the room with your detainee, so I don’t lose any more patients or staff?”
And that’s all before things go really sideways.
Warner Bros. Television, which produces “The Pitt,” declined to make Gemmill available for an interview to discuss the ICE storyline, but in an interview on “The Town” podcast, “The Pitt” executive producer John Wells said he gave studio executives a heads up the storyline was coming. Wells said he was not asked to “tone down” the story.
“Their response was, ‘Good story. Just make sure it’s balanced and we’re not just treating the situation as if it doesn’t have other points of view,’ ” Wells said. “I can say that all of us are approaching what’s going on in this country right now with a certain trepidation and also awareness that there are some possible risks to telling certain kinds of stories.”
That did not deter “The Pitt” writers.
“The thing we have to be careful about when we’re talking about any of these issues, is to make certain that we’re actually presenting both points of view, because we’re not really in the business of preaching to the choir on this show,” Wells said. “We’re trying to appeal to a broad audience, so we know there are plenty of people in our audience who have a different point of view than our point of view, so what is it these doctors are going through that’s truthful? As long as it’s truthful, I think people will stick with us.”
As for what’s coming to “The Pitt” in Season 3, expected to debut in January 2027, after winning the Actor Award for male actor in a drama series, Wyle said there’s never a “shortage of storylines to pull from in an emergency room.”
“When you have characters that are as rich and diverse and as multidimensional as the ones that we have, it’s very easy to plot them into the future and figure out what they would be struggling with at that point,” Wyle said, per Deadline.com. “But, obviously these cuts in Medicare, the ones that are going to affect Americans and put them off the rolls, hospital closures; there’s all sorts of very pressing issues that are facing hospitals and health care workers in America, and we’ve only scratched the surface.”
‘Scarpetta’
Author Patricia Cornwell’s medical examiner character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, has been primed for film or TV adaptation for decades. The character finally makes the jump with Amazon Prime Video’s “Scarpetta,” now streaming its entire eight- episode first season.
Adapted for TV by writer Liz Sarnoff (“Barry,” “Lost”), the first season melds some plots from two Cornwell novels, “Postmortem” and “Autopsy,” showing Scarpetta in the present, as played by Nicole Kidman, and in 1998 where the role is played by Rosy McEwen.
Characters from throughout the book series show up, including Kay’s kooky sister, Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis in full crazy/”The Bear” mode), niece Lucy (Ariana DeBose), detective Pete Marino (Bobby Cannavale) and Scarpetta’s husband, FBI agent Benton Wesley (“The Guardian” star Simon Baker, doing more of a Southern accent than the actor playing the younger Wesley, Hunter Parrish).
By jumping around in time, “Scarpetta” fills in the blanks on relationships (in the family, at the workplace) and the show focuses more on the Scarpetta family than most crime dramas would, which gives the show opportunities for some lighter moments.
Whether the series is faithful enough to the books to satisfy readers remains to be seen, but Cornwell clearly approves: She has a cameo in the first episode as the official who swears Scarpetta into her new role.
