The new year is approaching fast, and that means the 2026 TV schedule as well, which will include the much-anticipated second season of the Emmy-winning drama The Pitt. The series, which premiered in January with an HBO Max subscription, has been praised by healthcare workers for its accurate portrayal, and star and EP Noah Wyle even made sure to change one detail for Season 2 after receiving negative feedback. Now, a real ER nurse is giving her praise.
Tez, a 26-year-old pediatric nurse practitioner who works in the emergency room of a Washington, D.C., spoke to People about watching a show like The Pitt, which has a lot of similarities to her own job and workplace… even down to the food. But there’s one particular aspect that she was impressed by, especially since she revealed that most shows have gotten it wrong:
When you have a patient suffering a cardiac emergency, there are certain heart rhythms. On the EKGs that you see, in every medical show, the big squiggly line that’s usually green that goes up and down, that’s the electrical activity within your heart. Day one of any cardiac class, you are taught not to shock. You don’t put the pads on and deliver electrical impulses to the patient’s heart when the patient has no pulse or asystole, that flat line on the screen.
There are a lot of hospital-set shows, and considering the number of times a character can flatline on them, it’s surprising that many get it wrong. However, The Pitt is not one of them, and it is one of the many things that the series has gotten right. Tez was pleasantly surprised when she came across a scene involving Wyle’s Dr. Robby and a flatlined patient:
I can’t remember who he was talking to, but Noah Wyle was talking to one of the professionals, and they went to prepare to shock the patient. He said, ‘No, you don’t shock asystole.’ I said, ‘Finally!’ My husband is a paramedic, and I showed him, and he said, ‘Wow, it only took 30 years of medical dramas to make sure somebody said that.’
Wyle, along with creator and EP R. Scott Gemmill and EP John Wells have taken great care in making sure that The Pitt is as medically accurate as possible, so it makes sense that something often overlooked on other medical shows was not overlooked on The Pitt. The show has also been praised for its portrayal of the COVID pandemic and the mental toll it has on healthcare workers, so at this rate, it trumps all the other medical shows.
That being said, regular healthcare workers are not the only ones praising the show. Wyle’s mother, who is a longtime nurse, had a cathartic and catalytic reaction to a medical emergency on The Pitt. And it’s a reaction she didn’t even have when her son was on ER for over 10 years, once again proving how important the series is and how accurate it truly is.
Fans will be seeing how The Pitt continues to bring the accuracy with the upcoming second season, airing this January. The show will be taking a bit of a time jump, taking place several months after the first season, and focusing on the Fourth of July weekend. There will be a lot of pretty insane ways that patients can hurt themselves that likely include fireworks and a barbecue, and who knows what else. A premiere date has not been given for Season 2, but it has been confirmed that it will be sometime in January 2026 on HBO Max.