A new doctor is clocking into The Pitt — and so is a disgraced one.
The Emmy-nominated medical drama‘s sophomore season — again taking place over the course of one 15-hour shift in the emergency department — takes place on July 4th, 10 months after the events of the season 1 finale.
Showrunner R. Scott Gemmill tells Entertainment Weekly that timeline was chosen specifically to bring back Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball); the season will take place over the course of his first day back after completing rehab. (For those who might need a quick refresher: Langdon was caught stealing medication from the hospital, leading to a blow-out fight with Noah Wyle‘s Dr. Robby and the revelation of a drug addiction).
“It was really driven by wanting to have the Langdon character back and knowing how much time he would’ve had to spend in rehab and going through his recovery process,” Gemmill explains. “We knew it had to be about 10 months, [which] took us into the summer. We played Labor Day, essentially, for the first season, so we decide to play this on the 4th of July.”
Gemmill acknowledges that most of the other doctors will be well aware of Langdon’s drug problem by now — “gossip seems to travel faster than the internet” — but there are some new characters that won’t know the extent of what happened. It’ll be the first time Langdon and Robby cross paths since their dramatic fallout in season 1. “Let’s just say there’s a lot of history that has to be resolved between them before they can get back to any kind of normalcy,” Gemmill says.
One such new character is Dr. Al-Hashimi, played by Black Bird and Generation Q: The L Word star Sepideh Moafi, an attending who arrives at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center from the VA Hospital, where she previously worked with Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden) and Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh).
“She’s gonna be someone who’s very progressive in her approach to medicine and believes in the modernization of the medical field,” Gemmill says. “And Robby’s a little bit more old school and there’ll be a little bit of, let’s just say, tension as they try and figure out how to work together.”
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He adds, “Robby has a very specific way of how he likes to run his emergency department, and Dr. Al-Hashimi has her own specific ways of how she likes to run an emergency department, and they’re not necessarily cohesive.”
As Robby navigates these tense relationships new and old, he’ll also be navigating his mental health, which Gemmill says is the “big through-line of episode 1.”
According to Gemmill, season 2 is really about Robby “coming to terms” with the post-traumatic stress disorder he picked up during COVID.
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“One of the things that Robby has a habit of is, he’s very good at telling people what to do, but not necessarily great at taking his own advice,” Gemmill says. “He has to come to terms with setting an example, I think, for those who he works with so that he can’t tell people to get help and to seek help if he’s not doing it himself. So, you know, I think it’s a journey of self-discovery for him as well in terms of his own mental health.”
Robby’s journey includes a plan to take some time off, but it might not be so straightforward, Gemmill teases. “There’s some questions whether he’ll really do it or not, because it’s not in his nature to step away from the work.”
The Pitt season 2 debuts in January 2026.
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