I'm clearing out my drafts and archives and queueing everything on this blog so if you see a post from like 2014 re-appear in your activity feed, no you don't <3
i mean this genuinely i think the pitt s2 would have been significantly better if they had made baran al hashimi the lead character. we should have started with her driving in to work instead of robby. would have made the clear case that the show is not the story of one man but of an entire industry. would also allow the show to center a different set of traumas and struggles as well as a different approach to governing and tackling the weight of responsibility inherent to er work. in so many ways baran’s hyper competence and strict adherence to rules would serve as the perfect structural parallel to the more cowboy er act of robby and abbot in s1. her reveal of a life long struggle with illness which she ruthlessly plans around so that it never effects her work, how she is hyper collaborative and still fucked over, how even her breakdown is kept off the company clock would be a perfect callback to robby’s own much more self centered break down. and switching protagonists opens a discussion about how men and women are held to different leadership standards, as well as who we expect to see at the helm of a prestige television series. and who ends up in the background.
s3 langdonmel where they are besties and Langdon is indeed divorced and hooking up with women. Regularly. And whenever he tells Mel about it she feels a certain type of way but she doesn’t know exactly what she is feeling. But she lets him tell her about it. Because she’s a good friend. Then Mel goes on 1 single date and langdon genuinely crashes the fuck out. And Mel is so mad at him because WHAT? She has to hear all about these different women he’s with and puts up with it but she goes on 1 date and he’s bitching at her? what is his ISSUE? and then they bitch at each other all day literally brat4brat they are gonna rip each others heads off etc etc etc
if season 3 is supposed to be focused on robby sitting at rock bottom and doing the work to try to get well again, then i would have kept mohan there and made her better than ever. because if he really does see himself in samira and resent her for it, him coming back and seeing that she thrived under anyone else's guidance would get right under his skin.
he could see his own potential for improvement and EMPATHY (something samira has an abundance of) reflected back. robby could dig his heels in and keep projecting his own self-hatred onto her, except we see her character development in how she's stronger and won't accept that treatment; not just in a weak "i belong here" way, but truly standing up for herself. the reflection could reverse, and mohan could grapple with her future in medicine after seeing what a shell it's turned robby into. MANY MORE OPPORTUNITIES!
The biggest issue in the pitt season two is the writers killed their own momentum at every turn and then acted confused when it didn’t work for people (how could it)
Trinity’s a new R2, drowning in work and seeing a new attending come in who she doesn’t like on the same day as Frank’s return to the ER. She’s stressed and overloaded and her position is being threatened and her tone all season is…she’s sleepy. Trinity is tired. Instead of her fighting for her place in the ER like we saw in season one, metaphorically elbowing people as a way of reasserting herself, she sits at a desk and charts. For 75% of the season. It doesn’t go anywhere, nothing happens with it (she makes a mistake and it’s caught and the lecture about it is so mild she doesn’t even stand up). Trinity spends a season designed to push her buttons doing nothing but talk about the characters around her
Robby’s planned a suicide trip that from the opening of the season is already clearly a bad idea. But because of the format of the show, instead of it being a sudden announcement or a reason to talk to him, everyone spends the season wishing him well….because they’ve known about it for weeks. There’s nothing left to discuss. And the audience knows Robby’s not killing himself - it’s an empty threat - so every Robby scene goes the same way: you’re heading out? Ah man that’s so out of character, well have fun and see you later (Robby face of ‘there won’t be a later’). By the time Robby actually said he’s suicidal I rolled my eyes because it had been textually overplayed for thirteen episodes. Robby started at the end of his character arc for the season and was given massive amounts of screentime like he was going to progress somewhere (nope)
Frank is back in the ER he used to thrive in, returning with who knows how many rumors stacked against him and a checklist of people he knows he’s wronged. It’s emotional and tense and such a good premise for real character exploration, and then the season conspires not give him any space for emotional catharsis. Louie’s death was the biggest fumble I’ve seen in modern TV in a long time for both the character and his impact on the show. It was rushed and verbally sad but tonally nothing. Frank works the hotdog case afterwards, Dennis doesn’t even know about it, everyone’s repressing so hard that no one does anything. Instead of a private moment between Frank and Louie with could-have-beens and grey areas about who’s still in Louie (and Frank’s) life after addiction - we got a bunch of characters standing in a room (I though the ER was packed) 90% of them not speaking (then why are they here) as Robby reveals omnipotent Louie knowledge in a monologue (that’s not impactful). And then the season moves on and we get more time from Trinity and Robby doubting Franks recovery than Frank himself discussing it. Frank’s recovery isn’t about him, so he spends the season waiting to impact other people
Samira’s arc was a mess from top to bottom and that fact that the writing did that to her and then the editing doubled down on it is disappointing and exhausting to the nth degree. She should have been a shining star of the season, pushing and pulling with Frank on various cases to keep the energy up when other plot drivers had to do something else. Instead she was shoved into ‘lecture’ patients to learn medical lessons that she’d already know, had her position in the ER stolen by Dennis because her boss is straight up racist, and didn’t get to interact with anyone with the authority an R4 should have (and then they kicked her off. Because WOC aren’t allowed to argue with Robby and stay on the show 😐)
Add onto all of these character choices where they’re positioned to stand still until acted on (paralyzing the show for episodes at a time), the environment was also changed in a way that’s a negative for any building any impact or momentum.
The removal of Gloria means that Robby becomes the ER rule guy to everyone (including Baran) - he’s the enforcer and the victim. There’s nothing for Robby to narratively push against because he’s the one defending the system.
The choice to stop shooting from Robby’s POV gave the camera too much freedom and instead of getting to explore characters in more personally engaging situations, we completely lost any sense of tension and movement in favor of lingering conversations (the Annie conversation between Robby and Trinity should have been a third of the length at least).
The complete avoidance of a central conflict is the worst of the bunch though. First it was going to be the computers going down and that was going to lead to drama (patients getting lost in the gaps, missing medication being blamed on Frank, doctors on top of each other because they have to interact to share information). Then it was going to be the waterpark patients coming in to swamp the ER. Then it was going to be how do they do hand off when the ER is so overcapacity and still drowning with patients
And then they didn’t do any of it. Victoria missed something with a patient but she’s a med student. Nothing went wrong with medication or missing patients, they just kept track of it. They got some waterpark patients but there was nothing distinguishing them from the other people already in the ER or showing the system being filled past capacity so that trickled out into nothing. Hand off was just…completed.
I’m shocked by how many examples of killed momentum I have and it devastated character impact for the whole season (which reduces the scale of the characters).
The middle of the season felt like it was spinning its wheels, keeping people separate so they could have one formative conversation 2/3rds of the way through the season and have an arc by the finale. Characters were paralyzed, didn’t emote, emoted internally, or just never found out about things to keep them from reacting in ways that would genuinely shake up dynamics. It’s disappointing and exhausting to see so many choices sabotaging characters then recognize that they took screentime from WOC for white male characters THAT WEREN’T EVEN BEING UTILIZED
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