[The following story contains spoilers from the season two finale of HBO Max’s The Pitt, “9:00 p.m.”]
The Pitt season two finale conversation between Shawn Hatosy’s Dr. Jack Abbot and Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch about their respective mental health struggles is not the first time that the two close friends and fellow attending physicians have talked about suicide.
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In fact, the topic comes up just minutes into the series’ first episode as Robby finds Abbot on the roof and jokes that jumping on his shift would be “rude.” Later in the first season, it’s Robby who’s up on the roof as Abbot tries to reassure him while Robby’s crying and talking about how he let himself and his staff down.
Though both Robby and Abbot walk out of the hospital together at the end of season one, it was that moment that planted the seeds in Wyle’s mind for Robby’s suicidal thoughts in season two.
“What would happen if Abbot hadn’t come back? If Abbot hadn’t stepped out and talked Robby down at the end of season one? Where does that scene end? How does Robby get off that roof? He was out there closer to the edge than Abbot had been that morning,” Wyle says. “I think that’s where the flirtation with this notion of checking out again came from.”
From there, mapping out Robby’s dark mental health journey in season two just involved “responsible storytelling,” Wyle says.
“If the one everybody looks to for help and guidance is the one that’s in the most trouble, who does he turn to?,” he adds. “And who can he show vulnerability to that he may not have it all worked out, especially when everybody looks to him to be such an authority and competent leader? So who helps the helpers seemed like a really good theme. And doctors don’t make good patients seemed like another good theme, this sort of isolation of leadership positions, feeling like you have to wear a double mask, was an interesting thing to explore.”
And with the American College of Emergency Physicians reporting that roughly 300 to 400 physicians a year die by suicide and the American Medical Association noting that “physicians are at a higher risk of suicide and suicidal ideation than the general population,” Wyle acknowledges “it’s not statistically an anomaly; it’s actually quite common.”
The team behind The Pitt got a real-life reminder of that halfway through the season, Wyle recalls, sharing that he learned from a friend of one of their directors that someone like Dr. Robby in his hospital, “who had gotten everybody through COVID and had been really an amazing figure,” went home one night and shot himself.
Wyle and the Pitt cast taped a message to the hospital staff saying they were thinking of them, and the experience amplified the importance of the story they were telling.
“That just underscored, to me, like how tragic [it] would be if Robby went through with it,” Wyle says, finding himself thinking, “We need to really explore this. We really need to take this all the way down to the studs to shout our comment.”
Portraying that, though, Wyle says was “a fairly unpleasant headspace to occupy every day, 12 hours a day, from that same emotional place that you left the day before.”
And he says it involved “fine brush work” to slowly reveal Robby’s state of mind across the season.
“You really want to make sure you’re not letting out too little or too much,” he says. “And you certainly don’t want it to seem like it’s getting gratuitous. That was my big fear. You can’t show too much in all these episodes, because it slips away at the professionalism. It becomes a little bit like, ‘OK, enough already’ to an audience member that’s very sophisticated, jaded and thoughtful.”
As for the significance of that final scene with baby Jane Doe, Wyle says it was not only “appropriate” to end the season with his character with that “innocent, abandoned life,” but also that it gives Robby the chance to “be able to tell a dark secret to somebody who can’t repeat it, who can’t respond to it, in a room that is almost hallowed ground for this kind of emotion.”
“This is the room where all of Robby’s ghosts are, most of them anyway,” Wyle says of the place where he had his meltdown in season one and watched Dr. Adamson die during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking ahead to season three, Wyle is reluctant to share too many specifics, in part because he doesn’t “know yet,” as the show’s writers, led by showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, are still mapping out the storylines.
But he offers some mild speculation about where Robby goes next.
“Knowing that if he wants to see more wonderful things and have people love him, he’s going to have to meet that universe more than halfway,” Wyle says. “And how to go about doing it is what we’re playing with now.”
As for whether Robby goes on his planned motorcycle trip and how long his sabbatical lasts (three months or just a few days), Wyle says “all of that is being discussed.”
And with respect to the writers’ approach to storytelling, Wyle says they’re trying to keep the focus relatively narrow and centered around the characters.
“As this show keeps scaling larger and larger in its reception, resisting the temptation to scale it larger and larger in its narrative is almost like a mantra that we keep repeating in the room, that this is about a very small community treating a very small community, and it’s representative of a much larger problem in population,” he says. “But the more specific and focused we keep our narratives just being what you would find in this arena and what these characters will find in their lives, the more we’ll be on mark. It feels more authentic to start with what’s in our environment already and then work outward.”
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