The Pitt is now more than halfway through its somewhat streaming-unprecedented 15-episode season on HBO, and we’ve just learned that it’s going to tackle yet another current political issue, as it often does: ICE.
In an interview with Matt Belloni on The Town, producer John Wells revealed that an ICE situation would be coming up in season 2, one that they let HBO know about ahead of time, reportedly because of WB’s giant pending acquisition (first with Netflix, now with Paramount).
“I don’t want to be in a situation where it’s a surprise,” Wells said. “And 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 goes on to say he doesn’t want to have the show be “preaching to the choir” with just a singular point of view on issues. Though it has taken specific positions on things like anti-vaccine sentiments and ballooning healthcare costs.
Season 2 of The Pitt has featured a lot of law enforcement-adjacent storylines. There’s a prisoner who is brought in who appears to be malnourished in prison. There’s a SWAT team member who is shot in the throat and saved, and the show’s beloved Dr. Abbott goes in with SWAT as a medic. There’s a security guard who tases a young black man on a campus, and he is reprimanded by the actual police. Most recently, Charge Nurse Dana is furious when she realized that the police have not picked up a rape kit she collected two weeks ago, when it was supposed to be a few days, max.
Now, ICE. It’s being brought into the show because “it’s a real issue in emergency rooms,” says Wells, though we do not know how it’s going to play out, and that storyline has not started yet. This will come in the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, though with both of those incidents happening in January, that was well after season 2 had been written.
The Pitt does have a large, liberal following, and it remains to be seen how this storyline will be handled and whether a “both sides” approach will play well with its audience. I would expect some measure of controversy once that storyline starts unfolding, and those individual patient arcs can last weeks. It may take some time before we know how this goes, but it’s rare that we know a specific storyline is coming in advance, short of what’s shown in trailers.
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