‘The Pitt’ Team Talks Robby & Jake’s Estrangement, Doug’s Arrest & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 1.]

The Pitt Season 1 may have just taken place over the course of one (extended) shift, but a lot happened in that 15 hours.

From Robby (Noah Wyle) dealing with the anniversary of his mentor’s death to the numerous losses of the day (including his stepson’s girlfriend) to the reveal of Abbot’s (Shawn Hatosy) prosthetic to Dana (Katherine LaNasa) maybe being “done” after being punched by a patient (not the first time) to McKay (Fiona Dourif) nearly getting arrested after drilling a hole into her ankle monitor, it was a jam-packed day.

Below, stars Wyle, Hatosy, LaNasa, and Dourif and executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells offer insight into some of the key moments. (Plus, read deep dives on the finale with the cast and the EPs as well as Season 2 teases.)

Robby’s future

In Episode 11, Dana tells Robby he’s a good man and not to let the hospital take that from him. Even with everything that’s happened and what he went through over the course of this shift (leading to a breakdown then him standing on the roof, close to the edge), could it?

“Doctors reach burnout and emergency room physicians and nurses burnout, and they step away. And I think what she’s trying to say is, ‘What you bring to medicine, don’t let this place take it away. Remember what that core thing is.’ That’s one of the great challenges for every emergency room physician, and we talk to a lot of emergency room physicians and nurses, and it’s trying to hold onto that thing in the midst of what you’re actually doing all day long. So I would hope that he’ll never lose it, but it’s not unusual,” said Wells.

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Gemmill then brought up a statistic he found: “Within the next 18 months, one out of three doctors are thinking about leaving medicine or something like that. And for nurses, in the next 20 days or something, it was 17% are thinking of not practicing anymore. It was crazy high stats. And that’s just because of the burnout and what they are put through.”

Abbot talked him down from the roof, and as they left the hospital, Robby asked if therapy was helping him. It would be interesting to see if that could be in Robby’s future as well.

For now, Wyle thinks, “He’s going to come back to work. What he is going to do when he goes home and how that evening’s going to go from there, he is going to knock himself out and get some sleep and then take it day by day. My guess is he’s a one step forward, two steps back, kind of guy sometimes, or two steps forward, one step back guy. So it won’t be a linear road, but I don’t think that he can go through the experience that he’s just had and be conscious of how out of control he got for a moment there without recognizing that there’s no more pretending to himself. There’s no more compartmentalizing to be done. The compartments are full and something’s got to be emptied now.”

Robby and Jake’s estrangement

Robby tried long past the point he should have to try to save his stepson Jake’s (Taj Speights) girlfriend, who was one of the shooting victims at Pittfest. After, Jake convinced him to let him see her in the makeshift morgue, then asked why he couldn’t save her, leading to Robby’s breakdown. And when Robby went to check on Jake in the finale, the young man told him they’re not friends and he’s not his father. That was the first of a series of moments that led Robby up to the roof.

“Not to be too morbid about it, but in that moment, I just felt that Robby felt a little nihilistic about everything. If there are no more anchor lines and you’re totally adrift, what’s the point in anything really? And I think that’s kind of where he is at,” admitted Wyle. “The one-two punch is Jake telling him that and then having to go in and break the news to Leah’s parents. And then there’s this moment where he is about to go back onto the ED floor and it’s chaos in there. It usually is. And that’s it. It’s just like, what’s the point? Who am I doing this for? Can you ever get ahead of it? Are you ever appreciated? Is it helping my life? Am I a better man for what I do? All those things come crashing down.”

With Season 2 picking up 10 months later, that relationship will remain strained, according to Gemmill.

“I think Jake has a lot of growing up to do, but he also has a lot of grief and frustration and sadness to work through, and Robby knows that,” he explained. “Robby’s seen people deal with grief. I think he has a good relationship with Jake’s mother still, obviously. And I think that’s something that Robby’s going to work on, but it will be at Jake’s pace and not Robby’s, and Robby’s aware of that. But I think a lot of what he said was just out of the moment, and he’s probably going to have to deal with a certain amount of post-traumatic stress himself. Anyone who was involved that will.”

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Doug Driscoll (Drew Powell), the patient who punched Dana, was found by the police and arrested. They wanted to know if she wanted to press charges, and Robby immediately said yes. But Dana just wanted to forget the day.

As Robby and Abbot are leaving the hospital at the end of the finale, the latter says he prefers working nights and his therapist thinks he finds comfort in the darkness. And so we couldn’t help but wonder if he there might be a question of whether he finds more comfort in the darkness or in the chaos?

“I just love that line,” Hatosy said before admitting he didn’t know the answer. “I think Abbot is somebody that has got so much buried inside of him, so much trauma as we met him at the beginning of this thing on the roof, that he’s just obsessed with work because if he allows himself to be by himself, he might not know how to handle it. So even in his off time, he’s sitting there listening to a police scanner. So he’s just addicted to the work because otherwise he will have to look in the mirror and maybe not like what he sees.”

That’s also because he doesn’t really have much away from work. “He works all the time,” Hatosy continued. “Every chance he gets. I think they have to take a day off, but he’s in the next day, and I think he works the night shift, I think he works the day shift, too, whatever’s available. He’s such a fascinating character. I haven’t ever experienced a character who is universally liked as Abbot. I’ve played a lot of roles, and some are complicated, some are messy, but there’s always something that people latch onto with a role that says, I don’t like that guy. And look, I mean, I’m not saying he’s not flawed, he’s definitely got his issues, but his flaws are human and relatable, and I think despite them, and because of them, people respect, they trust him, they want him in the room when everything’s failing.”

McKay’s near arrest

At the end of Episode 14, cops showed up to arrest McKay for what she did to her ankle monitor (and with only a week until she was due to get it off!), but fortunately, Robby spoke up for her and vouched for how much she helped during the influx of shooting victims — including saving a cop — and she was uncuffed and told to just get it fixed in the morning. (She’ll be without it in Season 2.) But that happened so fast that she wasn’t even able to get to resignation that consequences were coming her way, Dourif told us.

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“When the arrest happened, it was panic and rage and humiliation. So I don’t think I got to resignation really before it was handled. I think there’s probably some angry words to a probation officer that happened after that shift,” she said.

We’d gotten a hint of something in Santos’ backstory with the way she reacted with and how she threatened the man who molested his daughter earlier in the season. In the finale, she shared with a patient, to help him, that someone took advantage of her and her friend when they were younger, and her friend took her own life.

Gemmill revealed that scene was a late addition. “We knew what we were going to do for [Episodes] 12 and 13. We knew where we had to get to in 15, [but] 14 was one we had to figure out because we knew we’d built to such a big crescendo, and then how do you not drop off the cliff and still end satisfyingly for the audience? I think there was some feeling that Santos was sort of an unlikeable character to a lot of people because she was so brash and used her comedic chops to deflect her own pain and to sort of beat on people,” he explained. “I thought we redeemed her a little bit with the Silas character, the molestation, and I felt like she should have another win to show that she’s not all brash. Here it allowed us to get some backstory from her in terms of why she behaves the way she was, and that backstory ties into what she did with Silas as well, and it felt like she is a good doctor and she will make that connection when she needs to, and she felt she needed to. I thought that was a nice little gift for her character to be seen as a real, caring doctor when push comes to shove.”

Little moments between Dana and Abbot

Something we’d like to see more of in Season 2 is Dana and Abbot together, considering they’re the two people who know Robby the best. They had one brief exchange in Episode 14, and that was it.

“I went up to one of the writers when we were around 112 and I said, ‘I don’t say anything to Abbot,’ and they said, ‘About what?’ I said, ‘I have never had a spoken written scripted word with him. You got to think, he’s my other Robby.’ And they were like, ‘Right,'” LaNasa revealed. “And so we started choreographing in the looks. So all those looks and stuff, we started making that on the fly during the mass casualty when he and I were looking about Robby, me calling him over about Robby and kind of some nonverbal stuff. And then they wrote us that nice little thing.”

LaNasa also raved about all her season she shared with Wyle: “I just love all the simple scenes with Noah, all the walk and talks, all the stuff. We’re both older. We’ve both been working a long time. Sometimes the most fun part of work is just feeling your experience. All of that choreography that we do as we walk through it, it’s actually complicated, and so just sort of dancing with him. He’s like my dance partner, so I loved everything with him.”

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