In its second season, the award-winning medical drama is a scarily reflective show for the many Americans who watch it

If you were stuck in the waiting room at the fictional Pittsburgh trauma medical center (PTMC) – and, as is the case with most real emergency rooms, to be at “the Pitt” almost certainly means waiting for hours (unless you’re imminently dying, but even then …) – you would at least have a lot to read. Paperwork and entry forms, for one. Signs warning that “aggressive behavior will not be tolerated”, a response to the real uptick in violence against healthcare workers. A memorial plaque to the victims of the mass shooting at PittFest, which drenched the back half of the acclaimed HBO Max show’s first season in unbelievably harrowing, bloody, very American trauma. Labels on the many homeopathic remedies carried, in Ziploc bags, by a prospective patient deeply skeptical of western medicine and big pharma. Promotional literature on the larger hospital system, for which The Pitt is its cash-strapped, paint-stripped, constantly beleaguered front door.

And, in its second season, which premiered earlier this month, so-called “patient passports” that supposedly help you understand the procedures and expected wait-times at an urban emergency room. The leaflets are the brainchild of Dr Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), the tech-affectionate, norms-challenging attending physician introduced this season as a foil to the more by-the-books Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the series anchor played by recent Golden Globe winner Noah Wyle. Dr Robby, the show’s raison d’être and the core of viewer sentiment, is skeptical of the patient passports, as he seems to be of most change at the Pitt; their introduction is one of many seeds planted in what will surely become a larger thematic battle between tradition and innovation, emotion and rationality, old, haunted attending and his upstart replacement.