Is HBO's Weekly Release Schedule Hurting Season 2 of "The Pitt"?

The first season of HBO’s medical drama The Pitt raked in some truly impressive accolades, winning both the Emmy and the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series as well as a slew of acting awards for star Noah Wyle. While we’re only three episodes into season 2, this second go-around has failed to resonate quite as strongly so far.

The most common complaint from viewers on social media is that the plot this season simply isn’t as interesting. “[T]he pitt s2 is such a snoozefest and everything is 10x cornier and not in a good way,” one X user recently wrote. “[T]he new the pitt season is so boring and nothingburger,” another lamented.

Set 10 months after the events of the first installment, season 2 takes place on the Fourth of July — typically a very busy day for emergency rooms across the country, for obvious reasons — and follows the same real-time structure, with each episode depicting one hour in a single 15-hour shift. (So far, it’s only 10 a.m., so presumably most of the fireworks-related injuries will start rolling in later in the season.) But is the same structure that enhanced the realism of The Pitt and set it apart from other medical series in season 1 to blame for the lukewarm reception to this new batch of episodes?

No, the problem isn’t the real-time pacing; it’s the fact that, as it does with nearly all of its original programming, HBO is rolling out season 2 on a weekly basis instead of releasing the entire season all at once. That’s what they did with season 1 too, but the show took a while to find its way into the zeitgeist, gaining popularity through word of mouth after the season had already aired. It’s safe to assume that most people who watched the debut season did so by binge-watching it. For those viewers, the weekly rollout of season 2 is a jarring change of pace, one that feels slow and counterintuitive to the show’s premise.

every complaint about pitt s2: idk it just feels really slow with no flow and like nothing has happened. not like s1 last year which i binge watched in two days
— 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐲 🪞 (@LITTLEBlRDS) January 23, 2026

Binge-watching The Pitt highlights the chaos that doctors and nurses who work in the ER must endure every day and the speed with which they’re supposed to navigate it by immersing us in it. If something crazy that we’re particularly invested in happens in one episode, we’re able to simply call up the next one to find out how it’ll continue to play out. That’s the advantage of binge-watching any show, of course, but for one where timing is so crucial to the plot, it feels especially important. It’s natural that the first few hours of a day in the ER would feel uneventful compared to the afternoon and evening hours, when emergency rooms are generally busiest. That’s fine when you can breeze through those early episodes to get to the meatier stuff later in the season, but when you’re limited to one episode a week, it means the first month or so of season 2 is inevitably going to feel slow and boring.

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But the weekly release schedule isn’t completely to blame for season 2 falling flat thus far. The 10-month time jump makes sense logistically; for a show that’s set almost entirely within hospital walls, there’s no way to delve deeply into the trauma the characters would no doubt be coping with in the wake of the mass shooting that dominated the final hours of season 1, because we only ever see them at work. But it also means that we’re introduced to a significant number of new characters in season 2 — including some deeply annoying new medical students and Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (played by Sepideh Moafi), who’s there to take over as chief attending for Dr. Robby (Wyle) during his forthcoming sabbatical — while we’re left to piece together what exactly is going on with all of our season 1 favorites. The show’s decision to spend the first few hours of season 2 trying to getting us to care about entirely new characters while relegating the ones we initially fell in love with to the sidelines is only hurting it thus far.

When a series like The Pitt receives such critical acclaim upon its debut, there’s always going to be added scrutiny and talk of a sophomore slump. The problem is that, no matter what happens in the remainder of season 2, it’s going to be extremely difficult to match the high-stakes drama of season 1. Most things that these doctors deal with in subsequent seasons are going to feel underwhelming compared to their emotional and gripping response to a mass-casualty event. Last week’s episode ended with the news that another hospital in the city was experiencing a “code black” and diverting all of their patients to Dr. Robby’s ER instead, so we know that things are about to get more intense, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any scenario that could possibly be as harrowing as what they experienced last year.

It’s a problem another medical show, Grey’s Anatomy, ran into as well; that series became a laughing stock in later seasons for the sheer volume of traumatic catastrophes they incorporated into the plot — those poor doctors at Seattle Grace have endured an active shooter, a bomb exploding in the hospital, a fire, a flood, several plane crashes, a ferry crash, an ambulance crash and an earthquake. Talk about an unlucky bunch.

Ultimately, the jury is still out on whether or not The Pitt peaked too early. Will season 2 pick up steam and eventually live up to the hype? I know one thing: I’ll be waiting until I can binge the whole thing to find out.

Meet your guide

Bonnie Stiernberg

Bonnie Stiernberg is InsideHook’s Managing Editor. She was Music Editor at Paste Magazine for seven years, and she has written about music and pop culture for Rolling Stone, Glamour, Billboard, Vice and more.