Home For The Holidays
Make The Pitt Season 3 A 15-Episode Thanksgiving Special, Please
I’ll bring the plates.
Cold weather is coming for The Pitt. While not much is known about the medical drama’s third season, star and executive producer Noah Wyle has confirmed that it will take place in the “late fall,” recently telling People he’s zeroing in on November specifically. (Alexa, play “Stick Season.”) With the frigid temperatures come new dangers, he explained: “You get more car accidents, more black ice, more boilers exploding and that kind of stuff.”
You also get the start of the holiday season, and if The Pitt is ready to be brave, it can pull off a 15-episode Thanksgiving special.
Sure, after setting Season 2 entirely on the Fourth of July, The Pitt might be wary of repeating the holiday theme lest it become a little gimmicky. But if any show can mine new depths from the time-honored tradition of festive TV, it’s this one.
Holiday episodes are often my favorites of any series, but they’ve made for particularly memorable storylines in medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy and ER. There’s an inherent tension in watching nurses, doctors, and hospital staff spend Thanksgiving in such a decidedly un-homey place — reckoning with their own holiday baggage while helping patients through no shortage of seasonal emergencies.
And when better than the holidays to test — and fortify — the ER’s social ties? For many of The Pitt’s ensemble of young healthcare workers, this might be their first Thanksgiving spent away from home. Who’s hosting the Friendsgiving after work, and who’s bringing what? For those desperate to know more about the staff outside of the hospital (is Dr. Langdon still married or...?), a Thanksgiving episode would put their love lives into sharp relief, showing how the team leans on each other on an emotionally taxing day.
Given the viral karaoke scene at the end of Season 2, it’s clear there is an appetite for seeing The Pitt people let their hair down. As Sepideh Moafi (who plays Dr. Al-Hashimi) recently told Bustle, “I’d be interested in all of the characters having a collective day off and seeing who they are out of their scrubs.”
While the show might not be ready to take the characters entirely out of the ER, seeing them balance a grueling workday with their holiday hopes and frustrations — and bonding over some good food in between — could be an enlightening window into their lives.
