The Pitt showrunner R. Scott Gemmill infuses references to his Canadian roots in the acclaimed medical series’ second season.Phillip Faraone/Getty Images
Emmy-winning medical drama The Pitt returns for a second season on Crave Jan. 8, with Dr. Robbie Rabinovitch (Noah Wyle) dreaming about an escape to Canada on America’s Independence Day.
As soon as his July 4 shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency room is over, his plan is to hop on his motorcycle for a sabbatical trip to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta.
This plot line is just one of a number of nods to his Canadian background that The Pitt’s creator R. Scott Gemmill has put into the new season – from doctors in hockey hats to a new nurse who hails from Sault Ste. Marie (albeit the one in Michigan).
In another version of his life, Gemmill would be working in health care in Ontario.
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“I thought I would try and get into medicine,” he recalls. “I didn’t really think it was a realistic career path trying to be a writer in Canada.”
After high school, Gemmill took a writing course at Sheridan College and then enrolled at McMaster University in gerontology.
That might have been the end of it, he says, had the late producer Peter Simpson’s film company Simcom (later renamed Norstar Entertainment) not come across one of Gemmill’s scripts and bought it. Producer Ilana Frank then offered him a job at the company writing features.
So began Gemmill’s first, Canadian, decade in the business – which moved from film to TV when he was hired to write on Friday the 13th: The Series (1987 to 1990).
“I didn’t even own a television at the time,” Gemmill recalls. “We bought our first TV, my wife and I, so we could see my credit.”
In 1995, Gemmill got the opportunity to move to Los Angeles to work on JAG – and he’s been in the U.S. ever since.
After four seasons on the Navy-themed legal drama, Gemmill joined NBC’s medical procedural ER in its sixth season – where he first met Wyle, then playing Dr. John Carter, and producer John Wells. (It wasn’t his first medical show though; he’d written one 1994 episode of CBC’s Side Effects.)
While Gemmill worked steadily since, including a stint showrunning NCIS: Los Angeles, his industry profile is on a whole new level now that he’s reunited with Wyle and Wells for The Pitt – which landed on pretty much every critic’s top ten list at the end of 2025.
Its real-time format, with each episode representing an hour of a single shift, was a new angle on the medical genre. “It was a bit of an experiment – and that was good become it forced us to rethink how we did things,” Gemmill says.
Plotting a season of The Pitt begins with the characters – many already beloved such as salt-of-the-earth head nurse Dana Evans (the now Emmy-minted Katherine LaNasa) and neurodivergent doctor Mel King (Taylor Dearden).
First, Gemmill and his writers’ room decide what journey they want to put these characters on. Then they come up with medical cases to support that arc.
The Pitt differs from other procedurals in following each patient’s story over the course of however many hour-long episodes it would actually take to pass through an ER. “If it’s a procedure that can be done in a hour, we’ll do it within the body of an episode,” Gemmill says. “If it takes three hours or four hours or a whole day, then that story will carry over for the length of that duration.”
The series is made to be intensely realistic, with prosthetics that have fooled some medical professionals into thinking the show splices in real footage of surgeries. “It’s a full orchestra of people working under the table, puppeteers working the lungs, pumping the blood,” Gemmill says.
The showrunner promises some hair-raising procedures in the new season, including a hysterotomy. “It’s a version of an emergency C-section, but it’s a vertical cut instead of horizontal because you only have about 15 seconds to get the baby out,” he says.
The point is not to make audiences avert their eyes but show life-and-death situations that medical professionals deal with on an hourly basis.
Gemmill accepts the Outstanding Drama Series award for the Pitt at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards.Mike Blake/Reuters
The Pitt’s commitment to realistically depicting emergency-room medicine – Gemmill has two doctors in the writers’ room – as well as exploring their mental health immediately struck a chord with those in the field. “A lot of our growth in terms of viewership was through word of mouth, through that community,” he says.
This season, the arrival of artificial intelligence in the ER is tackled through a new main character, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who will be taking over from Dr. Robbie when he goes on sabbatical and believes AI will save doctors time on charting.
The medical profession’s big fear about AI isn’t about mistakes it might make, but about whether it will make doctors’ lives even busier, Gemmill says.
“Will that time saved go back to allowing them to spend more time with patients, or will they be expected to pick up even more patients?” he asks.
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The new plot line, however, does not reflect any of Gemmill’s own anxiety surrounding the technology, which he says he doesn’t use in showrunning at all.
“I don’t think AI is ready to do this job yet,” he says. “There’s too many aspects of it in terms of dealing with personalities and actors and directors and other writers.”
As for Dr. Robbie’s desire to run away to Canada, Gemmill says he was last north of the border visiting his family and friends over the holidays in 2024; this year he wasn’t able to make it back and he’s acutely aware that there are not a lot of Canadians travelling to the U.S. at the moment. “No one’s coming to visit me,” he says, with a knowing smile.