Watching The Pitt at the End of an Era for HBO

On February 26 of this year, all the systems went down at The Pitt. Up to that point, the doctors and nurses and interns working in the emergency room at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center—colloquially, “the Pitt”—had already dealt with a cascade of isolated catastrophes, from an abandoned baby to an unexpectedly violent patient to the implementation and then malfunction of a new AI charting program. By its eighth episode on the 26th, season 2 of HBO Max’s hit hospital drama had pile...