Watching The Pitt at the End of an Era for HBO

An overstretched emergency department and TV network have a surprising amount in common.

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 piled on emergencies at the same pace as its paradigm-shifting first season, but the show had yet to reveal its big bad. The Fourth of July setting of the new season—which implied the possibility of some fireworks-related mass casualty event to rival last season’s festival shooting—turned out to have been a red herring. Instead, this year’s big twist was a coordinated cyberattack against the hospital. The Pitt wouldn’t be overrun with casualties of an external disaster; instead, they’d have to deal with the casualties of an internal one. So, midway through this season, on February 26, the Pitt shut down its electronic systems and went analog.

HBO Max experienced a systems failure of its own on February 26. That morning, Netflix announced that its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery—which owns HBO—was off. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, which also had been vying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, had come in with an offer of $31 per share, and Netflix dropped out of negotiations, clearing the way for conservative mogul Ellison to finalize his takeover of yet another media conglomerate. Last summer, Ellison’s company Skydance merged with Paramount in a move to consolidate several legacy media assets under a new, Trump-friendly umbrella. The changes made to Paramount post-merger have been both substantively and symbolically significant; in particular, the axing of Stephen Colbert’s resistance lib version of The Late Show and the hiring of Free Press provocateur Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Ellison has stated that entities like HBO and CNN will continue to operate independently if and when Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition, but, if you’ve been paying attention, then you know to be skeptical of such claims.

So, as The Pitt’s second season comes to a dramatic end, we are left to wonder if HBO is coming to an end of its own. For over two decades now, HBO has sold a sometimes hyperbolically praised but largely exemplary vision of creative freedom and risk-taking. There have been ebbs and flows, and the network’s recent overreliance on spin-offs and existing IP seemed to foretell the beginning of its “enshittification” era. But, all the same,........

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