When the rooftop watch party for the Fourth of July fireworks finally commences, the day’s darkest events are written all over the faces of McKay, Mohan, Santos, Javadi, Mel and especially Nurse Perlah. She sobs in Dana’s arms while they all watch the city’s big celebratory display. No one is smiling. No one is feeling lifted after a day of death, depositions and deportations. With a patient and a nurse in ICE custody, no one looks proud to be an American, where, to paraphrase lyrics by the MAGA favorite Lee Greenwood, at least they know they’re free.

The multicolored lights of the fireworks shine down on faces uncertain about the future of the country being celebrated. Their uncertainty is sadly familiar, the opposite of the assurance Robby tries to make himself and the baby feel. “Everything’s going to be just fine,” he said. No one can know that for sure.

I did say there was catharsis as well as pain, though, and that’s where final scene comes in. After the action fades out on Robby and the baby, as the credits begin to roll, we hear crowd noises and then voices, singing the opening lines of Alanis Morissette’s poison-pen classic “You Oughta Know.” It’s Santos and Mel, out doing karaoke together and really going for it.

Are they note-perfect? No, but a good karaoke performance isn’t about perfection; it’s about commitment. As Mel and Santos thrash and scream and whip their hair around — Mel even loses the glasses! — they’re giving the most you can ask of anyone, on a karaoke stage or anywhere: their all. They do the same in the hospital, but considering the day these two have had, I hope they are having too much fun to think about it.

I reviewed the season finale of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

But I keep coming back to Dr. Robby’s statement “I don’t know if I want to be here anymore.” Depression is a dark journey, and passive suicidal ideation is one of the hardest stretches of road you’ll find on it. Yet it is strangely validating to hear sadness this profound come out of the mouth of such a mensch. This is a disease to which no one, not even the Superman of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, is immune.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Pitt Season 2 for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

We have come to it at last. In episode after episode, Dr. Michael Robinavitch has dropped hints, given warning signs and generally worried his friends and colleagues with his increasingly frazzled demeanor. Now, in this episode’s cliffhanger moment, he says what everyone has been thinking: His impending sabbatical might be permanent.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“The Pitt” does not work the way most dramas do. It’s a medical procedural, but it treats that venerable TV genre like the intense opening reel of “Saving Private Ryan.” The action is visceral, intense, virtually constant and realistically random; there’s rarely a cohesive theme or narrative progression to be constructed from each episode’s pile of unconnected cases.

The show’s near-real-time gimmick, moreover, dictates the pace at which the staffers of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grow and change while we watch. We follow these people during a busy shift on a single day, not over the course of weeks or months. Amid that concentrated tumult, character development is squeezed into rare quiet moments between cases, or shouted over the cacophony of crowded hallways and beeping hospital equipment.

But in the dozen episodes we’ve seen this season so far, I can hear a steady, ominous drumbeat beneath the din. Looking over my notes, rereading these reviews, I see myself asking one question, over and over: Are Robby and Dana, the heart and soul of the E.R., ever going to return after this shift from hell is over?

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

I’ve never felt the mood in Dr. Robby’s department shift the way it did when a new patient, Pranita (Ramona DuBarry), was brought in by I.C.E. agents. She is suffering from injuries incurred when they raided the restaurant where she worked, in pursuit of President Trump’s draconian mass-deportation policy.

She is not allowed to contact her daughter to tell her where she is. She is not allowed to tell the hospital staff so they may do so on her behalf. In the end, she is not even allowed to wear the sling she is prescribed to help her damaged arm.

The agents’ rough handling of Pranita proves to be too much for Nurse Jesse, who tries to intervene. Suddenly, the sounds of struggle and shouting can be heard throughout the department. Within seconds, Pranita and Jesse are being led away in zip ties by the agents. They refuse to say what Jesse did that merits his detention, or where he and Pranita will be detained.

The whole incident seems to stem from when Robby dresses down one of the agents, who is still wearing his gaiter, for the chaos their presence has caused in the hospital. Dozens of patients and staff have fled, fearing their immigration status will lead the agents to target them, too. Sick people are not getting the treatment they need, Robby says, and they will go home to get even sicker, forced to return when it may be too late. At the same time, much-needed professionals are no longer around to do their jobs. Raising his voice and dropping an expletive, Robby asks them to take their prisoner and get going as soon as they can before they make things worse.

“No problem, doc,” the agent responds, a little too softly. He has Jesse on the ground in his next scene.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

But while Jude’s prognosis is good — he kept his three most important fingers, which will work fine once they close the wound — his family situation is not. His sister and legal guardian, Chantal (Sasha Compère), informs Santos, Robby and Dylan that their parents were seized and deported to Haiti during a routine immigration appointment. You can almost see the air get sucked out of the room when she says it.

This cruel implementation of the current administration’s mass deportation policy has forced Chantal to transfer out of her college and move back home to care for Jude. But they have almost no money, so she works long hours on top of her continuing education, leaving Jude unsupervised for long stretches of time.

Now it isn’t certain that either of them will graduate, or that social services will leave Jude in Chantal’s custody. Dylan, the social worker, is optimistic, but he also thinks they may be better off with their parents in Haiti, a place they’ve never been.

The Pitt’s staff attack any problem that comes their way as if they had a fighting chance, but they stand little chance against the punitive powers of a government that is actively hostile toward immigration. Their sense of frustration and sadness is palpable.

“We can’t separate her from her brother,” Santos says. “It’s not right.”

“A lot of what happens to people around here isn’t right,” Robby replies. Happy Fourth of July, folks.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

There’s an ugly undercurrent to all this provided by everyone’s (OK, my) least favorite student doctor, Ogilvie. His feelings about Howard are made clear with his first sotto voce wisecrack. His questions regarding the man’s condition are really just a series of veiled critiques. Is he on Ozempic or Wegovy? Has he tried water aerobics? Will they have to get him weighed at the zoo? Ogilvie says all of this either directly to Howard or within earshot.

Small wonder the poor guy keeps apologizing to the staff, as if being obese were a moral failing and his mystery illness were divine punishment. He presents the story of how his weight gain began — he was in a bad car accident, which caused severe burns and led to multiple leg operations — as though it were somehow exculpatory of a crime.

Howard’s troubles remind me of those experienced by Harlow (Jessica “Limer” Flores), the deaf patient whose treatment keeps slipping through the cracks. Finally hooked up with a real A.S.L. translator, Harlow gets the care she needs for her neck pain from Dr. Santos lickety split. But think of how much more quickly this would have gone had the hospital been adequately staffed for such contingencies, or had Santos been less eager to ditch Harlow every time communication broke down.

Based on these two cases, it is clear that medical treatment and outcomes can differ depending on the personal circumstances of the patients involved. Try telling that to the United States government, though. Mohan tells Al-Hashimi that “the White House cut the funding” of a study she was working on regarding racial disparities in health care. It’s the show’s most explicit critique yet of the Make America Healthy Again administration.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

You don’t expect casualties among the core cast of “The Pitt.” Yes, they deal with life-or-death stakes, and sometimes with infectious diseases or belligerent patients. But characters in a medical procedural are not in the kind of danger you expect in a show about gangsters, knights or rebel spies. When I sit down to watch this series, I expect to be affected by heartbreaking deaths, but not involving anyone I’ve come to care about over the show’s 21 episodes to date. Dr. Robby and the gang feel off-limits, somehow.

This week’s episode was different. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Two half-hour episodes remain in the show’s short first season. (It was renewed before it even debuted.) With the combatants already on the field, it feels as if we’re headed for a penultimate episode in the grand “Game of Thrones” tradition, a wall-to-wall battle, followed by an final episode of wrap-up with an eye toward the future. It’s an exciting feeling: I have never quite forgiven “Shogun” or “House of the Dragon” Season 2 for teasing battles that never arrived. (Or won’t until the next season, anyway.) That won’t be an issue here.

But it’s more than the prospect of combat that moves me. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a decency fantasy, a term coined by the comics critic Tom Spurgeon to refer heroic narratives that privilege kindness, cooperation, competence and the fundamental humanity of their heroes over individualistic derring-do or edgy anti-heroism.

Ser Duncan may or may not survive his trial of seven (though the show’s renewal feels like a tip-off). But in the same way that he most likely saved Tanselle’s life by putting himself between her and her attacker, his allies Prince Baelor, the newly minted Ser Raymun, the jocular glory hound Ser Lyonel and the others are all volunteering to try to do the same for him. It’s as if justice were contagious, spread whenever even an ordinary person like Dunk proves willing to defend the defenseless.

I reviewed this weekend’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is already out on HBO Max, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Dr. Robby’s beef with Dr. Langdon, or a case of necrotizing fasciitis: Which condition will prove harder for the medical professionals of “The Pitt” to handle?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

At any rate, with none of his squire’s privileges and protections of rank and title, Dunk straight-up decks a man he knows to be a Targaryen. Having seen his own father hanged as a boy, he is under no illusions about the nature of Westerosi justice. He knows standing up for Tanselle will cost him his life. Then he does it anyway.

Ser Duncan sees armed and armored agents of the state assaulting a woman of color — racism against the darker-skinned Dornish is pervasive at court during this time period in George R.R. Martin’s stories — and places her life above his own. He does this instinctively, without thinking, without letting the almost certainly fatal consequences deter him. He has seen the powerful doing evil, and he has chosen to fight it. For him, there’s really no choice to make at all.

When Aerion petulantly asks Dunk why he has chosen to throw his life away, it’s a rhetorical question. But it sheds more light on the prince than he realizes. Men like him really can’t understand that kind of selflessness, that sense of kinship with one’s fellow human beings. That inability is the tyrant’s biggest weakness. And it’s what gives free people hope for a fighting chance — a hope which belongs to all who invoke it.

I reviewed tonight’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link! And yes, I’m aware the byline is wrong as of press time.)

“The Pitt” loves its teachable moments. If a patient doesn’t have insurance, characters will discuss the way many families fall in a coverage no man’s land: too poor to afford health insurance, not poor enough to receive Medicaid. If a nurse ignores a deaf woman in favor of her A.S.L. translator, he — and the hearing members of the audience — will be gently reminded to address deaf people directly when speaking to them. If a secretly bulimic patient’s pneumonia is caused by her eating disorder, the safe money says that the friendly emergency room doctors will persuade her to accept help almost immediately. They will also note, correctly, that Black women with eating disorders are underdiagnosed.

Every episode of “The Pitt” features moments reminiscent of “very special episodes,” in which 1980s sitcoms briefly silenced their laugh tracks to address serious societal issues. Moments like those in “The Pitt” work as much like educational programming or civics lessons as they do drama.

But the skill of the actors and filmmakers goes a long way toward lessening the sense that you’re being lectured. It would indeed be nice to live in a world where the differing needs of people from different backgrounds and with different conditions were met with care, respect and understanding. No matter what cases come their way — and the cliffhanger ending, about an antibiotic resistant infection, suggests they’ve got a doozy on their hands — it is a safe bet that the staff of the Pitt, for all their imperfections, will teach by example.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Although we’re only two short episodes into the season’s brief six-episode run, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already a significant shift from the somber grandeur and Grand Guignol horror of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” Its tone is light. Its threats are decidedly less than world-shaking. Its protagonist is a commoner, not a noble. Its editing is positively zippy in places.

Moreover, while the show relies on the interplay of Peter Claffey’s decent but dense Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell’s precocious problem child, Egg, the result is less a “Lone Wolf and Cub”/“The Last of Us” survival story than a mismatched buddy comedy. Ser Duncan may be the only contestant in the tourney dopey enough not to realize that there is more to his suspiciously knowledgeable and headstrong squire than meets the eye.

I reviewed this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“The Pitt” is not a show for the cynical. The show is full to bursting with heartfelt declarations of devotion, moving rapprochements between estranged loved ones, copious tears of both sadness and joy, and celebrations of cooperation and community. This sweet stuff can be hard to swallow when you’ve been weaned on a bitter diet of prestige antihero dramas like “The Sopranos.”

But “The Pitt” is not a show about normal circumstances. Every patient who arrives in the E.R. introduces a new set of potentially life-or-death stakes for the core cast to handle. Even cases that aren’t potentially fatal often reveal some horrible defect in the American health care system.

The friends and family members by the bed sides of their loved ones are alternately terrified, furious, confused, devastated and grateful beyond belief. Why wouldn’t they be? A group of competent medical professionals just healed the person they care about — or failed to. Emotions run hot and close to the surface. Apply enough pressure, as circumstances in the Pitt do, and those emotions explode with volcanic force.

In essence, the hospital setting of “The Pitt” is a cheat code. It allows us to access our deepest, most profound emotions without embarrassment because those big emotions match the scale of the triumphs and tragedies we witness on an hour-by-hour basis.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

You don’t hear whistling in Westeros very often. The warring kings, the scheming viziers, the occasional incursion by angry dragons or ice zombies — there’s just not a whole lot to feel cheerful about in the Seven Kingdoms. It’s hard to whistle while you work when the work is a Hobbesian war of all against all, unless you’re being a real Joffrey about it.

But in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the new HBO show set in the same world as “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” there’s whistling on the soundtrack. Lots of it, in fact. Jaunty, carefree whistling, atop a bed of folksy acoustic guitar. The work that composer Dan Romer does here is a world removed from the dramatic, swirling score provided by Ramin Djawadi for this show’s predecessors. Only once does the music hint at that familiar, rousing theme song … and it is immediately cut off by a shot of the show’s hero violently moving his bowels.

In other words, you can literally hear that this is a different kind of show than the previous Westerosi epics. (The episodes are near-sitcom shortness, too.) “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is adapted from the author George R.R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight,” a far more compact and straightforward story of bravery and villainy than his epic “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels. Ira Parker, who created the series with Martin and oversees it as showrunner, is not telling a story that determines the fate of nations or the future of humanity in this fantasy world. (Not so far, anyway.) No wonder the music sounds less like “The Lord of the Rings” and more like “Harold and Maude.”

I reviewed the series premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. Always great to be back on the Westeros beat, especially now that maybe my most beloved character in the setting is on deck. (Gift link!)

Maggots feasting on a living man’s arm. A bone poking through a bloody wound before getting forcibly shoved back into place. A man smiling happily as his distended stomach is drained of liter after liter of fluid. A syringe drawing blood from a fully visible and erect penis.

Normally, you’d have to turn to the work of purveyors of the extreme such as Clive Barker, Takashi Miike or Lars von Trier to see such sights. This week, they’re on America’s favorite weekly medical drama. Who says Hollywood is risk-averse?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

It’s all in a day’s work at the Pitt. (A long day: Like the show’s first outing, Season 2 will tell the story of 15 consecutive hours in the E.R., played out across 15 weekly episodes.) But “The Pitt” isn’t, or isn’t just, a workplace drama. Certainly the friendships and flirtations, the alliances and rivalries, the infuriating inconveniences and the “man, I love this job” moments will feel familiar to anyone who has worked hard with the same group of people in the same place, day in and day out.

But what Wyle, the creator R. Scott Gemmill and the director John Wells achieve here is more than a recreation the past glories of their stints on “ER,” which before the New Golden Age of TV ushered in by “The Sopranos” represented the cutting edge. More germane points of comparison for the world of “The Pitt” include the teeming city of King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” or the fully realized and lived-in sci-fi environments of “Andor.” “The Pitt” is an act of world-building first and foremost.

That starts with the show’s formal aspects: one contiguous set, filled with all different kinds of people, filmed by two hand-held cameras, set in what is meant to feel like real time. After even one episode in that crucible, you start to see it as a place you could hang out in and explore, even get lost in. “The Pitt” shares a sense of repleteness with the grand fantasy epics — the feeling that they’re teeming with life, which continues whether you’re watching or not.

As important to that parallel, though, are the staffers of the Pitt. They are heroes, drawn from all walks of life to serve their collective mission to save that lives. Neither addiction, nor immigration status nor autism spectrum disorders prevent them from doing their jobs. Indeed, their wide variety of life experiences are crucial to their ability to help as many people as possible.

The personal struggles of the medical staff, the intriguing — and often gory and disgusting — cases of the patients, the dazzling you-are-there production: These are the hooks that get you watching. But beneath it all is a message. Rock-star Robby may be the main attraction, but “The Pitt” is a full-throated celebration of expertise, competence, cooperation, science and diversity, at a time when those values are under widespread attack. In “The Pitt,” at least, those values are still alive and kicking.

The Pitt is back for Season 2 and this time around I’m covering it for the New York Times, starting with my review of the season premiere. (Gift link!)

When we learn his company helped drop the bombs itself, it hits viscerally. Why did you make that choice?

What we were trying to grapple with is a corporation whose stock price goes up when there’s a war and people are terrified. They’d have financial motivation to stoke the fears of war further and further, which might actually cause the bomb to drop. Look around and see what’s happening with A.I., or new technologies in the military space. It feels like everyone’s on this hamster wheel because it’s increasing the number of zeros in their bank accounts, the world be damned. That’s why this felt so interesting and frightening to me. The world might end because a few people needed to get rich.

I interviewed Fallout co-creator and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet for the New York Times. Yes, they made the Ghoul sexy on purpose.

This fluid approach to the movies’ continuity is part of what makes this show such a surprise. “It: Welcome to Derry” feels like a mulligan for Muschietti, who directed them. The first film’s haunted-hayride vibe, the second’s nonsensical plot and warmed-over, quip-heavy dialogue: All of that has been jettisoned. In their place stands a season-long testament to the power of cruelty in art.

From start to finish, “Welcome to Derry” has relentlessly probed fears that plague our childhood and our adulthood. Children are tormented with their worst nightmares. Adults are taunted for their most painful failures and confronted with their most terrible memories.

At the center of it all lurks an orange lunatic who feeds on fear and suffering, empowered by a government apparatus working to spread that fear and suffering from sea to shining sea. As such, Pennywise is a monster for our degraded age.

I reviewed the season finale of It: Welcome to Derry, maybe the biggest TV surprise of the year for me, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Ingrid does not appear evil at first. Was it challenging to keep that aspect of the character under wraps?

Andy [Muschietti] actually loved her very much! He feels that she was good in her heart. That wasn’t a difficult thing to portray. There’s a sense that Ingrid is stunted. She’s caught in the age when this terrible tragedy happened. She’s been in a state of suspension all these years, waiting for the impossible, waiting for her father to be reclaimed. She sees something in this girl Lilly, and her compassion for her is very real — but then it stops, because there’s something else that’s really driving her. Part of that involves Pennywise’s trickery over her, the illusion that he’s created.

But when I see what’s going on right now, there are grand illusions happening before our very eyes. And nobody believes that they’re a bad human being. You can see that in the Epstein emails, for instance. It’s fascinating to me, watching Epstein have conversations with Larry Summers: They’re saying certain things about Donald Trump, but nobody’s looking to themselves. They view themselves as the good guys. In Ingrid’s mind, she thinks she can extract her father from It and bring him back to himself, and all the rest will end. It’s an “end justifies the means” situation.

I interviewed Madeleine Stowe about her role on It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. She did not mince words. (Gift link!)