HBO Max’s enormously popular television series The Pitt is receiving plaudits for its realistic depiction of the trials and tribulations of health care in an urban emergency room.
Now in its second season, which premiered on Jan. 8, 2026, the show follows Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle) and his colleagues through a single 15-hour clinical shift, divided into one-hour episodes. The team treats patients against a backdrop of all-too-common American societal plagues, from substance use disorder to medical bankruptcies and mass shootings.
Spoiler alert: About halfway through the season, Dr. Robby and the staff at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grapple with chaos ensuing from a less commonly depicted disaster – a hospital cyberattack. The hospital’s network and computers were incapacitated, resulting in scenes of millennial residents struggling with fax machines, laboratory orders disappearing in a shuffle of papers, and constant communication breakdowns culminating in a missed life-threatening diagnosis.
All this might prompt viewers to wonder: Does this actually happen in real life?
As physicians who study cyberattacks and their impact on patient care, we have seen many of the same events depicted in The Pitt play out in the real world.
