A Fan-Favorite The Pitt Character Returns For Season 2 (But Not The Whole Season)

After season 1 of "The Pitt" concluded its run in April 2025, a major fan favorite character emerged — and no, it wasn't Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch (Noah Wyle, the "ER" veteran who helped craft the show alongside R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells and serves as an executive producer). It was his night shift counterpart and trauma attending Dr. Jack Abbot, played by veteran performer Shawn Hatosy, across just five episodes of a 15-episode season. See, "The Pitt" is structured like "24" (remember that show?!), so each episode takes place across a "real hour" — and because Robby ends up spending 15 full hours in the emergency department due in large part to a mass shooting event that sends a flood of victims there in need of help, he and Abbot reunite and work together to save as many people as they can.

Despite frequent calls for a "night shift" spin-off of "The Pitt," there's no word on whether or not we'll get that just yet ... but we do know, thanks to a Vanity Fair piece about the upcoming second season of the popular HBO Max series, that Hatosy's Abbot will be back. Still, the feature's writer, David Canfield, who spent time on the set of season 2 of "The Pitt" for the story, only spoke to Hatosy over Zoom, so he hadn't come back to set just yet. We will see Hatosy and Abbot again, though!

"I've heard snippets of what's going to happen, and it will be a surprise — I am really excited to see him on his feet again," Hatosy told Canfield, excitedly. "I'm coming back a little bit later than maybe you expect, so I haven't quite dug in yet." Fans will undoubtedly be happy to see Abbot back on their screens, and as far as Hatosy is concerned, the role of Dr. Jack Abbot was a lifeline in a dark time.

On that same call with David Canfield, Shawn Hatosy said that before he booked the role of Dr. Jack Abbot on "The Pitt," he "was going through a bit of a crisis and a depression," going on to say, "It was a lean time for me." He continued:

"I was just hanging on to my youth, or trying to, and really worried about how I looked. What is so surprising and special about Abbot is that people are responding to him, and it's just a middle-aged guy who is not trying to be anything other than who he f***ing is."

Not only did "The Pitt" earn Hatosy a legion of new fans who might not have seen him in "Southland" or "Animal Kingdom," it also scored him an Emmy nomination for Guest Actor in a Drama Series — which is, astoundingly, the first in his career. "I didn't realize how profoundly I was going to be impacted by this nomination because it just says that those people that I've been working with over this 30-year career are responding and paying attention and saying, 'Hey, good job,'" Hatosy told Canfield.

Just one day after the Vanity Fair piece ran, Esquire featured an interview with Hatosy conducted by Andrea Cuttler, and the two spoke extensively about Hatosy's previous work and the newfound joy he's derived from playing Abbot and working on a series like "The Pitt." Unsurprisingly, Hatosy addressed his Emmy nomination yet again, but made one thing clear: it's about the work, not an award.

"Getting nominated is a huge surprise, and I'm honestly overwhelmed," Hatosy told Cuttler. "It feels really good. It's not because I'm chasing a trophy, but because the people that do this for a living, they're appreciating something that I'm very proud of."

More than that, though, Hatosy is happy to see a series like "The Pitt," which picked up a ton of nominations — including one for Outstanding Drama Series and acting nods for Noah Wyle and Katherine LaNasa — succeed in this way. "What makes it even more meaningful is that the show as a whole is being recognized," Hatosy said, ever the team player. "'The Pitt' has something important to say. It's a show that's being made efficiently right here in L.A., and that matters to the business, and I love this business, and I hope it opens the door for more shows like it." He's absolutely right ... and as he continued speaking to Cuttler, he revealed that he's already forged a deep bond with his character after just one season of the show.

Even though we only see Dr. Jack Abbot in the first episode of "The Pitt" and all of the episodes from "6:00 P.M." onwards, we learn a lot about the character in that short time, which is pretty representative of the tight, excellently crafted storytelling found on the series. It's clear, though, that Abbot, a military veteran, goes above and beyond whenever possible, to the point where, during the mass shooting, he starts donating blood in real time while he works on patients. In his conversation with Andrea Cuttler, Shawn Hatosy pointed to this specific sacrifice as the moment where he truly understood Abbot. 

"The one moment for me that really pulls it all into focus is when he comes back in episode 12 and he's got the blood bag on — he's donating in the midst of [the mass shooting]," Hatosy shared. "We don't hit the audience over the head with how it was revealed. It's very in the moment of the procedure. I just knew then. That was it for me. I was like, 'Oh, I love this guy.'" Add this to the moment in the season 1 finale "9:00 P.M.," when Abbot heads up to the roof to comfort Robby after a devastating personal loss in the ER, and it paints a full picture of a tough but deeply empathetic physician.

Another thing we learn about Abbot — which comes at the very end of "9:00 P.M." — is that, presumably due to his military service, he has a prosthetic leg. When Cuttler asked Hatosy about this reveal, he spoke candidly about the choice to include this detail:

"It's a shock to the audience, and it's a shock to the [characters] that are new and don't know. That's important. There were some discussions early on — should he have a limp? And we discussed that it needed to be a surprise. That works in Abbot's favor because he's not a person that should be identified by this. It's not his identity. He is the commanding presence in this ER. He has combat medic experience, and he has a talent for this kind of work that others don't."

We'll see Abbot and everyone else on "The Pitt" when the series returns in January 2026 for its second season, which takes place on the 4th of July.