The Pitt was a certified home run for HBO Max the second it premiered on the service, becoming one of both the production company and the streaming platform’s biggest hits of all time. Season 2 pulled in even more viewers than the Emmy-sweeping first outing, and for good reason, especially since it introduced even more new characters to the Pittsburgh emergency room that are destined to become new fan-favorites. From the professional-yet-complicated Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) to new med student Joy Kwon (Irene Choi), the Noah Wyle show’s ambitions to have a rotating roster of medical professionals seems like a foolproof plan, even if it makes saying goodbye to characters like Dr. Heather Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) and Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) that much harder.
Though one facet of The Pitt that has developed the quickest cult following is the night shift team led by Dr. Jack Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) — so much so that many fans have been clamoring for an entire spin-off series following the night team, though that dream has repeatedly been debunked. Even the night team got a new face in the form of Dr. Cyrus “Crus Control” Henderson (played by Shrinkingstar Luke Tennie), and it sounds like we haven’t heard the last of The Pitt‘s newest superstar. I had the opportunity to speak with Tennie during his promotion of Apple TV’s Shrinking at the Newport Beach TV Fest, and when asked if we could see him again in the now-in-development Season 3, he shared the open invitation he received from star and co-creator Noah Wyle:
“Noah Wyle told me in the hair and makeup trailer last time, he said, ‘Hey, if there’s a night shift, Crus is on the night shift, and we always see [the] night shift.’ And I said, ‘Okay, good to know!'”
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
Luke Tennie Describes Crus’ Approach to Doctoring as “Medical Hip-Hop” in ‘The Pitt’
Crus as a character is one of the most interesting additions to The Pitt‘s roster in Season 2, partially because of the character’s attitude towards X-rays and MRI, which he views as being unnecessary when he can diagnose with an ultrasound machine. An unorthodox way to look at it, to be sure, but also one that ends up coming in handy for Dr. Robby’s (Wyle) team after most of their computerized equipment is taken offline. When asked about his character’s unique approach to diagnosing without modern equipment, Tennie likened it to a new genre of sorts for the medical world:
“It was kind of pitched to me as ‘This guy is sort of on the cutting edge.’ It felt kinda like medical hip-hop. Like when hip-hop started after the blackout in New York, people got all this DJ equipment and stuff, and it was kinda this thing where people learned to DJ on the fly. It was this sort of new, flowy, ‘I’m gonna take this track and then I’m gonna get an MC.’ Nobody really knew what was going on.
I think Crus is kind of on the cutting edge of [a] new hip-hop style of diagnosing issues with ultrasound versus using an MRI or X-rays. That stuff is expensive, and it’s hard to move around. A fricking ultrasound cart, you can move that thing around. It’s super easy to maneuver throughout the hospital. It’s perfect for emergency medicine. So I think that kind of angle fits with the character description of Crus being someone who’s so calm and cool and collected.”
The first two seasons of The Pitt are streaming now on HBO Max. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates on Season 3.
