NOAH WYLE (LEFT) AND PATRICK BALL ON ‘THE PITT,’ | PHOTOGRAPH BY WARRICK PAGE/MAX

All those headlines you’ve been reading lately: Medicaid cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE detentions, treatment of documented and undocumented immigrants — you’re likely to see them as storylines in Season 2 of “The Pitt.”

The HBO Max series set in Pittsburgh, which has been praised by health care workers and patients as being the most realistic medical drama on television, returns in January. During the first season, which wrapped in April, viewers saw a fatal fentanyl overdose, the fatal drowning of a child, the handling of mass shooting victims, long waits in the emergency room, frustrated health care workers and more.

“The Medicaid changes are going to have a significant impact, and you don’t have to take a political position to discuss what the impact is actually going to be,” John Wells, a Carnegie Mellon University grad and one of the executive directors on the show, told Variety in a recent interview.

“I don’t want to have an argument about whether or not they’re appropriate, what Congress did or didn’t do. But they’re going to have on-the-ground, immediate consequences in emergency rooms, and nobody’s arguing with that. That’s a bipartisan agreement. You’ve got very Republican senators from Missouri like Josh Hawley agreeing that this is going to be a problem,” he added.

Wells worked with series star Noah Wyle and R. Scott Gemmell — both also executive producers — on the long-running NBC series, “ER,” and they teamed up together on “The Pitt,” a 15-episode show, in which each episode covers one hour of a 15-hour shift. The fictional hospital is set at Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side, where film crews are expected to return in September to get new footage. Wells, in a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published Aug. 7, said that ‘The Pitt’ would return on Jan. 8: “We’re essentially returning the exact same day that we premiered. It will be the eighth of January — 365 days later.”

Regarding the storylines, “We have a certain safety net in just being a realistic drama by trying to depict what it looks like in a hospital,” Wyle told Variety.

Gemmell agreed. “When people have less finances from the government to help them with their health care, they’re going to get less health care, and that means they’re going to end up in the only place where they can get free health care, which is the ER. So the ER is just going to get busier and busier and become more of a safety net, and it’s already broken, so the system is destined for a tipping point.”

One of the issues highlighted in Season 1 was the discrimination that occurs in health care settings toward marginalized populations, people of color — whether consciously or unconsciously.

Wells told Variety that he is hopeful that medical professionals will both see themselves in “The Pitt” but privately question, and rectify, their own unconscious bias about patients from marginalized groups.

“We’re doing a big story right now on the difficulties the Deaf community has in arriving at an emergency room and being unable to communicate and not being able to be understood for their specific problems,” Wells said.  “We’re always on the lookout for those kinds of stories that are going to resonate.”

Said Gemmell: “We take our platform very seriously. I think one of the things when you can reach 10 million people — and this was true back in the day on ‘ER’ as well — is with that amount of people listening, you have to be responsible for what you put out there.”