PHOTO BY MAX/WARRICK PAGE

Get ready for a wild Fourth of July holiday weekend.

That’s the backdrop of the next 15-hour shift of “The Pitt,” the wildly popular Max series that is set in a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room and partially filmed around Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side.

The first season wraps on Thursday, but production already is underway on Season 2, according to producers on the show who appeared in a panel discussion on Deadline’s Contenders TV this past weekend. The show picks up 10 months after the last episode.

Related: Which ‘The Pitt’ Character Are You?

If the first 15 episodes are any indication, the next season will be action packed. So far (spoiler alert!) there’s been an honor walk for a high school student donating his organs after being declared brain dead from a fentanyl overdose, a mass shooting at a music festival, a measles case and much, much more.

Among the features that distinguishes the show from others is that there is no music. All the crew wear scrubs. There’s no differentiation between foreground and background. And the set was designed before the show was written, requiring that everything fit into a floor plan, the producers said.

Noah Wyle, star of the show and an executive producer, said the “The Pitt” is looking for a lot of extras and background actors.

“We’re calling all pros,” Wyle told the crowd . “We want people who are good with props and who are used to working in a company, with an ensemble. We want creativity. We want passion. We don’t want ego coming to play. We have tremendous people showing up excited.”

Because each season takes place over a 15-hour shift, many of the background actors appear in several if not most of the episodes.

“Guest actors who were on the show worked for months, oftentimes just appearing in the waiting room for a scene or two, and then being in the background and then eventually they have a scene,” said executive producer John Wells, a Carnegie Mellon University alum who also produced NBC’s “ER” that starred Wyle.

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“We had wonderful actors who signed on to be background for four or five episodes and then had major scenes. So everybody was on set the entire time, including all of our regulars. The set is so deep and big that we see everything so everybody is there.”

Wyle said in earlier interviews that he was inspired to brainstorm another medical show after receiving a lot of mail from front-line health workers during the Covid pandemic.

The aim of the producers has been to be as realistic as possible, which has been reflected in the continued flood of fan mail, especially in recent weeks, they said.

“We’ve had a lot of physicians and nurses who work in these facilities who have been reaching out to us saying, ‘I can now show it to my family and they understand why I come home like I come home, you know. They understand what we actually go through,’ which has been very gratifying,” Wells said.

R. Scott Gemmill, the show’s creator and executive producer, described the show this way: “It’s really a love letter to first responders, nurses, doctors, medics, techs, everyone who works in a hospital.”