Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

“The Pitt” executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, a 1979 Carnegie Mellon University grad, have already started work on Season 2 even as the show advances to its first-season finale at 9 p.m. April 10 on Max.

“We’re talking to a ton of experts,” Gemmill said, which the show’s writers/producers also did before writing Season 1. That may be why real doctors have largely applauded “The Pitt” for its verisimilitude. “We’ve talked to people about the new immigration elements in terms of ICE coming into hospitals. We’re talking about reproductive rights, transgender affirming care.

“For the writers, that’s a big part of our first part of the season,” Gemmill continued. “We just gather as much information about what’s going on, what’s working, what’s not. That’s fundamental to the show. What haven’t (doctors) seen on television? What is it people don’t understand? It makes for good viewing and really responsible writing and producing.”

In its most recent episode, “The Pitt” proved particularly timely with a storyline about measles following a real-life measles outbreak in Texas.

“When you (make medical shows) for as long as we have, part of our job is to be proactive in terms of stories,” Gemmill said. “It’s just basically looking at what’s going on in the world and extrapolating. … We write these months in advance of when we shoot them, so if you’re looking ahead in terms of what’s happening in medicine — what could go wrong? — it’s just a matter of time before some of those things come to fruition.”

“We’ve had measles outbreaks in California over the last few years in unvaccinated, progressive preschools primarily,” Wells said.

“Yeah, don’t go to Disneyland if you’re immunocompromised,” Gemmill added.

Both Wells and Gemmill are veterans of “ER,” but the “24”-like format of “The Pitt” — each season covers one day, with each hour devoted to one hour in the ER employees’ shift — creates new challenges the writers/producers never faced on the NBC medical drama.

“We weren’t sure it was going to work,” Gemmill conceded. “This was an experiment in a lot of ways for us because no one had really done it before. ‘24’ has done a version, but to do it with patients and tracking them hour-by-hour, it just took a lot of logistical planning.”

Gemmill described how the show’s set was designed before writing on the first season began. Writers would place tags representing characters on large maps/blueprints of the ER set, moving the tokens that represent characters around, “kind of like playing Monopoly or Risk. This was the medical version of Dungeons & Dragons.”

Wells, who directed the season premiere and this week’s season finale, compared directing episodes of “The Pitt” to a relay race.

“Somebody hands you a baton and every actor is in a certain place, and they’ve already performed the scenes that are right before it,” Wells said. “You don’t have that reset of a different episode, different stories. You’re basically (dropped into) a 15-hour performance. So there’s the logistics of where everybody is that you’re just picking up and working with, but also making certain that there’s a continuity in the performance, helping the actors to remember exactly where they are and pay off where they are.”

For this week’s season finale, Gemmill said, two exterior scenes are key, both filmed in Pittsburgh in September, five months before the adjacent interior scenes filmed on soundstages in Burbank, Calif.

The first is a scene shot on a rooftop at Allegheny General Hospital that bookends a similar scene in the first episode. The second scene takes place in a park near AGH, which portrays the exterior of the show’s fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

“The tricky part was, whatever we did (in Pittsburgh), we had to end up there,” Gemmill said. “(Series star) Noah (Wyle) kept giving me a hard time saying, ‘I can’t wait to hear my speech,’ because Abbott says what a good speech it was” in a scene filmed in a Pittsburgh park in September, months before the rallying-the-staff speech Wyle’s Dr. Robby gives in the ER earlier in the episode.

Wells wants the finale to leave viewers hopeful but also concerned.

“It’s taking all the threads that we’ve woven throughout the (season) and then tying them all up at the end as best we could, and then maybe leaving a couple open-ended so that we have a reason to come back,” Wells said.

Already this season, fan favorite Nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) expressed a desire to permanently hang up her scrubs after she was assaulted by a patient midway through the season.

“We want (viewers) to be worried enough to come back and see if she’s on the show or not,” teased Gemmill, who appeared in a Zoom interview late last month clad in gear emblazoned with the name of Pittsburgh band The Clarks, a group he recently discovered.

“I actually just told my sound or my music supervisor that there’s a song of theirs I want to try and use next year for our show, ‘Better Off Without You,’ ” Gemmill said. “I’m excited if we can do that.”

Season 2 will begin filming in mid-June and will return to Max with new episodes in January. Producers expect to return to Pittsburgh for a week of filming in September.

“We do want to lean into the Pittsburgh of it all, because they’ve been great to us, and it’s a great city, a fundamental element of our show,” Wells said. “We are hoping that, now that people have seen the show, we might get some movement from Major League Baseball or from the NFL to allow us to (use logoed clothing on characters). When do you walk down the street in Pittsburgh and not see a Pirates or a Steelers something?”

“As a Canadian,” Gemmill joked, “it’s more important to see the Penguins (logo).”

Of course, producers will compete against the success and critical acclaim of the first season as they begin hashing out plots for Season 2.

“So much of the first season was predicated on (the idea that) this is the day that Robby was working, which he hasn’t worked in the past because it was the anniversary of when his mentor died,” Wells said. “The challenge in the writers’ room is, do you look for the same large event of some sort for a character? Or does that then become a trope of the show? I think there’s a real hope on the part of the writers … to not fall into the exact same pattern, although it absolutely wants to be a one-day shift because we think that’s what the show really is.”

One other planned adjustment for Season 2: They might remove the antlers from the deer painted on the wall of the ER pediatric room “so when we shoot against that wall it doesn’t look like (one of the actors has) antlers behind their ears,” Gemmill said.

“In the last episode,” Wells added, “you’ll notice that we have to keep moving the camera because, otherwise, Robby’s head lines up with the antlers.”

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