Twelve episodes into the second season of “The Pitt,” there’s a short scene — scratch that, a mere minute-long exchange — that has unexpectedly emerged as a point of contention.
Joy Kwon, a third-year medical student trainee with a photographic memory and a scathing eye roll, clocks out at the end of her 12-hour shift.
That’s it.
And, given the format of the critically acclaimed HBO medical drama, in which each episode represents one hour of a shift, Kwon doesn’t appear again for the last three episodes.
Before she steps away, one of her supervisors, Dr. Frank Langdon, who returns to the emergency room after a stint in rehab for drug addiction, tries to pressure her to stay. But she doubles down, reminding him that she has finished her shift and that she isn’t being paid. (Medical students are not paid during their trainings and continue to pay school tuition.)
That exchange landed in the midst of a season that spotlighted the mental health struggles of hospital staff members. Each character’s stoic, professional mask slips at some point, including that of the emergency room’s chief attending physician, Dr. Michael Robinavitch (who goes by Robby), who comes to realize that dedicating his life to this practice is slowly killing him.
“Maybe all you lunatics need to learn how to set some boundaries,” Kwon tells Langdon before walking out the door.
It was yet another moment when the show, which is known for its realistic portrayal of an emergency room, had a finger on the pulse of a long-simmering debate in the medical profession. In this case, how far should doctors and nurses have to push themselves for their jobs?
Online, medical professionals, workers in other industries and fans of the show have chimed in, sharing their own experiences with workplace burnout. Some called Kwon a “queen” for setting a boundary they believed should be common sense, while others saw it as a risky or selfish move that could jeopardize patient care and her career.
Kwon is also younger than many of the doctors, and her decision spoke to wider divides over work-life balance between generations that spilled into public discourse during the pandemic. While their forebears lived for the hustle and grind, some members of Gen Z and young millennials are quiet quitting, “lying flat” (eschewing extra responsibilities at work) or opting for flexibility over raises and promotions.
Irene Choi, who plays Kwon, weighed in during an interview for the YouTube series “Reel School,” saying that boundaries in her own life as an actor were essential to doing good work.
“When you’re on set, you leave whatever is happening in your life behind,” she told the host, Michael Winn Johnson, adding that those boundaries make actors more “effective team players.”
Dr. Heather Farley, an emergency medicine practitioner and vice president of professional satisfaction at the American Medical Association, said that even though she hadn’t yet watched the second season — lingering “post-traumatic stress” from her time working in an emergency room means she can only watch it in doses, she said — she still “heard lots about that scene.”
That’s because it spotlights systemic issues in medical settings that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated, she said.
“We reward endurance, we celebrate going above and beyond, we normalize self-sacrifice,” Farley said.
While those expectations may be slowly shifting, setting a boundary in those environments can be “a constant uphill battle,” she said. A survey of 19,000 physicians around the country that was conducted by the medical association and published last month found that about 42 percent reported at least one symptom of burnout in 2025. That was down from 49 percent in 2023, but “we’ve got a long way to go,” Farley added.
For trainees, not going above and beyond the job description can jeopardize career opportunities because supervisors often interpret staying late as a sign of dedication, said Dr. Adil Menon, a clinical pathologist in Cleveland who felt compelled to jump into a heated Reddit thread about Kwon’s decision on “The Pitt.”
He viewed Kwon’s decision as “reckless, because she’s throwing away a chance to support herself and stand out,” he said in an interview. Every little edge that trainees can get can end up shaping their paths, he added.
When Menon was a third-year medical student in 2019, he witnessed a first-year resident work so many hours that “he did end up actually passing out and falling asleep in a patient’s room,” he said.
Instead of finding ways to support him, Menon said, hospital staff members presented that resident as a kind of cautionary tale for other trainees and barred him from the operating room for weeks.
On Substack, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, declared himself “Team Joy” — a viewpoint that drew a lot of positive feedback, he said.
“This particular topic has been a really important debate for as long as I can remember,” Faust said. “We inherited this system that essentially, in my view, perpetuates a cycle of abuse that is justified by this idea that if we don’t do this, then there won’t be good doctors. I just reject that.”
