The Pitt quickly became a smash hit for HBO Max in 2025, with the first season bringing Noah Wyle back to the world of fast-paced medical drama. That's not to say that the ER vet is the only factor in winning viewers over to streaming with an HBO Max subscription, and Taylor Dearden's Dr. Mel King has officially reached fan favorite status by this point in the 2026 TV schedule. The actress spoke with CinemaBlend about playing Mel in Season 2, as well as how far she's come since her very first credit as "Sad Faced Girl" on Breaking Bad in 2010.
Before the cast of The Pitt took the stage for the Impact Award at the 2026 SCAD TVfest in Atlanta, they opened up about everything from Noah Wyle as a director to Taylor Dearden's role in the 800th episode of The Simpsons. After I checked out Dearden's IMDb page, I had to ask the actress: how does it feel for her to have started on TV as more or less an extra on Breaking Bad to now playing a popular and quite layered doctor on The Pitt? She looked back to her early career and shared:
Thinking of all the student films is quite a journey, but also you have to have bad stuff. You have to have bad student films or something like that, because otherwise you don't know what you could have been saddled with the whole time. Otherwise, it's crazy.
It certainly doesn't say anything bad about Taylor Dearden that her early acting work included student films and her first TV credit was as a character merely listed as "Sad Faced Girl." If anything, it's practically a rite of passage for actors to start small, and there are whole lists of Law & Order guest stars and even The X-Files guest stars who had bit roles there before making it big later on. (Fun fact: Dearden's dad, Bryan Cranston, was one of those X-Files vets to later become a big star with Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad.)
It's only natural that before she became Dr. Mel King on The Pitt, Dearden would start out with a role like Sad Faced Girl, seen above. (You can find her briefly in the Season 3 premiere of Breaking Bad streaming with a Netflix subscription.) The actress went on:
It's weird for me that some people think, 'Yeah, I always knew I was going to be at this point,' because I definitely didn't. I think any job was amazing, and just loving the work itself is the most important part.
It only took a few more years after Sad Faced Girl on Breaking Bad for Dearden to start landing recurring roles on projects like 101 Ways to Get Rejected, Sweet/Vicious, American Vandal, and For All Mankind, but it's safe to say that The Pitt has been her biggest break to date. (And not just because it landed her a role on The Simpsons!)
Of course, Mel isn't having the best time in Season 2, with the added stress of a deposition looming over her on top of the usual pressure in PTMC's ED. In fact, in the preview for the next episode, Mel can be spotted saying that she didn't think her day could get any worse. Take a look:
Considering that the season is only halfway through, I think Mel's day is probably still going to get much more complicated as the weeks pass! If Season 2 has a major crisis planned for the later episodes like Season 1's mass casualty event, the characters are undoubtedly in for a difficult ride. For Mel, she might not catch many breaks in the rest of her shift as long as that deposition remains on her schedule.
Find out with new episodes of The Pitt on Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET streaming on HBO Max, along with every other episode so far.
