Medical dramas have been a fixture in television since their creation in the 1950s and have earned their place at the forefront of pop culture. According to IMDb, Grey’s Anatomy is the 8th most watched TV show of all time, House is at 66, and The Good Doctor is at 82.
The most recent medical drama to skyrocket in popularity is R. Scott Gemmill’s The Pitt, following doctor Michael “Robby” Robinavitch’s shift as a senior attending in the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Every episode of the season is one hour of his supposedly 12-hour shift, though through one disaster or another, Dr. Robby’s shift is extended.
This format does an outstanding job at displaying what healthcare professionals go through on a daily basis, but because the second season just ended, there’s so much left to be known about the characters and world around them. This uncertainty around the majority of the lives of these beloved characters has caused fans’ imaginations to run rampant. Pop culture media outlet Slash Film’s Chris Evangelista wrote a piece called, “Many The Pitt Fans Are Proving That Yes, It’s Possible To Be Bad At Watching A TV Show”—a wordy, yet aptly titled article discussing what happens when fans’ imaginations run too wild.
“What’s troubling me, though, is that some viewers seem to be treating The Pitt like a puzzle to be solved,” said Evangelista.
The Pitt fans have created a reputation for themselves for their wild fan-theories and misinterpretation of events in the show’s canon, but what caused these wild predictions? A possibility is that the generation of TV-watchers has been raised on shows like Riverdale, Grey’s Anatomy, and Lost, which were meant to be frivolous, wild, and unpredictable. The Pitt is meant to be a show rooted in reality, which makes some of the more outlandish theories look downright ridiculous.
When asked about this on a red carpet, Dr. Robby’s actor, Noah Wyle, said, “I think audiences have become sophisticated in a whole new way when watching a show. They’re watching the show that we’re making, and they have another show that they’re making. And when that show doesn’t align with the show that you’re making, they don’t like it as much, because they thought you were taking it where they’re taking it.”
Alongside their wild imaginations, some viewers just don’t think when they watch TV, which seems like an oxymoron because normally people watch TV as a way to space out and forget about their day. The Pitt has a lot of subtleties in body language and symbolism that can easily be missed if someone isn’t fully paying attention, like if they’re on their phone or just playing it in the background. If someone doesn’t pick up on an implication from earlier, they could have a completely different perspective on the characters. Especially with the patients, you can tell very quickly if something is headed south once you get more adjusted to the medical language.
The characters of The Pitt are written to be complex and morally grey at times, which can be difficult for some viewers used to definite good vs. bad. This leads them to needlessly villainizing characters while heroicizing others, even though they all have relatively similar actions. This can really be seen by how fans treat Dr. Langdon, a resident who was caught stealing drugs from the hospital, vs. Dr. Santos, a medical intern who tends to be abrasive and happens to be the one that caught Langdon stealing. A lot of fans in online spaces tend to antagonize Santos in favor of Langdon, as if stealing drugs and poorly landing jokes were equal crimes. Something similar happens with Dr. Robby in the second season in which he’s struggling with his mental health and snapping at his coworkers and friends. Online, fans were aggressively villainizing him because he wasn’t their image of someone struggling with mental health.
It can be difficult to enjoy a piece of media when the fans aren’t enjoyable, but as long as you like it, that shouldn’t matter. Outside of the loud fanbase, The Pitt is an exceptional show I’d recommend to anyone with a solid attention span and even more solid stomach.
