Are ‘Pitt’ bullies real? Diagnosing the newest fandom menace

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — Almost every episode of the award-winning medical drama “The Pitt” goes like this: Intrepid emergency room doctors treat patients, banter and reveal pieces of their personal histories. With the story moving more or less in real time — 15 hour-long episodes for a single 15-hour shift — patients with gory injuries and tragic stories come and go more quickly than the health care workers can process. Mild cliffhanger. Repeat next week.

It’s about as straightforward as it gets, short of crime procedurals that introduce and resolve an entire case within one episode. “The Pitt” is old-fashioned, top-down television that doesn’t ask viewers to look for clues to solve season-long puzzles.

Yet in the absence of dramatic mystery or subtext, a small but vocal segment of its viewers has become notorious for seeking extra meaning — and, more importantly, conflict — in material outside the frame: casting decisions, interview responses, Instagram posts. And they’ve found a target for their complaints in the show’s foundational star, executive producer, sometime-writer and director Noah Wyle, whose grizzled attending physician Dr. Robby has spent much of this season spiraling deeper into a suicidal depression and lashing out at the women on his staff.

Onscreen, Robby is hardening into an antihero. Offscreen, some fans accuse Wyle of explaining away or downplaying his fictional character’s cruelty, and of a constellation of other sins, including envy of his fellow actors’ credentials.

The controversies and extrapolations are enough to make some viewers question whether they’re watching the same show. This has produced, in turn, scandal about the scandals: for every fan who’s decided Dr. Robby is a supervillain, there seem to be two other fans eager to denounce that fan for lacking the skills to comprehend a television program. (“The Pitt” streams on HBO Max, which shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)

“Do I think ‘The Pitt’ is structurally designed to be consumed like ‘Lost’ or ‘Westworld’ or other ‘puzzle box’ shows? No,” said Suzanne Scott, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies fan culture. “Do many fans find it pleasurable to approach any text in this way and engage in collective interpretative practices with other fans? Yes.”

Many fans of “The Pitt” engage with the series on its own terms, as a grounded medical drama in the vein of early “ER,” with fatigued doctors as skilled with a quip as they are with a scalpel. For viewers who want broader themes, the patients arrive bearing storylines that showcase contemporary social issues — the burden of health care costs among the uninsured, the emergency department’s role as primary care for homeless people — but “The Pitt” presents these issues without much room for interpretation. A character like Orlando, a diabetic patient who works multiple jobs and can’t afford to remain in the hospital to recover from a medical emergency, is a tragic figure failed by the American health care system.

This season’s most watercooler-friendly scripted storyline so far came when two ICE agents arrived with a woman who was injured while being detained. Those agents later arrested a white nurse who got into a confrontation with them while trying to care for the detainee. But fans were more intent on litigating the news that Supriya Ganesh, who plays the careful and caring Dr. Mohan, won’t be returning for a third season. Some fans pointed out that Ganesh’s departure marks the second time “The Pitt” has written out a significant character played by a person of color, though the character of Mohan is a resident due to rotate out, and real hospitals and medical dramas alike go through frequent personnel changes.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge who they’re keeping on the show and writing off,” said Emmy, a fan of “The Pitt” who writes critically about the series in a newsletter. Emmy asked not to be identified by her full name to keep her fan activity separate from her professional work.

Fans who criticize and speculate about “The Pitt” have argued that they are, in turn, being misunderstood and overly criticized, as the show has been dragged into the running debate over whether it’s appropriate for mass media to cover fan-to-fan discourse. Some Pitt devotees were offended when interviewers probed Wyle about saucy fan art starring his character and mousy resident Dr. Whitaker (“I don’t want to put judgment on these things,” Wyle said in one appearance, though he seemed to appreciate the creativity).

Some of the fan anger toward the show, though, has escaped quarantine. When Wyle put up an Instagram post about his friendship with the late actor Robert Carradine, users flooded the comments to complain about Ganesh leaving the show.

To a small but passionate segment of “The Pitt” fandom, the series consists of both what streams every Thursday and the events happening offscreen. To this part of the fandom, the peripheral stuff is key to understanding “The Pitt,” another part of the “mystery to be solved,” Scott said.

“For those fans who only care about the text, or casual fans who are totally unaware of the fandom discourse surrounding the show, they’ll just ignore these elements, and for fans who enjoy tracking rumors and offscreen drama, or performing deep analysis of the show, it might produce a different sort of pleasure,” she said.

Many viewers may not know that Ganesh won’t appear next season or be aware of the hubbub surrounding her departure. But for the more engaged fan, events outside the fictional world of “The Pitt” can also shape their interpretation of the show. They noticed when none of Wyle’s costars attended his ceremony for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They paid attention when Ganesh dropped out of a planned appearance at a PaleyFest panel for “The Pitt.”

“The Pitt’s” weekly release model may be helping breed discourse. More and more people kept joining fandom after its first season was over, said Colleigh Stein, a fan studies scholar. Many new viewers devoured the show in one go ahead of the second season, which has aired weekly since January. The traditional release model has encouraged conversations around the show to survive for months instead of burning hot and dying out within a week of the season being dumped on streaming, she said.

“We’ve spent a decade learning how to engage with ‘instant gratification’ of a show and really immerse ourselves in it, after seeing the entire arc, then dissect and pick apart,” Stein said. Fans desperate for more of the show they love are looking everywhere for crumbs of information.

But can they be blamed?

“Metatext is built into the entertainment industry,” said Bethan Jones, a research associate at Cardiff University who studies fandom. “So fans are already primed to think about these nonfictional contexts when it comes to film and television because it’s embedded into its industrial logic.”

Series in a similar position to “The Pitt” have also endured offscreen dramas that threaten to eclipse fictional stories. Rumors of friction between Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey have followed “Grey’s Anatomy” throughout its run (even now, 11 years after Dempsey’s character was killed off; theirs was also perhaps the least contentious of the reported on-set clashes). The long-rumored feud between “The Good Wife” stars Julianne Margulies and Archie Panjabi was seemingly confirmed in its finale, when the actors appeared in a scene stitched together from takes the actresses filmed separately.

“It becomes very difficult to not be aware of off-screen events and speculation, especially if it reinforces fans’ existing beliefs about Wyle based on their feelings about the show, becomes part of that,” Jones said.

If “The Pitt” had aired 20 years earlier, there probably still would’ve been discourse about it somewhere — just not on X, where anyone with an account can accidentally happen upon some inflammatory tweets. Fandoms were formerly relegated to more niche spaces, like forums or fan fiction archives, Stein said. Now, social platforms eat discourse like candy. It doesn’t always benefit fans to churn out outlandish theories about where the season is headed — like “Robby is going to DIE!” — but platforms pick up those theories to amplify through algorithms because they make people mad. And an angry audience is an engaged audience.

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