We Actually Do Have To Talk About The Pitt Fandom
Every fandom is The Pitt fandom
HBO Max’s The Pitt concluded its second season last night, the final blast of a months-long cultural explosion. I can’t remember the last time I could talk about a TV show with almost everyone I know from every part of my life. I don’t need to tell you that The Pitt is excellent, though the specific ways in which it excels are belied by its acceptance into the mainstream. In many ways it’s a “normal” TV show—it airs one at a time in a weeknight timeslot and it’s playing in the recognizable sandbox of the medical drama—and this normalcy is key to its appeal. But it’s also deceptively formalist, with camerawork and editing so tightly controlled that the design appears invisible, and narratively withholding to a degree the medium can almost never manage. There were no storylines paid off in last night’s finale, there was no grand emotional catharsis, just people muddling through. Half of them aren’t even seen leaving the hospital. There are no endings on The Pitt, only hours we don’t see. Yet at the same time, the writing is so sharp and engaging that a general audience can appreciate it on a week-to-week basis. My Stranger Things-loving teenage sister can understand that the absence of resolution is part of the point of the show. There’s also more gore effects than any show since Hannibal, and that makes my heart sing.
So it turns out that The Pitt is for everyone except for one specific group: Fans of The Pitt. I use the word “fans” in a specific way here. The definition of the word has become disturbingly broad. Right now on Twitter, there’s a sidebar feature with AI summaries of current discourses, and it never fails to use the word “fan” when describing discussion of a work of art. “Fans Debate,” “Fans Erupt,” “Fans Discuss,” always fans fans fans. The Fan has become a catch-all identifier for anyone with positive feelings about a work, the way Kleenex became the word for facial tissue. It used to be that fandom was a distinct mode of engagement. The average person might enjoy watching Grey’s Anatomy—the fan would bandy about minutiae, attend conventions, write fanfic, cosplay as the characters, investigate, fixate, obsess. We came up with no word for the casual enjoyer. We are all fans now.
Fandom can be fun. I’ve been part of them in my life, and if I told you which ones I would be too mortified to show my face on here again. At a certain point in my life, though, I started to realize that being a fan of something was harming my ability to think critically about it. My mental projection of what a work meant to me was coming into conflict with what the work actually was, and accommodating that dissonance was getting to be more trouble than it was worth. Fandom by nature is histrionic; the intensity of a fan’s love is directed both inwards and outwards. Moreover, fandom is a space where being histrionic is encouraged, where the quilt of community is knitted with emotional outbursts, where hierarchies are assembled based on who demonstrably cares the most. I don’t mean to moralize too much—it’s not evil to be part of a fandom. Some works are designed to foster such a reaction. The Pitt, I think, is not one of them.
I’ll refrain from spending too much time recapitulating the drama surrounding The Pitt’s fandom. If you’re reading this article, you have seen it discussed again and again for the last fifteen weeks. This is a loud, opinionated, particularly intense fandom that seems constantly at odds with the show they ostensibly love. They hate Noah Wyle, who created the show, and Dr. Robby, the main character. They constantly whine about creative decisions doing perceived disservice to their favorite characters. They turn everything into a moral test and attest the show is failing. They claim to be falling out of love with The Pitt. They keep watching. What explains this behavior?
The Pitt, despite its mainstream appeal, is not necessarily well-built to support this kind of community. Its commitment to a realistic real-time depiction of life in an emergency room means that it doesn’t operate like a normal medical drama. Episodes don’t have a strict televisual structure, secondary characters cycle in and out depending on who’s working that day, almost nothing can be emotionally resolved across the course of a season. Characters are vividly depicted but lacking in detailed canonical backstory, and they don’t really have “arcs” in the traditional sense. They constantly vocalize virtuous messages but act in realistically contradictory and disagreeable ways. Sets and costumes and makeup are full of hyper-specific particularities that encourage attentive viewing but do not pay off as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Watching this show from a fandom perspective, obsessing over trivia and relationships and rightness and wrongness, is liable to drive anyone insane. And indeed it has!
The behavior of this fandom is a little more complicated than the “lack of media literacy” bromide that’s been the constant refrain for the last four months. I don’t think these people are just stupid and watching the show “the wrong way.” Their behavior is actually much more calculated than it appears. You need to understand this fandom in the context of a sincere belief that they possess partial ownership of the work and the ability to reshape it to their desires. On last night’s finale, Dr. Mohan finished up a season-long clash with Dr. Robby by reciprocating his apology and acknowledging that he has good intentions. Here’s some sample reactions from the Pitt fandom:
What fascinates me about this sentiment is the presumption that the show itself is somehow misinterpreting its own character. The idea that they “had her apologize” implies that the creators forced her to do something she otherwise wouldn’t. To these people, the fandom interpretation of Mohan is somehow more true than how she actually acts on the show. Instead of taking this scene as it is and working it into their understanding of Mohan as a character, they reject it outright. The reality of the show chafes against the version of it that they hold in their hearts. The response is that the show needs to change, not them.
What’s more, they believe that they actually have the power to make those changes. They think that if they post hard enough, they can create an environment so hostile The Pitt’s showrunners will be scared into submission. They think that if they post enough spurious accusations of Noah Wyle being a supporter of the Confederacy that HBO Max will be forced to punish him. They think that if they make the departure of Dr. Mohan into an issue with moral dimensions, then the decision to write her off could be reversed. They hate The Pitt as it is, but they see it as fertile ground for something they could love. They feel that the obsession they demonstrate for it means they are owed access to the levers of creative power.
Viewed from the inside, it’s easy to mistake fandom for being the only way anyone is engaging with a show. It’s easy to feel like no one would care about the show if not for you and people like you pouring endless passion into it. It’s also understandable to feel like you’re posting in a locked room and take issue with being criticized by outsiders. A common sentiment among fandom types is that they want to be “left alone.” Fandom has long been a space for outsiders, so perhaps they aren’t aware of the extent to which they have monopolized the conversation and pushed out different ways of thinking about the show. That’s the generous view. Undeniably, though, there is some severe arrogance on display here too. They feel they are owed both privacy and a seat at the table, to be ignored but to have their hands on the wheel. And they have made their existence a moral issue, as though “fan” is an oppressed class of individual.
Admirably, The Pitt does not seem to have taken the bait. The cast and crew have approached the fandom with a light touch, occasionally offering bemused reactions to shipping and fanart but refusing to be in dialogue with anything but their own creative instincts. Lesser artists have destroyed their own work by trying to appease fandoms out of a misplaced sense of obligation. In reality, it’s rare that a show’s audience is largely made up of people who engage with it in a fannish way. The Pitt didn’t need a fandom to build its audience, it just needed to be good. Now its fandom claims they’re done with the show. One can only hope.
—Capybaroness, 2026
Watching the Pitt season 1 as it aired was one of my favorite experiences watching television. I (a person too young to remember ER in its heyday) had heard some mild rumblings about this “super accurate new medical show” and decided to check it out. I was hooked, and caught up around the time of episode 6. At the time, it felt like discovering this hidden gem no one was talking about, but soon I realized basically everyone had just done the same exact thing I had. Every week, there were more and more people posting about the show, and by the time the show blew itself open with the MCI, it felt like the whole world was there to react.
By the end of season 1, I had fully joined what you’d call the “fandom,” and I was having a great time. But, in the time between seasons, things started to shift. People will say it was the influx of new fans, but honestly, I’d seen the pattern enough times to know the Pitt fandom didn’t need any outside help in flaming out. You find a new passion, and it burns so brightly and intensely, you want to consume every single scrap of content you can find. Then, either you burn yourself out or you run out of content, but eventually, you need something new to sustain the flame. You start to notice the flaws, all the ways your object of devotion failed to live up to the pedestal you placed it on. The disappointment shifts to betrayal, and your obsession turns to hatred.
This used to be a pretty rare occurrence in fandom, something that would happen to a tiny subset of people that would be scoffed at and ostracized by the fandom writ large, but it’s become more and more common. Look at the Heated Rivalry fans, or the Stranger Things fans, or the House of the Dragon fans, and so on and so on. What once felt like an aberration now feels like the inevitable endpoint of all so-called “fandom activity,” and I think the driving factor is that fandom has moved off forums and onto algorithm driven platforms. Shrinkflation has come for the attention economy, and in the era of dopamine-driven engagement, “well-beloved show that everyone likes” is just not a status that can sustain itself for the months long gaps between seasons. At some point you run out of positive things to say. Someone has to say something new.
And so, with no new content from the Pitt, no new information to explain the shift, the Pitt fandom turned. Noah Wyle went from savior to scourge. There are things you could point to about season two, ways it might not have lived up to season one, but it didn’t really matter. The winds had already shifted. The show was not going to be fun to talk about online this year, and maybe would never be again. Hatred of a popular thing is much easier to sustain. Every new award or accolade, every positive review or reaction, can be used as a fuel source. Hate-watching has become more popular than ever. In fact, despite what that twitter user claims, squadrons of obsessive haters may now be more of a recognizable sign of a show’s success than any other “fandom activity.”
It might even be the thing that's necessary to power engagement. Even among people who still liked the show, the shows obsessive fans was the main topic of conversation. Popular posts praising the show shifted from just enjoying it to proving the immaturity and “media illiteracy” of those who did not. Far from being “irreversibly damaged,” both sides of the Pitt fandom may have just the opposition they need to sustain themselves ad infinitum. If that’s the case, then the Pitt’s doing just fine. It’s just a shame for the rest of us who watch it.
Great article! The Pitt is sort of a dark mirror of Avatar in terms of the fandom it looks like it should have versus the fandom it does have. Avatar confuses people because it looks like it should have a star wars style fandom, one that buys funko pops and cosplays and writes fanfiction, but it doesn't. The Pitt is the opposite, it looks like it SHOULDN'T have a funko-pop fandom, but it inexplicably does. "Pissing off the hardcore fans means less edits". Dog, do you think the creators assumed there would be ANY edits before the show premiered?