The HBO Max hospital drama has spawned an obsessive fandom that sees the troubled hero of the series as its villain.
If you dig into the vast and voracious community of The Pitt fans on the internet, you’ll find some curious opinions. After season two’s premiere in January, there were people who started shipping charge nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) and her new mentee Emma (Laëtitia Hollard)—in other words, wanting them to become a couple. Others are annoyed that Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) and Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez) haven’t gotten enough screen time together this year. Still more are obsessing over whether Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) is a “girl dad.” But by far the oddest Pitt opinion I’ve found served up by the algorithm is that Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is ruining the show.
This is strange on multiple levels. Wyle is an executive producer of The Pitt, as well as one of the driving creative forces behind the series. It quite literally would not exist without him. Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch is also the show’s main character—as much as this ensemble series has one. During the show’s wildly popular first season, Robby was treated as a swaggering, tortured heartthrob by the viewers who turned this HBO Max original into an Emmy-winning success.
But the anti-Robby sentiment also seems to be a result of the show’s success. Creator R. Scott Gemmill—along with Wyle and fellow EP John Wells—did such a good job that fans have developed deep parasocial relationships with nearly every character on screen, from the sensitive Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden) to nurse Jesse (Ned Brower), who began, essentially, as a background character. But it’s also evidence of how online communities can sometimes desire fan service above all else, with little care for nuanced storytelling.
Because it’s very clear, if you’ve been watching this season, that The Pitt’s writers are purposely trying to paint Robby as a complicated, flawed man, someone who desperately needs to get a hold of his emotions and is frequently a bit of an asshole. It’s a portrayal that consciously wants to poke holes in the notion of the ER doctor as an untouchable cowboy. In season one, Robby’s vulnerabilities were made evident through his trauma over the loss of his mentor during COVID; in the show’s next chapter, his vulnerabilities are shown through his stubbornness.
That much is clear from season two’s very first moments, when we see Robby riding into work on a motorcycle—without a helmet. It’s an image designed to make him look cool. That fantasy of invincibility is quickly crushed once he arrives at the hospital: By 9 a.m., a driver comes in devastatingly injured after a crash with a motorcycle. That plot twist is a bit on the nose; so is the patient who arrives during the 12 p.m. hour after falling off a motorcycle pyramid. When Dana asks if he was wearing a helmet, and he says yes, she shades Robby: “What do you know? They are still in style.”
We find Robby on July 4 on the verge of taking a much-needed sabbatical. His plan is to drive, likely helmetless, to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a world heritage site in Canada. He’s both eager to leave and having trouble letting go, as evidenced by his tense interactions with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), the attending who was brought in to replace him. Al-Hashimi’s style—calm with a belief in a work-life balance—is in direct contrast to Robby’s reactive, heart-on-his-sleeve approach. Despite her slightly annoying interest in generative AI to help with charting, it’s clear Al-Hashimi is not a villain. In fact, her composure shows just how volatile Robby is.
That’s clear in a scene that created controversy among Pitt fans last week, in which Robby yells at Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) for not proofreading the charts she used AI to create. The backlash against Robby’s aggressive banging on a desk was so vocal that it was the subject of a trending topic on X.
But this week, it seems even clearer that Robby’s bad attitude is a deliberate choice on the part of the show’s team. While waiting for a swimmer who ran into a boat’s propeller to arrive on the hospital’s helipad, Dr. Langdon pours his heart out to Robby. Langdon was once Robby’s golden boy; he betrayed his mentor by stealing benzos from patients to feed an addiction. Now he’s back and eager to make amends. Even with Langdon’s (very illegal) actions, the show has been sympathetic to the doctor as someone trying to find his footing after rehab. Robby? Not so much.
“I’m really glad that you got the help that you need. But I don’t know if I want you working in my ER,” Robby tells Langdon.
It’s a line that hits the Robby sweet spot. You can understand where he’s coming from, but he’s so brutal that his honesty comes off as cruelty. Robby’s inability to forgive and his short fuse are clearly building to something, but the way The Pitt is paced means viewers have to wait a while for the explosion.
The trouble is that because Wyle is both the face of the show and a prominent presence behind the scenes, fans have taken this well-written arc as an implicit condoning of everything Robby does and says onscreen. Occasionally, it’s not just Robby they see as a bad guy, but Wyle himself. There’s a video that shows members of the cast being asked whom among their ranks would be able to survive a 15-hour hospital shift; they all answer “Noah” or “Robby,” which prompted this audience comment: “did he pay them to say this.” There’s also frustration that Tracy Ifeachor, a Black woman who played Dr. Collins in season one, is no longer on the show—the implication being that her storyline was passed over for that of a white man. (Other internet sleuths have pointed out that Ifeachor was associated with a church that holds allegedly homophobic stances, a clear mismatch with the series’ avowedly progressive politics.)
The notion of the “bad fan”—Emily Nussbaum has described them as “the loyal viewer, often a guy, who views antiheroes as heroes”—has existed at least since the height of the prestige TV age. One of the most cited examples is the Breaking Bad devotees who thought that Walter White was an unequivocal hero, despite all the killing and drug dealing. But The Pitt’s “bad fans” are not cheering for bad behavior. Instead, they’re demanding a sort of moral purity. They’ve fallen so deeply in love with elements of this world that anything that doesn’t fit within the picture they’ve created in their heads—their “headcanon,” as it’s known in the fandom world—is seen as an affront.
But the truth is that Robby being a jerk is one of the most fascinating threads of this show’s already exciting second season. If the fans want to take the white dude down a peg, they really don’t need to: The show is doing it for them already.
