{"id":609706,"date":"2026-04-17T06:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T06:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/609706\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T06:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T06:53:09","slug":"the-pitt-season-two-was-great-but-challenging-its-no-surprise-some-viewers-turned-on-dr-robby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/609706\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pitt season two was great, but challenging. It\u2019s no surprise some viewers turned on Dr. Robby"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Noah Wyle and Patrick Ball in The Pitt.Warrick Page\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The most talked about aspect of The Pitt\u2019s second season, which came to a satisfying, emotional conclusion on Thursday night, wasn\u2019t anything that actually appeared onscreen in the medical drama. <\/p>\n

Rather, it was how many viewers had started to view the lead character, Dr. Robby (played by Noah Wyle), as a villain rather than a hero \u2013 with some even taking to denouncing the show online.<\/p>\n

Vanity Fair kicked off the conversation in February with an article titled \u201cWhy are The Pitt\u2019s most devoted fans turning against saintly Dr. Robby?<\/a><\/p>\n

Since then, there\u2019s been a flurry of think pieces delving into why the vocal fandom is \u201cputting The Pitt\u2019s characters on trial to be deemed \u2018good\u2019 or \u2018bad\u2019\u201d or how the show\u2019s fans \u201care proving that yes, it\u2019s possible to be bad at watching a TV show.\u201d <\/p>\n

Back in the day of HBO\u2019s \u201cdifficult men\u201d dramas such as The Sopranos, critics fretted about some viewers celebrating its criminal anti-heroes. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Sepideh Moafi and Wyle in The Pitt.Warrick Page\/Supplied<\/p>\n

It amuses me, in a way, that the concern now is that viewers are judging characters such as Dr. Robby too harshly.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t get too upset about what a few Pitt viewers say in the heat of the moment on Reddit forums, however.<\/p>\n

For one thing, it simply makes the case for the continued existence of professional criticism at a time when everyone has a voice, but algorithms inevitably highlight the most toxic ones.<\/p>\n

But also, I completely understand why The Pitt\u2019s second season has alienated some. <\/p>\n

When the show premiered last year on HBO Max in the United States and on Crave in Canada, there was a lot of chatter about streaming services turning to the comfort food of medical procedurals.<\/p>\n

The Pitt was an ER for our times, with a nostalgic network-style week-to-week release.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Supriya Ganesh in The Pitt.Warrick Page\/Supplied<\/p>\n

In its first season, Dr. Robby \u2013 brilliantly leading his emergency department through a mass shooting despite his PTSD \u2013 soothed many viewers in the same way that the Artemis II astronauts did with their recent mission around the moon. <\/p>\n

It is soul-stirring to see people showcase integrity alongside high-level excellence under pressure. <\/p>\n

But even the best people aren\u2019t perfect everyday, of course. And The Pitt wouldn\u2019t be a great drama if it showed the same day over and over.<\/p>\n

For all its familiar trappings, the HBO show is not actually easy viewing \u2013 the title itself suggests despair or bottomlessness \u2013 and is quite experimental with its form. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s structured into 15 episodes meant to represent 15 sequential hours.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason that real-time TV shows have previously mostly been thrillers, such as the Fox classic 24 and Apple TV\u2019s Hijack. Nobody is looking for psychological realism in that genre.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, and Gerran Howell in The Pitt.Warrick Page\/Supplied<\/p>\n

In a medical procedural, however, viewers expect main characters to have an emotional arc in each episode amid the action.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s made it especially difficult to watch Dr. Robby struggling with his well-being for a full season. While in the previous season, his sharp superior side was mainly reserved for cost-conscious administrators and anti-vaxxers, he has now turned it on his own colleagues. <\/p>\n

In the end, however, The Pitt has been brave in highlighting how hard it actually is to keep your empathy up over time for people who you love as they go through mental-health struggles. <\/p>\n

Creator R. Scott Gemmill and his writing team have not exactly been subtle in communicating to viewers that Dr. Robby is suicidal this season.<\/p>\n

The opening scenes of the first episode showed him riding his motorcycle to work without a helmet on his last day before a sabbatical. He\u2019s been planning to ride to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, no less. <\/p>\n

But even though viewers know Dr. Robby is fantasizing about killing himself, his pity party started to get tiring.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Howell and Wyle in The Pitt.Warrick Page\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The scenes where the white male doctor has been cutting or condescending toward the women of colour he works with have been particularly hard to brush off. <\/p>\n

His defensive attitude toward Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) was off-putting from the get go \u2013 even if his suspicion that she was hiding something turned out to be right. <\/p>\n

But what really struck a nerve was when Dr. Robby upbraided Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), who had a panic attack, for letting her \u201cmommy issues\u201d affect her work in episode 10.<\/p>\n

Viewers had to stew online about that for three more episodes before The Pitt revealed that this wasn\u2019t just cruelty, but projection. <\/p>\n

In a climactic scene in episode 13, nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) told Dr. Robby she\u2019d give him a time out if he were her kid. He shot back that his actual mother had left him when he was a child. <\/p>\n

Because Dr. Robby said this during a fight, I don\u2019t think it fully sunk in for viewers. <\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t really sink in for me until Thursday\u2019s finale. In the last images of that episode, Dr. Robby cradled the baby \u201cJane Doe\u201d who had been left in the emergency department in the season premiere.<\/p>\n

This was the quiet, tearful moment that will heal viewers\u2019 relationship with the character, I suspect. <\/p>\n

Catharsis has followed conflict, but as is so often the case with a visit to the hospital these days, the waiting time was hard to handle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Noah Wyle and Patrick Ball in The Pitt.Warrick Page\/Supplied The most talked about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,2922,348],"class_list":{"0":"post-609706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-noastack","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}