I got an ask about unconscious bias and Robby's sexism that I won't post because it's way long, but I hear you, Anon, and I did have some thoughts. re: Taylor Dearden's point* about unintentional sexism and my point about the show unintentionally revealing the male EPs' unconscious bias, the question is, how is that possible when the writers' room is full of women? To which I would say: TV shows are not a democracy. They're not a commune. They are a dictatorship. Hopefully, a benevolent dictatorship, but the reality is that every woman in that room could object and it doesn't matter because Scott Gemmill can do whatever he wants. Even if the writers disagree, none of them will say so publicly because that is simply not done. It's the showrunner's show, period. (If anyone wants to learn more about how writers' rooms work, check out the Children of Tendu podcast. They talk a lot about the hierarchy.) But I'd also point out, well, women hold sexist views, too. We live under patriarchy, man. Sexism is so baked in that many people simply don't recognize it. It's 'obviously women are more nurturing' or 'of course men are better engineers.' A lot of people hold sexist beliefs and have simply never thought twice about them, women included. That's why it's called unconscious bias.
When I talk about the EPs' unconscious bias, I'm not talking about characters being sexist on screen. I'm mostly talking about bias in the storytelling framework of the show. I've said it before, but I find it telling that almost all of the women have stories related to their gender or their families and none of the men do. It's the choice of the stories themselves that reveals the problem. The male EPs in charge can choose to tell any story they want. The fact that they picked the ones they did, and that it fits a pattern, reveals a way of thinking about women and their stories. To be clear, I don't think the show or Robby are misogynistic; they don't fundamentally hate women. I think we're seeing good old-fashioned Gen X benevolent sexism. I'm gonna go into detail on the storytelling, which is long, so now I shall cut.
I want to start with a couple definitions for clarity's sake here. When I talk about plot, I mean the incidents that happen in the show. Story is how a character changes. So "Mr. Green's unknown AAA bursts and he dies" is plot. "After missing Mr. Green's AAA, Ogilvie doubts he's cut out for the ED" is story. One of the odd things about S2 is it failed to give all of its regulars season-long story arcs, which is considered poor TV writing. I think it might be a symptom of S2's shaky writing, but we'll have to see how S3 goes to make a full judgment on it.
If you look at S2, the men's stories are thus: after struggling with suicidal ideation, Robby realizes he still has things to see and people to love. After falling from grace, Langdon realizes he still has what it takes to be an ED doc. Whitaker doesn't really have a story, but if I were BSing it, I'd say it's that he comes into his own and realizes the ED is the place for him. (If you squint it's maybe that he learns to set a boundary with Langdon? But again, it's kinda BS. He doesn't have an emotional change over the season.) Abbot's not a regular, but hey, let's include him: when he realizes how much Robby is struggling, Abbot reveals his own vulnerability to save his friend's life.
What about the women's stories? After her mom's engagement, Mohan abandons her previous life plan and struggles to find a place she belongs, realizing it might not be the ED. Under relentless pressure from her parents, Javadi realizes emergency psychiatry is her passion. Mel learns that her sister is building a life that doesn't always involve her and realizes she must do the same. (Note that Mel's plot is overwhelmingly about the deposition that meant nothing, but her actual story is with her sister.) The catalysts or impediments to their stories are all family members. Quite different from the guys.
Santos is the real exception. Her story is that she confronts the superior who made her question herself and finds a new equilibrium. I would've liked the story where she struggles with self-harm only to find refuge in building a new friendship, but we can't actually say that from what we saw on screen. (All they had to do was show her putting the scalpel back! Sigh.)
I'd argue that our other returning regulars don't really have stories. Broadly, I'd say that McKay's plots deal with her acknowledging how the ED is negatively affecting her life (needs to get laid, can't cry), but she doesn't have an emotional change over the season, so it's not actually a story. Through the course of the season, she's sexually harassed in a way the show treats as cute and then is there to empathize with a dying mother and her children. Most of her material relates to female-coded things - sexual object, mothering, crying, etc. What's frustrating is it would've been so easy to give her an arc. Just show us one shot of her crying at the fireworks at the end. It would still be about a woman being all emotional, which is of course sexist in its own right, but it would've been something.
And then there's Dana. I said a while back that it felt like a final Dana scene in the finale was cut - because her story doesn't have an end, it just kind of stops; her last scene is giving the cops the rape kit, but it's not about an emotional change for her - so I was glad to have Noah confirm that at the terrible FYC panel. Whatever that scene was, I think it was a mistake to cut it because its absence left Dana without a story end. Broadly, her plotline was about taking a trainee under her wing and protecting her, which she does, but it doesn't change her emotionally. She struggled with her own mental health through the season, but that doesn't really have an end, either. I wish they had landed the mentorship story - Dana finds new purpose in being a nurse by seeing it through the eyes of a trainee - but even if they had, it's not treated as a professional mentorship story. It's the story of a mother nurturing and protecting a child. Abbot makes that explicit when he says, "You are the mama bear glue that holds this place together."
Mothers. Daughters. Sisters. Even objects of desire. That's how the show views women, broadly-speaking. Sure, men have relationships (flings, wives, Amys), but they're incidental, whereas the women's relationships are the lens through which the show sees them and the catalysts for their stories. That's what I mean when I say the male EPs' unconscious bias seeps in. I think the three old, privileged men in charge see women as relational, not as ends in themselves like men are.
Again, I wouldn't call this misogyny. It's not hatred of women. Hell, Noah made this explicit when talking about how Robby believes the women are better, so he's harder on them because he expects more. That is benevolent sexism right there.
Just to be clear, I don't think any of these stories are "wrong" or even that they shouldn't do any of them individually. I think most were written poorly, or didn't quite work, but I rather liked Javadi's. The problem is the totality. When all of your stories approach women a certain way, that shows a very limited view of what women are and can be. And it can unintentionally tap into harmful stereotypes of women, as I think it did in S2.
The big example of that is Mohan's story, which I think was bad on pretty much every axis and sexist in a harmful way. As I'm sure many know, there is an age-old stereotype that women are too emotional to hold important jobs. We see this every time a woman runs for president in the US, which is how it plays out on the grandest scale, but it's a still widely-held, harmful belief in everyday life. Historically, it's been an excuse to exclude women from certain jobs, the echoes of which still affect women today. So why The Pitt would choose to deploy this negative stereotype of women is utterly baffling to me.
To recap, Mohan's mom gets engaged and plans to go on a year-long cruise, which (inexplicably) upends Mohan's life, destabilizing her so much that she literally has a panic attack at work, the distraction of which makes her miss a diagnosis, causing a patient's entirely preventable death. To which I say...seriously? In 2026, they thought it was a good idea to show a woman panicking and getting a patient killed because of it...seriously??? Whatever the intention was, they have a responsibility as storytellers not to reinforce harmful negative stereotypes, so what the actual fuck, guys? Why was this story so important to tell that it trumps the reinforcement of what generations of professional women have fought to achieve? Yes, they gave Robby a panic attack in S1, but men don't have the same history of exclusion based on being too emotional; as soon as you give that story to a woman, it becomes a sexist stereotype because of the context. People can say it's just a story, but stories are how we understand the world, and these EPs have talked about the importance of their storytelling.
The sad thing is, if I had to guess, I'd bet it just...never occurred to them. Or if someone brought it up, they didn't think it was a big deal. And that is how unconscious bias and benevolent sexism lead to the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes that can have real effects on people's views. It's a shame and why I do think it matters.
To sum up, there are different ways to analyze sexism in a show. A lot of attention has been paid to X character treating Y character in Z way. That's certainly valid, but I think it's also important to look at it from a wider view of what stories the writers choose to tell and how those stories are approached. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about the EPs' unconscious bias creeping in.
*Just a note on the critique that Taylor has (apparently?) said she doesn't watch the show: I don't think that's relevant. She reads all the scripts, given that she has to act out the scenes, and then she's there when the show is filmed. She knows the show and her opinion is worthy of consideration.
DORIAN COREY:
I always had hopes of being a big star. Then as you get older, you aim a little lower. Then I say, "Well, yeah, you might still make an impression."
there's an old anne rice interview circulating on twitter rn that i remember reading ages ago where she makes a pretty salient point about how submissive men who have bdsm fantasies etc will go to a sex worker and basically order the ala carte version of their fantasy to be performed in real life but women don't really have that same option and certainly not at the same point of availability so they read her horny books instead. and honestly that argument has been in the back of my mind every time people get on their high horses about the popularity of booktok romantasy novels or heated rivalry or whatever the "women are horny and we're upset about that" cultural property du jour is ever since. women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.
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