The Pitt is a 10 time Emmy Award winning HBO Max show about an emergency department in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Season 1 premiered January 9th, 2025 and Season 2 on January 8th, 2026. Season 3 is set to come out in January 2027.
The show is critically acclaimed for its inventive episode style where each of the 15 episodes per season is an hour of the doctor’s shift that goes in chronological order.
(For example, Episode 1 is titled 7:00am, Episode 2 is titled 8:00am, etc.)
After watching the first few episodes, I was hooked. I’ve always been a medical drama girlie, especially Grey’s Anatomy, but the fast paced nature and medical accuracy that The Pitt brought was above and beyond.
That’s when I took to social media to see other fans’ opinions as Season 1 had just finished airing. I came to find that one big disparity online was people arguing about two characters, Dr. Langdon (played by Patrick Ball) and Dr. Santos (played by Isa Briones).
- Dr. Langdon is a good looking, straight, white, male, doctor who is completing his last year of residency in the emergency department.
- Dr. Santos is a good looking, lesbian, Filipino, female doctor who is on her very first day of interning in the emergency department.
Despite these base line differences, Langdon and Santos are cut from the exact same cloth. They are both hot headed, ambitious, addicts with a passion for taking care of their patients. I’ve never seen two characters so similar in one piece of media. It’s also no coincidence that these two are neck and neck in the race of who’s my personal favorite character.
When you go online though, you would think that they’re entirely different. Fans have chosen sides, making one character the perfect angel that can do no wrong while the other is the worst person on television and it’s a pretty 50/50 split on which one fits which role.
As you can see, this post has almost 12,000 likes but even in the responses, fans are arguing back. One of them says:
As a young woman watching the reaction to these characters, it’s just reinforcing the narrative that women should make themselves smaller and easier to digest.
When Langdon yells at his patients, it’s hot, it’s confidence, it’s charisma.
When Santos yells at her patients, it’s unprofessional, it’s hormonal, it’s rude.
This sentiment is seen throughout the entire show. The male characters always find a way to overshadow the females that work with them. The double standard is infuriating and I’m outraged when I watch things that showcase it so clearly.
Isa Briones, the actress who plays Dr. Santos, said in an article from Vulture,
“Some people have really stayed hating her. I used to give a lot of grace. If you’re still this critical of her and not critical of Langdon, I think you’re just a misogynist”
Like my other bloggers have touched on in “He’s a player, she’s a slut” and “she’s obsessed vs. he’s dedicated: the gender divide of fan culture”, this double standard has a huge impact on us as women and it can be found in almost any situation we deal with in everyday life.
Watching it be replicated on screen definitely adds to the show’s realism but it’s not necessarily an aspect that I think needs to be reinforced in such a highly viewed and critically acclaimed piece of media.
This isn’t even a complete deep dive into the behind the scenes sexism from Noah Wyle who is a member of the writing staff, an executive producer, and the lead actor who plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. Here is an article from Entertainment Weekly about Dr. Robby’s sexism on screen and blog from substack discussing the prejudice some of the actors and characters of color faced both on and off screen.
My hope is that by January, when Season 3 starts airing, fans start to give the female characters grace and the same amount of slack that they’ve given the men. This goes for every piece of media. Maybe once that small step is accomplished, it’ll be more likely to bleed into our everyday, real life, interactions.