R.I.P. Mohabbot.
Early this month, Variety broke the news that Supriya Ganesh, who plays Dr. Samira Mohan on HBO’s medical drama “The Pitt,” was departing the show after the second season. Per executives, Ganesh was written off for storyline purposes, leaving fans to mourn the beloved character. With her character arc ending abruptly, much of Mohan’s story remains unfinished, including potential future plotlines in which she might find her speciality post-residency, explain her family lore, make friends at the hospital and, perhaps most importantly (depending on the fan) explore her connection with night-shift attending physician Dr. Jack Abbot (Shawn Hatosy).
Despite only sharing a few scenes, Mohan and Abbot (or simply Mohabbot to fans) are one of the show’s most popular “ships,” which, if you’re new to fandom lingo, is how couples are referred to. Sparking after a Season 1 encounter in which Abbot championed Mohan’s medical skills, the ship joined the legion of other “Pitt” pairings yet to set sail.
Mohabbot is one ship among many. There’s also KingDon — Mel King (Taylor Dearden) and Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), HuckleRobby (Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby and Gerran Howell’s Dennis Whitaker) and McVadi (Victoria Javadi, played by Shabana Azeez and Cassie McKay, played by Fiona Dourif), to name a few. Characters are not restricted to one ship; Robby and Abbot are another popular pair. Dr. Robby and Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) from Season 1 are one of the few ships that actually have a basis in the show’s storyline, in addition to Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) and Yolanda Garcia (Alexandra Metz). Getting overwhelmed? Us too.
Part of what makes the couplings of “The Pitt” unique is the plethora of pairings to choose from — and the fact that the show, which takes place in an understaffed and overfilled emergency room, barely features anything that might suggest romance is blossoming. Mohan and Abbott do little more than share one somewhat private conversation during a particularly tense shift (granted, he’s shirtless for it); the same can be said for KingDon, McVay and the rest (though all remain clothed, in those cases). The lack of source material hasn’t stopped fans of the show — rather, it’s made it all the more fun to analyze, speculate and imagine what might be going on outside of the singular 15-hour shift we get to see.
“It’s kind of a wish fulfillment, but it’s also a way to keep the narrative going,” explains Susan Murray, a professor of media, culture and communication at NYU. “There’s only so much narrative that you’re going to get from the show, because the season’s done. That’s it. That’s all that exists… But if you’re a fan on that level, you can continue a story by fantasizing, or projecting, or imagining.”
Shipping fictional characters is hardly a new phenomenon; it’s one of the oldest fan practices in the book, according to Paul Booth, a professor of media and pop culture at DePaul University. As for why, “the general consensus is there is no general consensus,” he explains. Yes, the fact that it’s fun to picture attractive people in a relationship plays a role, though there’s an emotional element, too — if two characters complement one another, it makes sense that fans would root for them to get together.
Camille — who runs the Instagram account @thepittdetails, and asked to be identified by only her first name — says that shipping characters makes the show easier to converse about. “It’s watercooler talk. You gotta have something to talk about, especially on a show like ‘The Pitt,’” says the co-host of the “The Pitt Crew” podcast. “I don’t know what lung sliding is! The majority of the people who watch the show have no idea what the heck is going on. What you’re paying attention to is the personal conversations happening during these scenes.”
And while there’s no way to know what TV shows will be enlisted into shipping discourse, there are two elements that are typically present in media that tends to garner dedicated fans, explains Booth. “One is a set of three-dimensional characters, so people or characters within a narrative that feel like they’re real and that feel like they could exist outside of the narrative,” he said. “The second thing is a deep narrative… there has to be some grounding in the human experience.”
In the case of “The Pitt,” both are applicable, thanks especially to the series’ devotion to creating an ensemble medical drama that is much more capital R realistic than its forerunners. Compared to hospital-set hall-of-famers like “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy,“ “The Pitt” keeps a focus on the medicine by portraying the authentic, entirely un-glamorous life of the ER staff without wasting precious time showing the employees sleeping with one another in on-call rooms, or placing their hands inside a patient’s chest to steady a bomb that could explode at any moment.
This, paired with the show’s real-time format (each season is simply one 15-hour shift in the ER), creates a near-perfect passion-attracting storm. “There’s a sense when you’re watching ‘The Pitt’ that you are almost looking through a window at a real day,” says Booth. “Which, of course, makes it really fun to watch.” (Jules Feliciani, who runs the Instagram account @weinthepitt, points out that the format allows fans to “get to know these characters, not super personally, but almost personally enough where you can connect with them.”)
The format has its limitations, though — the most obvious for fans with an inclination to ship is the sheer inability to develop romantic relationships over the course of a season. (X users often joke they’ll have to hold out until Season 50 to get the first “Pitt” kiss.) “It would be utterly awkward and not in the spirit of the show to try to develop a romance over the course of 15 hours,” says Suzanne Scott, an associate professor in the Department of Radio, TV and Film at U. of Texas Austin. “But it also means that, by the nature of the format, there’s so much time in between seasons, narrative time for these characters, that fans could sort of color in on their own.”
Booth refers to this as “filling in the gaps,” and in the case of “The Pitt,” there’s a lot left up to the viewer’s discretion: characters’ living situations, family relationships, building friendships, etc. It’s not until the Season 2 finale that audiences get a glimpse at Langdon, Mel, Santos and new attending Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi outside of scrubs. Mel and Santos’ post-credits karaoke scene is the first time we’ve seen any of the characters beyond the four walls of the hospital or its immediate surroundings. Conversations are often left unfinished, thanks to the “frenetic nature of the ER,” Murray says. “A lot of things just don’t get resolved,” she says. “There’s just a lot of opening of possibilities rather than closing off of possibilities.”
Season 2 has seen the plot lean into the show’s popular pairings (which some might call “fan service,” or material intentionally added to please the audience): Langdon taking care of Mel’s sister, Mohan tending to Abbot’s wounds, Robby asking Whitaker to house-sit for him. When discussing the Mohan and Abbot scene, creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill told TVLine that he “leaned into” the romantic subtext, calling it “a flower tossed to the crowd.” Though, at a certain point, it doesn’t matter what occurs onscreen, explains Scott; “Some of the enjoyment starts to become a little bit more divorced from what’s actually going on in the show, because the fun is in the speculation.”
Fans aren’t the only ones with an opinion on the show’s pairings. While Dearden and Ball have played coy about their onscreen connection, saying they view the relationship as platonic, Hatosy, for one, is all aboard the SS Mohabbot. In an interview conducted after news of Ganesh’s exit went public, Hatosy told The Hollywood Reporter that Abbot “definitely has feelings” for his co-worker and “will miss her,” stating “she could go to Jupiter, and he’ll find her” – the type of swoonworthy remark you’d expect to hear on a Shonda Rhimes show.
“There’s a real danger of doing that,” according to Booth, who feels that actors expressing their opinions on the show’s content could possibly alienate parts of their fanbase who don’t watch the show in that way.
There’s also the fact that said fanbase is hard to pin down, and huge: Season 2 is averaging 15.4 million viewers per episode, Variety reported. While other hit shows like “Heated Rivalry” or “Grey’s Anatomy” have audiences easier to broadly categorize, demographically, “The Pitt” doesn’t fall under that umbrella; young fans make up a portion of the show’s viewership, but the hit series appeals to viewers of all ages, some of whom are totally unaware of the wider world of fandom, shipping and vigorous discourse centered around the show.
Some observers are perplexed as to why a serious adult drama is attracting the level of fan scrutiny usually reserved for genre material. “Is this your first time watching a TV show?” is a common remark on X, fueled by pieces such as a SlashFilm article titled “Many ‘The Pitt’ Fans Are Proving That Yes, It’s Possible To Be Bad At Watching A TV Show.” The inter-fandom discourse goes beyond just shipping; cast members leaving, Wyle’s comments to the press and on-screen plotlines are all subject to heated debates.
“There’s often a sort of misconception that cult television fandom needs to be orbiting around [shows] like soaps or horror or sci-fi,” says Scott. “Part of the reason fans are getting as much coverage as they’re getting at this moment in time is, in general, a sort of perceived disconnect because of that realism — like we are meant to just consume this and not speculate about it is the implication.”
But to ask a fan to simply consume something is unrealistic. Fandom, whether people like to classify themselves as members or not, has existed as long as there’s been entertainment, and extends beyond whatever TV show happens to be the current hit; athletes, sports teams, musicians, books, superheroes and more all have their avid fanbases. “Fans have long-standing reading practices,” says Scott. “And it doesn’t matter what text they’re approaching; they’re going to approach a text with those reading practices kind of in their toolkit.”
“The Pitt,” clearly, is not the singular exception to this. And that’s got to be good news for HBO.
As Scott explains: “Fans are often the loyalest, most active promotional agents a television show can have, and those are two things you need in television — particularly at this moment in history.”