The Pitt is a masterpiece of television, and I’ve been enraptured by it all season. It’s a medical drama with the structure of 24, where each episode takes place over the course of one hour in an emergency room in Pittsburgh, often ending on a twist or a cliffhanger. One thing the show pointedly doesn’t have is romance. The fandom is making up for that in spades, even if the biggest ship so far is definitely not going to happen on screen.
When I talk to people about shipping, I feel like I have to first offer a series of caveats (and sit through a bunch of jokes I’ve already heard about boats—so funny and original!). Shipping does owe its name, at least, to the X-Files fandom, where fans were clearly 100% correct about the scorching tension between the two lead actors. But its actual origins as a fan activity come from Star Trek, where the women creating zines about Kirk and Spock falling for each other must have known that this wouldn’t ever happen on screen.
In recent years, most people unfamiliar with fandom make the assumption that shipping two characters falls under the X-Files category: something you really want to see happen on screen. To be fair, shippers of this kind who make shipping a crusade have sometimes performed obnoxious antics. In one infamous example, a shipper in the Voltron fandom attempted to blackmail the studio that made the show with the threat of releasing footage they claimed to have stolen unless they made their chosen relationship canon. Studio Mir didn’t respond to the threat, and eventually the shipper gave up.
If that’s the only introduction one has to shipping, then well, you probably think everyone who is into this is a freak. But shipping is simply a very normal human activity: imagining things. When people say they hate fandom or hate shipping, it always makes me a little sad. Imagining things is fun, and what people imagine fictional characters doing in their heads cannot hurt you.
In the case of The Pitt, it is totally unsurprising to me that fans ship the characters on the show. They are all professional actors, and even in their scrubs they’re all really hot. Noah Wyle as the bearded, angst-ridden Dr. Robby is a bona fide heartthrob—and yes, he does have a slightly homoerotic friendship with another old man. But the most popular ship by far is between the sweet, probably autistic Dr. Mel King and her mentor, the hotheaded Dr. Frank Langdon. Of the 641 fanfics about The Pitt on Archive of our Own, 120 of them are fics that romantically pair these two together.
Shipping these two has faced some pushback from the fandom, especially because the actors that play Dr. Mel and Dr. Langdon don’t seem very interested in portraying a romance on screen. Taylor Dearden, who plays Dr. Mel, told Us Weekly that she thinks Mel is asexual.
“I think Mel is asexual,” she said. “I don't think that's part of how Mel would think — especially at work. She's a hyper professional.”
Patrick Ball, who plays Dr. Langdon, agrees with his co-star, describing the relationship between the two characters as platonic.
“I think that has to do with the fact that audiences have been trained by most medical dramas for love affairs more than it has to do with me and Mel,” he also told Us Weekly.
It’s true that The Pitt isn’t the kind of medical soap opera like Grey’s Anatomy, where the doctors never seem to do any doctor-ing. It’s a very focused show trying to portray a realistic look at what it’s like to practice medicine in our current era. This has not stopped the ship’s popularity at all—and why should it? I have to believe that everyone who was a diehard Team Jacob fan in the midst of Twilight’s popularity probably understood that wasn’t going to happen. But people liked exploring the ideas, taking ownership of the text within their own fan communities by expressing themselves with fanart and fanfiction.
Shipping is more about fans and their expression than the actual show itself. If you’re a budding writer, sometimes it’s easier to explore ideas in a fictional universe that already exists, that you don’t have to make up from wholecloth. Besides, the chemistry between Mel and Langdon is real, even if the actors see it as platonic. Dr. Mel could also be asexual but still experience romantic attraction. Langdon and Mel’s relationship is the kind that could possibly bloom into romance in a different kind of show. She's kind, gentle and tries to always see the best in everyone; he’s a cynic and a huge fuckup who thinks the worst of himself at all times but secretly has a big heart. On Grey’s Anatomy, this storyline would practically write itself. Writing fanfiction is about exploring that possibility space, especially when you know the show itself would never go there.
The next season of The Pitt will apparently take place after Dr. Langdon returns from a stint in rehab, and I’m sure that Dr. Mel will be there to support him—just as friends. In the meantime, I’ll be exploring the places their relationship could have gone in my imagination.
