The Pitt's Ensemble Illusion

The numbers on who gets seen, centered, and awarded

Emmy nominations were announced this past Wednesday, July 8, and The Pitt leads with 25. But The Pitt’s representation has always been about broad on-screen diversity instead of narrative depth, and that’s more obvious than ever

Of those nominations, there are eight acting nods for season regulars: Wyle for lead male; Dearden, Dourif, LaNasa, and Moafi for supporting female; and Ball, Hatosy, and Howell for supporting male. This means that every single white lead cast member got nominated, and one person of color — Sepideh Moafi — did.

(A Black actor, Ernest Harden Jr., got a guest nod for playing Louie, a recurring patient, and Tal Anderson, who is half Korean, also got a guest nod for her role as Becca King.)

Award nominations don’t appear out of a vacuum, of course, but they’re worth talking about as a symptom of bias in the industry. We’re going to get deep into some data in a second, so let’s just start here:

• I think every member of The Pitt cast is an exceptionally talented actor.

• I do not think most actors on The Pitt had enough to work with in season two to deserve Emmy nominations. This is not a skill issue; this is a writing choice. With that in mind, the fact that every lead white actor got a nomination and only one woman of color did is, to use the technical term, reaaaaaaally not ideal.

• This is a show that has prioritized white men over its characters of color through its writing and promotion.

But let’s talk through all this with some data, sourced from fan-made transcripts linked below.

What’s The Problem?

If you pull just raw line numbers, representation looks stable:

Like for real, it’s surprising how even the division of lines by race and gender is across two very different seasons of television, and they have added slightly more screen time for women of color. But, of course, that’s far from the whole picture. The Pitt producers tout its diversity regularly, but the data shows that:

• While the cast contains many people of color, particularly women of color, they get far fewer lines and far less narrative importance

• The average woman of color also gets fewer lines per scene than the average white man

• And season two became more white- and male-centered as it went, leading to a climax that focused on a small subset of the characters

But What About Lines Per Character?

In season two, there were 12 non-patient named women of color that work in the ED, an increase of one over season one’s 11, and women of color are the largest of any of the race/gender segments across both seasons. It’s also the segment with the most turnover.

While it’s nice to have that many women of color on screen, I hope you can already see a problem here: the share of dialogue they get is being split between a much larger group. That ~35% of total lines gets split up 12 ways, whereas the white women’s share only gets divided by four.

Or, to put it in numbers: in season 2, the average named woman of color got 250 lines across the season. The average white woman got 525.

Averages, of course, aren’t perfect, particularly when there are outliers, and that’s the case here: Drs. Santos, Al-Hashimi, Mohan, and Javadi are the only four women of color with 350+ lines; the next highest is Joy at 175. So while the average for WoC is 250, the median is Perlah’s count of 161 lines in season two.

When the average sits that far above the median, it means that a couple of characters are carrying the statistic, and that’s exactly the point: The Pitt casts a lot of women of color and writes many of them as background characters.

For white women, the average is, as stated, 525. And the median is 502. When you look at the median WoC vs. the median white woman, the white women get more than three times the lines. This particular chart is not normalized by episode; that data is below, but this matters too: when characters leave mid-season, their arcs end, and that’s worth noting as a sign of narrative importance or lack thereof.

And this isn’t just because of episodic flows. Perlah averages about 12 lines per episode she speaks in. Al-Hashimi gets just under 36. Dana gets 44, and Robby averages 104.

Additionally, line length is quite steady: no one group is getting more monologues while everyone else gets medical quips. Across all the race/gender categories, the average line is about eight words long. Some people just get fewer lines.

These women are, by and large, on the screen. We saw most of them every week, but the scene belonged to someone else.

So What About Scenes?

Lines are one way to measure a character; screen time is another. So let’s look at the number of scenes characters were in as well. (This, and all of the other scene data in this article, is derived from transcripts, so these are speaking scenes only. Dialogue is obviously not the only source of narrative importance, but, well, algorithmic sentiment analysis is far from perfect, so transcripts are what we’ve got, and huge shoutout to the person who compiled them as noted in sources below.)

In season one, women of color appeared in 37.3% of scenes and had 32.9% of lines. That’s not that far off. In season two, however, they appeared in 42.5% of scenes and had 34.7% of lines.

They showed up more than they spoke, and the gap grew. The show is putting women of color on screen! Frequently! And then, when they’re there, they’re increasingly not saying anything. They get an average of 3.8 lines per speaking scene, and that fell between seasons.

White men, for what it’s worth, run the opposite way: in both seasons, their line share sits about seven points above their screen share. White men get about 5.7 lines per speaking scene, and this held quite steady between seasons. When a white man is in a scene, he tends to run it.

White men are also named by other characters far more, showing prevalence in the narrative when they’re on and off screen.

This is all what that 35% figure is hiding. You watch The Pitt, and you see characters of color everywhere; you see a diverse set of actors. But presence is easy, and meaningful writing isn’t.

Gender dimension aside, about one in five scenes — 20.5% in season one and 17.5% in season two — have an all-white named cast, but about one in fourteen (7.8%, 6.8%) have zero white speakers. A scene is all white approximately three times more often than entirely non-white: even presence here has a ceiling.

Who Falls Off?

Dr. Heather Collins didn’t return in season two, and Dr. Samira Mohan won’t be returning in season three. But both of these characters started to disappear far before their respective finales.

Collins had the sixth highest line count of a character in season one, and she wasn’t even in the whole season. Her line count abruptly falls to zero in episode 12 onward: she isn’t at the hospital anymore!

Wyle has explained that Collins had to leave so Robby would become unreachable toward the tail end of season one, something I’ve spoken more about here.

Mohan gets a similar treatment: her season two line count reaches a high of 48 in episode 13, then it falls to six and eleven lines in episodes 14 and 15, respectively.

No other main characters in either season have had drop offs like Collins and Mohan.

Who Steps Up?

The Pitt wrote off several women of color between seasons one and two, but the overall count of women of color went up. Obviously, they filled in those spaces somehow.

Joy Kwon and Emma Nolan do some of the work, but let’s primarily talk about Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, since Sepideh Moafi is the one actress of color to get an Emmy nomination for her work on season two of The Pitt.

Al-Hashimi’s role is doing double duty from the start: she’s filling in the senior woman doctor slot left vacant after Collins’ departure, and she mirrors the way Collins’ arc revolved around a medical condition surfacing during work. She also fills in a part of the institutional friction space left vacant when Gloria Underwood didn’t return, given her clashes with Robby over reforms and processes she’d like to bring to PTMC.

The data supports this. A hub-adjusted similarity score* for the women that don’t appear in season two shows that Al-Hashimi is Collins’ number one replacement. (*This just means: who is connected to who, weighted by their own connections and that of their neighbors. It helps account for the fact that some characters, like Dana, are so highly connected to everyone that they skew the base results.)

Al-Hashimi is also the only female emergency medicine attending we’ve seen on the show so far, but she doesn’t get the lines to show for it: she appears in all fifteen episodes and averages 35.7 lines in each. Jack Abbot, who appears in six episodes, averages 36.5 lines per appearance.

I’m not arguing this show lacks women, or specifically women of color. In fact, there are more all-female scenes than all-male scenes: 17 to 19% across the two seasons vs. a steady 8%. I’m arguing they are present without narrative weight.

Where Do We End Up?

We’ve been talking a lot in terms of season averages, but episodes aren’t created equal. Both season finales of The Pitt have shown Robby at the edge of an emotional cliff and Abbot talking him down. In season one, this happened on the roof; in season two, it happened in a trauma room.

Across the first 13 episodes of season two, women hold a steady 50-65% of the dialogue. Then the last two episodes happen, and women fall to 33 and 35%, respectively. In the final episode of season two alone, Robby and Abbot account for 43% of the lines spoken: the episode, by and large, is two men in a room.

In season one, the two of them were 35% of dialogue in the finale, but the episode’s overall numbers track much closer to the rest of the season because of what surrounded those scenes: the MCI. Every doctor was working on a building full of patients, and women of color got to remain active members of the plot through the end. But in season two, the emergency was internal, and that means the plot collapses onto Robby.

In season one, Robby’s dialogue & scene share track his season averages closely, but in season two his lines and scenes both jump dramatically. The end of season two also has far fewer scenes than the average episode and fewer speaking named, non-patient characters.

The overall picture actually gets worse if you strip out the night shift characters: the day shift-only season two finale numbers run even whiter, with white men at 57.3% of the lines. The night shift is notably heavy on people of color, and they’re brought in at the end to balance the visuals without balancing the arcs.

The producers frame The Pitt as an ensemble show. And in a lot of ways, it is! Nearly every character shares scenes with every other named character at some point. But these aren’t usually one-on-one conversations, nor are they often character driven; these are doctors treating patients.

It’s also a teaching hospital, so there are dynamics at play within the doctors and med students as well. And between seasons, the biggest change was with Whitaker. In season two, he’s a first-year resident, and therefore no longer a student doctor.

But he teaches far more than his intern role might suggest: in season one, the top teacher is McKay. In season two, she remains on top, but Whitaker jumps to be tied for second. These rankings come from scenes where it’s only resident and student on screen, counting every resident’s time across the students; if you include scenes where an attending is present, he has more scenes with med students than any other resident.

And he isn’t set up for failure by this narrative. He isn’t the cause of any medical errors; he is written to be the authority even as an intern, in a way Santos never was in season one.

So What About The Emmys?

An acting nomination is about the performance given, and a performance is based on the writing, the scene partners, and a whole lot of other factors on top of just plain skill.

When a season showcases its white actors more, those actors have more scenes to pick from when submitting for awards. The bias in the voting room is downstream of the bias in the writers’ room.

I’ll repeat what I said up top: I think everyone in the cast is a talented actor. I really do. But after cancer patient Roxie passes away, Dr. Cassie McKay has far less narrative relevance for the rest of the season. Her line count doesn’t plummet, but the percentage of her scenes with patients drops from 60-100% during that arc to 40-50% after.

Dr. Mel King’s arc, for several episodes, revolves around her near dissociation in advance of her deposition; in fact, Mel King is the least linguistically diverse character in the season, with a dense core of short, repeated phrases like “Okay” and “I’m fine.” The average type-token ratio (a way of computing the amount of unique words per sample) was .66; Mel’s score comes in at .61. After Mel, Emma and Jesse have the second and third lowest vocab diversity.

So: the moments we did get were acted well, but I don’t think they qualify as dense material for a submission packet.

Or let’s take Abbot, who is in six episodes; Hatosy scored a nomination in the supporting actor category this year, putting him on par with actors with work in all fifteen episodes. His submission into this category was a surprise after his nomination and win for guest actor last year.

White actors receive nominations for comparatively thinner material in part because those thinner roles are still centered within the season’s primary narrative.

Gemmill, the showrunner, has called the spree of women of color departing the show “a by-product of having a diverse cast” and “coincidence more than anything else.” I’ve written before about how I disagree with this, so I won’t rehash it here. But I will say this: having characters of color is good, but they deserve enough relevance to be in the awards conversation.

It’s true that teaching hospitals have a lot of rotation, but it’s not true that that rotation only happens to one group of people.

A character who returns can continue to develop. Robby carries years of grief into every shift, and now we’re stacking season upon season of trauma onto him too. Dana’s assault in season one loomed over how she trained Emma Nolan in season two. This kind of weight is the point of an ensemble show: you get to see a variety of perspectives and tell a variety of stories.

Every character written off the show has been a woman, and the vast majority are women of color. You cannot build multi-season weight for women of color on a show that keeps writing them in or out after one season, and this churn isn’t separate from the line counts or the award nominations.

New characters get fewer lines overall than returning ones. New women of color, particularly when we remove the major outlier of Al-Hashimi, struggle. Returning white men, the other category with an extreme outlier (Robby), still out-perform all characters of color even when their outlier is removed.

The people behind the show are guaranteeing that the people accumulating the kind of history and deep characterization voters reward are, with few exceptions, white. Al-Hashimi, a character that fills the roles of several from season one, is the exception this year. We’ve yet to hear any details on Al-Hashimi’s plot line or significance in season three.

The Emmy nominations are frustrating, but they’re only part of the problem here. Those nominations merely confirm something the show has been telling us through numbers already: this is a show that wants the visibility of a diverse ensemble while telling the stories of a few white men.

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Sources & Methodology:

HUGE shoutout to tumblr user schrodingersregret for compiling the transcripts I used for this analysis, which can be found here and here. Any mistakes are fully my own!

Methodology:

I parsed these transcripts using a Python script I wrote to identify characters and lines per scene, then I cross-analyzed this against manually compiled race, gender, and hierarchy data.

For linguistic diversity analysis, all dialogue was lowercased and tokenized. I then took 200 random 300-token draws, and averaged the type-token ratios of those samples.

The data is quite messy at the moment, but I’m happy to share it upon request — reach out if you’d like any parts of it!