Supriya Ganesh got a 99th percentile score on her MCAT but dropped the idea of med school to pursue a career in acting. She still had a day job tutoring students for the MCAT when mounting interest in The Pitt, the HBO Max show currently streaming on JioHotstar, where she stars as Dr Samira Mohan, reached fever pitch. She logged on to teach one day and “everyone in the class went, ‘Dr Mohan, what are you doing here?’”
“It was a very sudden bump,” says Ganesh in an interview via Zoom from San Diego, where she’s currently in rehearsals for a play titled House of India. “It’s definitely overwhelming to deal with. No one really cared about me a year ago and now…there are people reaching out to me saying ‘we’re related!’ And I’m like, ‘who are you?!’ It’s like third cousins and stuff like that. It’s so crazy. I can’t believe this is my life right now. I mean, it’s all good things, but it’s also definitely not where my life was a very short time ago.”
For those who’ve been living under a rock or, you know, in a pit—The Pitt is the breakout show of the year, the kind that reinvigorates what was once water cooler conversation, before streaming binges precluded the fun of week-by-week propulsive television. Being “Pitt-pilled” has become common parlance on the internet, referring to the obsessiveness with which people began consuming the medical drama during its run from January to April.
Starring actor Noah Wyle of ER fame, the show follows the emergency room doctors and nurses at a Pittsburgh trauma centre. Setting it apart from other medical dramas is the unique format—every episode of the 15-episode season takes place over one hour of the hospital staff’s shift. This affords the show the opportunity to play things out almost in real time, capturing the frenetic pace and tension of a real emergency room, with its a-crisis-a-minute cadence. There’s an authenticity to how the show is made, earning it plaudits from real-life ER professionals. It’s something that caught Ganesh’s eye too.
Born in the US to Indian parents, Ganesh moved to New Delhi at the age of three, where she soon began acting in plays at school and at the India Habitat Centre. “Delhi had such an amazing theatre scene and avenues for me to develop as an artist,” she says. But the question of whether acting could pay the bills led her to pursue a safer path instead: after high school, she headed back to the States to study Neuroscience at Columbia University. While in New York, Ganesh began going on auditions and was surprised at how quickly she was able to get an agent and book her first gig. It was a small role on the TV series Blue Bloods that ended up getting cut, but it gave her the confidence to continue pursuing acting.
Given her educational background, it’s no surprise that the first thing that struck Ganesh while reading the audition scenes for The Pitt was the science. She had always found it hard to audition for medical shows because she knew “just enough” medicine to know when things weren’t right. “This show was the first time where I was like ‘someone with a medical degree was involved with this’. I think, in realising how accurate the medicine was, I also realised that I have to be a part of this. So many actors talk about how when you find that role that’s supposed to be yours, it’s like every cell in your body is saying ‘that’s mine’. That’s what it felt like.”
“So many actors talk about how when you find that role that’s supposed to be yours, it’s like every cell in your body is saying ‘that’s mine’. That’s what it felt like.”
So, she did a self-tape and then flew from New York to Los Angeles at her own expense for the callbacks, determined to show the creative team how invested she was in the role. And it worked, because she was able to convey to them that she understood Dr Mohan on a fundamental level. “I knew that she was a workaholic, which I relate to. And she doesn’t really have much of a personal life. But I think what’s really interesting about her is that she hasn’t really given herself the time to develop other parts of herself… So, I wanted her to not look like she had her shit together. I had no makeup on, my hair was unwashed and awful, I was wearing mismatched clothes… That made my audition stand out, because I understood what they were trying to go for. Like, this isn’t Grey’s or any of the other shows… We’re not here to look pretty. We’re here to show what doctors are kind of going through.”
The harsh (but largely hidden) reality of what doctors went through during and post-Covid is what made Wyle want to do another medical drama, something he had vowed not to do after 15 years on ER. During the pandemic, he began receiving messages on social media from medical practitioners who told him they had been inspired to go into the field by watching his ER character and how they could really use someone like him during that time of crisis. “So, I thought maybe there’s another story to tell here that’s more contemporary, that reflects what these guys are going through now,” Wyle told PBS Newshour.
And the show delivers on that promise. It’s raw, visceral and unflinching in its depiction of the highs and lows of a real ER. There’s no downtime, no moment of respite in a break room or a romantic rendezvous in a supply closet. Unlike other medical dramas, character development on The Pitt doesn’t happen in between all the medical stuff—it’s happening through it. It’s through Dr Mohan’s interactions with her patients, for example, that the show establishes who she is as a person, and her dynamic with colleagues and superiors. We learn that devoting too much time to her patients has earned her the nickname Slo-Mo and leads to frequent tussles with Wyle’s Dr Robby (the head of the emergency department), but she refuses to be deterred from her compassionate approach. “A little empathy goes a long way,” she says to a medical student during an early episode.
“I think [her empathy] is what makes her an incredible doctor,” says Ganesh. “The fact that she is able to put herself in other people’s shoes and really understand their symptoms and take a more holistic approach.”
The Pitt is raw, visceral and unflinching in its depiction of the highs and lows of a real ER. There’s no downtime, no moment of respite in a break room or a romantic rendezvous in a supply closet.
Though the season takes place over a single day, all the characters get to switch into a different kind of crisis mode when a mass shooting occurs two-thirds of the way in, allowing for extremely satisfying (if emotionally wrenching) narrative arcs. The heightened stakes and tension of the last few episodes are heart pounding and terrifying, and filming it all was no small feat either. Rather than multiple sets built for the various rooms and areas of the emergency department, which would close off the action in one space from another, the show’s set exists as one continuous floor, meaning that at any given time you can see what’s happening beyond the main action in the foreground. This requires both key cast and background actors to be present throughout filming, and to be in character at every moment.
An exceptional level of choreography is required once the shooting victims begin to sweep into the ER. Everyone needs to be tended to the moment they’re brought in, which means in a single frame you may see a half-dozen patients being tended to by doctors and nurses at the same time. It’s what gave the filming process the atmosphere of theatre camp, according to several of the actors. “It is really like theatre in that sense where it feels like they’re just filming us all on stage,” says Ganesh. And similar to a stage, there’s no additional lighting beyond what’s built into the set. Interestingly, the care taken with the lighting setup held particular significance for Ganesh.
“There have been so many times I’ve seen myself on TV and been like ‘I don’t think I look like that’. This is one of the first times where I’m lit correctly to actually show what my skin tone and my face look like. Our cinematographer Jojo [Johanna Coelho] did this incredible thing—she made sure the white on the walls was a specific kind of white that wouldn’t wash the darker skin tones out. She would swatch it and take photographs of people in front of it to make sure that it looked right.”
Given the diverse cast of actors on the show, it was a choice that went a long way in making everyone feel comfortable on set. One thing that hasn’t been lost on viewers is that there isn’t just one or two but three South Asian women in key roles (Shabana Azeez plays medical student Victoria Javadi and Deepti Gupta plays surgeon Dr Shamsi) and they all come with unique backgrounds and insecurities of their own, making each a thoroughly distinct character.
“I know I’ve lost roles in the past because they had another South Asian person on the show,” says Ganesh. “And it always just makes you feel in a weird way like you’re competing with other South Asian people. But I don’t want to feel that way. I don’t want to feel like there’s one seat at the table and we’re all fighting for it. And also, who’s setting the fucking table? You know what I mean? Who decides that there’s one seat? I had already done a lot of work to make sure I wasn’t in that scarcity mindset when it came to other South Asian women because I love South Asian women. I love South Asian people.”
The show also has three Filipino women on the medical staff, another detail the internet has been applauding the show creators for. The Pitt social media buzz is deafening, and it’s been impossible for Ganesh to ignore the various hashtags and memes and thirst traps circulating online. One thing that’s gaining traction, in particular, is speculation about the low-key flirtation in some of the scenes between Dr Mohan and Dr Jack Abbot, played by Shawn Hatosy. “I saw an edit recently where someone took a scene of me from a different show and a scene of him from a different show and spliced it together,” laughs Ganesh. “I was like wow, that’s dedication. Honestly, that’s filmmaking.”
The Pitt Season 1 is currently streaming on JioHotstar
