If you read any article preparing for the 2025 Emmys, hosted Sept. 14, you likely heard artistic pundits hype themselves up for their equivalent of the Super Bowl:
“The Pitt” vs. “Severance,” the two lead series in the battle for best drama.
The two series are different in theory, but surprisingly similar in practice. The debut season of “The Pitt” follows a single manic shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Center over fifteen episodes, while the second season of “Severance” continues to explore the mysteries of Lumon Industries and the dual lives of those who work there.
Both, however, are deeply concerned with corporate lifestyle and burnout, whether in the life-or-death halls of a trauma center or the drab workplace of Lumon’s employees.
By the end of the night, both series earned their fair share of awards: Noah Wyle and Katherine LaNasa of “The Pitt” for Outstanding Lead Actor and Supporting Actress in a Drama series, respectively, and Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman of “Severance” as best Lead Actress and Supporting Actor in a Drama series, respectively.
In the end, the series that took home the gold was “The Pitt” for Outstanding Drama Series.
I couldn’t be happier.
To clarify, I thoroughly enjoyed both series and thought “Severance” had a strong (though not perfect) second season. In fact, I prefer the mysterious premise of “Severance” to its medically focused counterpart.
This isn’t a question of how “Severance” fails, but instead of what “The Pitt” accomplishes. What makes it so deserving of its award, then?
Perhaps the first word associated with “The Pitt” is its accuracy. Go on YouTube, TikTok or any other social media platform, and you’ll find a series of videos praising “The Pitt” for its dedication to medical accuracy, especially compared to its ilk.
Indeed, the series (as far as I know) is quite true-to-life in the day-to-day operations of a trauma center. Yet, its true-to-life nature goes deeper in another, perhaps more significant, way.
Brought to life by powerful performances — Emmy winners Wyle and LaNasa among them, “The Pitt” demonstrates the severe mental toll that working in an understaffed, under-funded hospital day after day can create. The depictions of stress and struggle through various characters and situations are emotionally resonant to all audiences, without feeling melodramatic.
In other words, burnout is universal, and “The Pitt” portrays it better than almost any other show I’ve seen.
The show’s strengths are amplified by its genius structure. I prefer serialized, continuous stories to purely episodic ones. In “The Pitt,” each episode roughly corresponds to an hour of a single, torturous shift.
Not only does it make the eventual breaks in its characters’ psyches more believable, but it also avoids the pitfalls of many other episodic medical dramas by providing a sense of continuity. Not every medical issue can be resolved in an hour, of course, and I found myself becoming attached to some of the patients just as much as I did the doctors who helped them.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about “The Pitt” is the number of episodes it has. As television and streaming production have become more expensive, most of us consider ourselves lucky if a new season of our favorite show has even ten episodes to its name.
“The Pitt” has fifteen, and it is returning for another season, about a year after its first season wrapped.
While obviously this doesn’t mark a return to the early-2000s era of 20-episode seasons, “The Pitt” was surprisingly affordable to produce and was given ample financial attention and creative freedom by its network, HBO Max. It certainly paid off.
We may start seeing a growing capacity of networks and streaming services generously supporting a few of their series. This would help alleviate the industry’s current state, where an overabundance of productions results in none of them receiving adequate support to develop more fully through longer seasons. We’ll see.
Though it had strong competition, “The Pitt’s” victory at the Emmys is both well-deserved and signifies hope for the future of television production. Regardless of your interest in medical dramas, its commitment to realism — and, therefore, relatability — is bound to appeal to almost every one of us who currently faces burnout and exhaustion.
