[COLUMN] Why The Pitt Won Big at the Emmys | by Darren Mooney

The Pitt pulled off a slightly surprising victory at the Prime-Time Emmy Awards last weekend, winning in the Outstanding Drama Series category.

While it is perhaps too much to describe this win as a true upset, the general consensus was that Severance was the most likely winner in the category, as predicted by pundits like The Guardian, Variety, Vulture, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. To be fair, most of these publications identified The Pitt as the second most likely winner, so it is not as if the medical drama’s success came out of nowhere.

As ever, these awards mean nothing. The truth is that both Severance and The Pitt are good shows. Severance would have been a deserving winner. The Pitt is a deserving winner. Of course, Andor would have been an even more deserving winner, but that Star Wars spin-off was never going to win. It is an old truism that these sorts of award shows mean nothing, unless something that an individual commentator likes wins, in which case they are a truly important bellwether of objective quality.

Still, it is interesting to look at these sorts of awards as something of a statement from the Hollywood community. In many ways, these ceremonies say much more about the awards bodies and the voters than they do about the films and television shows being awarded. The Emmys and the Oscars are often about narratives, about stories being constructed. The winners often feel like the projects that most neatly fit within the larger tapestry being woven.

After all, these awards are inevitably about people working within an industry advancing their beliefs about the highest ideals of that industry. In identifying the best art of a given year, these bodies are able to codify what good art should look like by virtue of comparison. There is an argument that Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights was not nominated at the second Academy Awards because it was a silent film at a time when the industry was embracing sound. It didn’t fit the narrative.

Of course, there is also a sense that some of these narratives are retrofitted onto events, an attempt to make sense of something inherently chaotic and random. After all, there is also an argument that City Lights was overlooked by the Academy because Chaplin had used the honorary Oscar that he had received for The Circus as a doorstop, and the institution didn’t find that especially amusing. It is sometimes difficult to discern the wisdom and the motivation of crowds.

Still, these sorts of awards inevitably serve as an expression of what these industries aspire to be. That is, for example, what made the contest between Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and James Cameron’s Avatar so compelling, because it felt like a battle for the industry’s soul. It is a way of saying, even within the industry itself, “This work is important. Make more material like this.” This explains why some projects win and why other projects lose.

Historically, the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy has served as an indicator of the broader taste of the industry. It is often extremely representative of where the industry was heading in any particular moment. In the 1990s, the award went to procedurals like L.A. Law, E.R. and The Practice. At the turn of the millennium, the high-quality network show The West Wing dominated before surrendering to prestige cable shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men, followed by the spectacle of Game of Thrones.

Whatever one might think of the individual winners, they were often blueprints for years of copycats. The Sopranos and Mad Men ushered in a decade of “difficult men.” Television producers spent years looking for “the next Game of Thrones.” It is possible to argue that the Television Academy overlooked genuine classics like Better Call Saul, but the award does reflect something of the mood of the moment. It doesn’t necessarily say everything about a given moment, but it says something.

In hindsight, works like Severance and Andor feel at odds with the general mood of contemporary Hollywood. While The Pitt deals with contemporary social issues like mass shootings and the trauma of COVID, it is not an explicitly and urgently political work in the same way that Andor and Severance are. Andor is one of the most biting television shows in living memory, a story about a decadent culture slipping into fascism. Severance is a tale of the horrors of late capitalism.

The Prime-Time Emmys reflected an industry ill-equipped to handle or acknowledge such ideas. As observers noted, the ceremony itself was discordantly apolitical at a time when the national and global politics are incredibly charged, in marked contrast to, say, the 2017 ceremony. The winners who tried to speak to the moment, such as Hannah Einbinder, were cut off and censored. There was a clear desire to downplay any sense of a larger turbulent moment. It was an appeal to “normalcy.”

This may explain the triumph of The Pitt. It is a cliché to suggest that Hollywood award ceremonies are obsessed with Hollywood, constantly awarding projects about Hollywood. However, there is some truth to this. It is very telling, for example, that the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy went to The Studio, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s wry but affectionate take on contemporary Hollywood. Rogen would take home four statues for his work on the series.

Set in an emergency room in Pittsburgh, The Pitt is not literally about Hollywood. However, its victory might be. To put it simply, The Pitt is the kind of show that doesn’t really get made anymore. It is an old-fashioned procedural – like the decades of cop, lawyer and doctor shows – produced on a modest budget (costing a fraction of what The Last of Us, Andor and Severance do per episode), shot in Los Angeles and producing 15 episodes in a year.

There is a tendency to over-exaggerate the death of classic episodic television in the modern streaming (perhaps post-“prestige”, post-“peak TV”) age. There are plenty of episodic old-fashioned procedural television shows still on the air, from Law & Order to NCIS. However, The Pitt stands out because it is traditional in its production while also being produced to a high standard. This is a top-shelf version of a classical medical drama. It is accessible and old-fashioned, but it is also very good.

The film and television industry have been in chaos over the past decade, driven in large part by structural changes due to the arrival of streaming giants. Suddenly, television shows are no longer just television shows. They are “eight-hour movies.” The have to compete with film, so the budgets have ballooned to more than $25m per episode. Traditional roles like “showrunner” have been devalued, and shorter seasons have created even greater financial and career instability.

As with film production, a lot of these higher profile television shows have migrated away from Los Angeles. Andor shot in the United Kingdom. The Last of Us shoots in Canada. Severance shoots on the East Coast. For years, Marvel Studios shot in Georgia, and have recently moved much of their production to the United Kingdom. Taken together, this represents a seismic shift in how television is produced, particularly as compared to a decade or two ago when something like Lost was a novelty.

This disruption has not necessarily been kind to the industry. In 2023, Hollywood was disrupted by massive strikes by writers and actors who felt like they had not been fairly compensated in the shift from traditional production to the new model. Los Angeles itself was recently devastated by a series of fires that caused significant damage to the region’s economy. There is a real anxiety over the future of the industry in general and the city in particular.

In this context, The Pitt is a much more comforting winner than something like Severance or Andor. The production team, including lead actor Noah Wyle, have talked openly about the importance of bringing production back to Los Angeles. In the context of recent campaigns to bring production back to the city, it is perhaps noteworthy that both The Pitt and The Studio shot in Los Angeles, serving as something of a celebration of the city’s infrastructure and craftspeople.

In this sense, The Pitt stands in contrast to previous champions like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones. Those wins were forward-looking, identifying shows that felt novel and interesting, which pushed the boundaries of the medium and invited the viewer to wonder whether they had ever watched television like that before. To quote the broadcaster responsible for all three shows, “It’s not television.” To a greater or lesser degree, Andor or Severance would be that kind of winner.

In contrast, The Pitt is a more backwards-looking winner. It very much is television. Although it premiered on a streaming service and is heavily serialized, it is much closer to 1990s winners like E.R. and L.A. Law than it does to recent winners like Succession or even Shōgun. It suggests that maybe there is a way back, that maybe what has been lost can be recovered, that maybe old-fashioned television can be just as vital – and just as good – as the streaming media that sought to displace it.

The Pitt seems to offer proof that there is life in old-fashioned television yet, and that the Television Academy is not yet ready to switch off the life-support machine.