The Pitt's Big Emmys Win Proves Something Huge About The Future Of TV

Sorry, "Severance" fans — I'm one of you, but I'm plenty happy that "The Pitt" won a ton of awards at the 77th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards (plus a few during the Creative Arts Emmys that took place the weekend beforehand). Why? Put simply, "The Pitt" is a great show — and it's one that feels like a return to a "golden age" of television in a variety of ways.

First things first: let's talk about all the gold "The Pitt" took home after the two-part Emmys weekend concluded in 2025. Cathy Sandrich Gelfond and Erica Berger won a shared award for Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series, which was gloriously well-deserved — largely because the cast of the series is a combination of unknown actors and longtime TV veterans perfectly deployed in their roles — and Shawn Hatosy, who appears at the beginning and end of the first season of "The Pitt" as night shift ER attending Dr. Jack Abbot, took home his first Emmy win (on his first nomination) for Best Guest Actor in a Drama Series.

During the main telecast, Katherine LaNasa, also celebrating her first-ever Emmy nod after years on the small screen, triumphed over literally every lady from "The White Lotus" (and also Patricia Arquette from "Severance") and took home the statue for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series thanks to her role as charge nurse Dana Evans, shouting with glee as her husband Grant Show wept in the audience. (LaNasa is a breast cancer survivor who, as recently as the spring of 2023, was undergoing treatment.) Noah Wyle, who serves as an executive producer, helped craft "The Pitt" with John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, and stars as the beleaguered trauma attending Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch on the series, technically won two awards: one for his performance (a feat he never accomplished while playing Dr. John Carter on "ER") and one in his capacity as a producer. Finally, the series triumphed over, yes, "Severance" and several other huge shows to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.

So, what does this say about what audiences want from their TV shows, aside from the fact that the Television Academy really loves "The Pitt?" It's simple. "The Pitt" is a procedural and medical show that feels familiar while it quietly breaks barriers, and it releases on a regular schedule; it's exactly what TV fans are craving these days.

If you haven't watched "The Pitt," you might not understand all the fuss over what seems, at first glance, like a pretty standard medical show. For so many reasons, "The Pitt" is far from ordinary. Not only did Noah Wyle, R. Scott Gemmill, and John Wells come up with the concept for the series as the world endured lockdowns, quarantines, and deaths from the massive COVID-19 pandemic — specifically as an ode to healthcare workers and the horrors they witnessed and endured during that time — but even its framework is both familiar and inventive. While "The Pitt" technically steals the conceit used in "24," in that each episode is a "real-time" hour, we're told that Dr. Robby's shift is 12 hours long, only to notice that there are 15 episodes in the season. This is a brilliant way to communicate that things rarely go as planned when you're working in a busy emergency room, and if you have seen the debut season, you know that the reason for this is that Robby and his colleagues stay late to save victims of a devastating shooting at PittFest, a local event.

Medical shows are a dime a dozen. However, not only does "The Pitt" have a unique and intense commitment to medical accuracy, but it's also beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and has a writing team that explains complex procedures and diagnoses to the audience without talking down to them, trusting them to fill in whatever blanks might be required. Not only that, but the show even manages to communicate deeply important messages about the healthcare system in the United States, how it affects doctors and patients alike, and the impasses reached by physicians in certain situations that anyone who doesn't work in healthcare might not even know exist. "The Pitt" is a familiar formula done really, really well — and in terms of its overall message for and respect given to the healthcare workers it depicts, everyone on the Emmys stage celebrated this community in the moment.

Any time anyone won an award for "The Pitt" during the main Emmys ceremony on September 14, 2025, they made sure to thank real-life healthcare workers. Katherine LaNasa gave a shoutout to "all the nurses that inspired Dana." Noah Wyle began by thanking his wife and collaborators before concluding his big Emmys moment with a message to all those people working long, hard hours in emergency rooms: "And mostly, to anybody who is going on shift tonight or coming off shift tonight, thank you for being in that job. This is for you." R. Scott Gemmill, the showrunner who accepted the award for Best Drama, was also quite clear. "And I want to dedicate this, on behalf of everyone, to all the health care workers, frontline first responders," Gemmill said to the audience in person and everyone watching on television. "Respect them, protect them, trust them."

Healthcare workers have dealt with some truly wild and deeply difficult situations throughout the past five or so years, particularly after bad actors encouraged people not to trust them during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it's genuinely beautiful to see a show like "The Pitt" make sure to drive that point home. Anyone who's ever seen even one episode of "The Pitt" knows that it depicts some of the darkest moments one can experience while working in a busy ER, and the series' cast and crew are just as committed to representing this at a major awards show as they are within the stories they craft and perform on screen. "The Pitt" is familiar, fresh, perfectly executed, and an ode to a community that works hard to keep us safe. We'd be lucky to see more shows like it, and its big win at the Emmys might signal that we will.

"The Pitt" is streaming on HBO Max now.