The Era of Network Nostalgia Is Here, and The Pitt Stands to Benefit

The Max Original is gunning for the Emmys, backed by a big star and a satisfying narrative. Photo: Warrick Page/Max

Welcome back to another Emmys season at Gold Rush. We are currently a smidge over three months away from Emmy nominations and five months away from the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards, and if you’re wondering where the race stands as we approach the end of the 2024-25 TV season, the next few weeks of this newsletter will be devoted to figuring that out. Our first question: Can Max’s new hit medical drama The Pitt ride its image as an old-school medical procedural for the streaming era all the way to major Emmy success? 

It’s become impossible to talk about The Pitt and its 15-episode first season, tracking the course of one shift in the emergency room under the supervision of senior attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), without name-checking its spiritual ancestor, the landmark NBC series ER. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to make the connection: The Pitt’s creator and showrunner, R. Scott Gemmill, is a former ER writer and producer, ER’s former head honcho John Wells serves as executive producer, and Wyle, of course, spent 11 seasons at Cook County General as Dr. John Carter. Throughout its 15-season run, ER accumulated 124 Emmy nominations and 23 wins, including an Outstanding Drama Series win in 1996. It also, along with shows like Law & Order and The West Wing, represents the last great era of prestige network drama (the last network show to win the Drama Series Emmy was 24 in 2006).

At a glance, the Emmys outlook in the Drama categories comes down to a handful of shows that are returning after taking a year (or more) off: HBO’s The White Lotus and The Last of Us, Apple TV+’s Severance, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Disney+’s Andor, and Netflix’s Squid Game. Even with the Outstanding Drama Series category accommodating eight nominees, that doesn’t leave a ton of room for new shows. And with all due respect to Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal and Hulu’s Paradise, the buzziest new show by a good margin is The Pitt. (Plan B is apparently in talks to develop a second season of Netflix’s very buzzy new show Adolescence, but that has not been confirmed. Even if a second season is confirmed, a fully anthologized show would still compete in Limited Series. For all intents and purposes, we’re treating this like a limited series for now.)

For one thing, reviews of The Pitt have been great. Our own Kathryn VanArendonk wrote, “It has so much of what contemporary medical dramas are often lacking: It moves fast and expects you to keep up and is much more interested in everyday traumas than bizarre medical mysteries.” “Without question the finest example of [the medical drama] in more than a generation,” said The Atlantic. Vanity Fair declared Noah Wyle “an endlessly compelling lead,” but more than anything, critics really seemed to appreciate how much The Pitt drew upon the sturdy charms of shows that came before it. The connective ER tissue made these observations inevitable, but comparisons to TV shows that aired 30 years ago aren’t always compliments. Fortunately for The Pitt, it arrived at a time when streaming fatigue has many people longing for television’s past. “For the most part,” wrote Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone, “it’s a powerful reminder of why certain formulas are so durable, how satisfying they can still be when done well, and why we shouldn’t be so eager to throw out all of the things that have made TV TV for so long.” Yes, the era of network nostalgia is here, and The Pitt stands to be a major beneficiary.

If nothing else, The Pitt scratching that network TV itch and making it 1997 again through science or magic gives the show a hook, and when it comes to awards campaigns, it really helps to have a hook. And it’s not merely that The Pitt is a throwback show. What could really power an Emmy campaign is the idea of The Pitt as a kind of bridge show between the comforts of network TV and the formal structures and distribution methods of the streaming age. Even with its episode order — 15 episodes in its first season, which wrapped up this week — the show sits in a middle ground between network TV’s 22-episode seasons and streaming’s eight-to-12 episode runs. There’s also the fact that The Pitt is written as one continuous story broken up into multiple parts — a staple of streaming TV — but within that narrative, Gemmill and Wells managed to build in mini-arcs that play out and resolve over the course of a few episodes, before the characters move on to the next patient.

By far, though, the strongest card in The Pitt’s deck when it comes to Emmy consideration is its star, Noah Wyle. Wyle was part of the storied original ER cast that included George Clooney, Julianna Marguilies, Eriq LaSalle, Anthony Edwards, and Sherry Stringfield. John Carter was the baby of that group, the green rookie whose learning in the trenches gave the audience a perspective to latch onto. (It’s a tactic The Pitt has utilized quite well with its trio of interns.) Wyle was Emmy-nominated in the Supporting Actor category for his first five seasons on the show, though he never won. (ER only ever won three Emmys for acting: Margulies for the show’s first season and then two guest-acting awards years into its run for Sally Field and Ray Liotta.) In the show’s later seasons, when Carter finally leveled up to true lead character, the Emmys had moved on to shows like The West Wing and The Sopranos.

In the years since ER, Wyle stayed working in TV. Outside of Kyra Sedgwick, no actor propped up the TNT Original Series brand more than Wyle, who starred in The Librarians franchise and the Steven Spielberg–produced Falling Skies. His visibility during the SAG-AFTRA strike seemed only to underline his dedication to the business, and it’s reflected in the way other people in the industry talk about him. Wyle’s performance as Dr. Robby very much feels like a full-circle moment for the actor, and that it’s put him in Emmy contention as Lead Actor at long last is downright poetic.

If there’s any cause to be cautious about The Pitt’s Emmy chances (beyond the fact that first-year shows are almost always a gamble with Emmy voters, who tend to stick to what they already know), it’s that two of the biggest contenders in the Drama Series field are also HBO shows: The Last of Us and The White Lotus. The last time both of those shows were Emmy eligible, they picked up 24 and 23 total Emmy nominations, respectively, and The White Lotus in particular dominated the supporting-acting categories with nine of the 16 total nominees. However, in that same year, the most-nominated show was … HBO’s Succession.

Thankfully, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content Casey Bloys seems to be onboard for The Pitt and particularly interested in what The Pitt can do to help define Max as a brand distinct from HBO. In an interview with our own Josef Adalian, Bloys talked at length about how The Pitt is emblematic of what he wants a “Max show” to be:

There was this idea of trying to figure out, “What’s an HBO show versus a Max show? How do you define them?” You know an HBO show. I can point to a lot of them and say, “That’s what it should feel like.” A Max show is something we were still trying to define. One of the thoughts was, Well, a network-type show is not something we would normally do for HBO. One reason I’m very happy with The Pitt is, it is something I can point to concretely and say, “That is a great example of a Max original.” It’s doing something that an HBO show isn’t, and now it’s not just theoretical, it’s a show that has done incredibly well on every metric — on reviews, on performance, on the audience it’s bringing. It’s even starting conversations in the medical field about being the most realistic medical procedural people have seen. There have been a lot of articles about doctors or nurses saying to their spouses, “If you want to know what I do every day, take a look at this.” That’s meaningful.

In that same interview, Bloys confirmed that Max would be making an Emmys push for The Pitt. With Hacks (another Max original) currently sitting atop the prediction charts in the Comedy categories, Emmy success for The Pitt in drama would certainly help draw attention to Max as a successful brand independent of HBO, which sure seems to be what Bloys is after.

A source close to Max is more diplomatic about brand association during awards season, explaining that the Warner Bros. Discovery division won’t differentiate between HBO and Max Originals and will “campaign for The Pitt just like we campaign for all our titles, leaning into series’ strengths.” (This approach seems to be supported by the ad that aired before The White Lotus finale, promoting HBO and Max shows side by side without differentiation.)

As for its strengths, “The Pitt is special for us at HBO and Max because it is 15 episodes that take place in real time and are shot here in Los Angeles, employing hundreds of highly skilled individuals across all elements of production,” says the same source.

The Pitt’s 15-episode order and its Los Angeles production base are highly toutable virtues in a post-strike, post-wildfires era when the local industry is struggling to get back on its feet. The White Lotus films at exotic locations across the world. Severance is off filming at a dystopian office park in New Jersey. If a vote for this medical drama set in Pittsburgh can be seen as a vote for hometown L.A., that puts The Pitt in a good campaign position.

From this vantage point, the Emmy categories in which The Pitt has the strongest chances of success are Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor in a Drama for Wyle, and Outstanding Directing. There are eight slots in Drama Series, and once you get beyond White Lotus, Severance, and The Last of Us, a lot of shows are riding the “maybe” line. As for Directing, John Wells, who directed the pilot, is a 26-time Emmy nominee and six-time winner, mostly for producing ER, The West Wing, and China Beach, but he earned his first Directing nomination only in 2022, for Maid.

Then there is The Pitt’s ensemble and the question of which actors, if any, will get tagged as Supporting contenders. Currently, awards-forecasting site Gold Derby doesn’t have any Pitt ensemble member as better than a 100-to-one shot, but I’m not so pessimistic. The best odds, were I gazing into my crystal ball, would go in this order:
• Katherine LaNasa as tough-but-kind nurse Dana Evans
• Fiona Dourif as single mom Dr. Cassie McKay
• Gerran Howell as overwhelmed rookie Dennis Whitaker
• Taylor Dearden as the stealthily capable Dr. Melissa King

LaNasa’s Dana is the implacable eye of the raging hurricane that is the Pitt’s emergency room, and there is an almost preternatural loyalty to Dana that develops as you watch the show. Awards voters cast ballots for characters they love. This would also apply to Taylor Dearden, whose Mel King inspires “I would die for her” tweets. Dourif’s Cassie McKay gets a lot of big scenes and complicated emotions, which is helpful when it comes to capturing voters’ attention. And who could resist nominating The Pitt’s John Carter–esque rookie, Whitaker, alongside the erstwhile Dr. Carter himself?

Ultimately, when it comes to The Pitt’s Emmys outlook, another quote from that Casey Bloys interview comes to mind: “I mean, look,” Bloys said in response to whether HBO would be making an Emmys push, “first-season shows — who knows? But the show deserves the recognition, and the cast, especially Noah, deserve it.” That’s where we’re at. Noah Wyle seems to be the closest thing to a sure bet, but nothing is guaranteed.