7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Breaking down the Emmys' most dramatic battle: ‘The Pitt' vs. ‘Severance'
Have you at any point this year consulted WebMD to learn the possible side effects of reintegration?
And if the answer is yes, does that mean your favorite show is 'Severance,' or does your (possibly neurotic) interest in medicine put you squarely in the camp of 'The Pitt'?
I'm Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. And no, it's not too early to choose sides in the upcoming Emmy showdown between the Apple TV+ and Max drama series. Let's take a page from Lumon founder Kier Eagan and 'be ever merry' while we take an early look at the race.
It would be easy — and perhaps reductive — to boil down the battle between 'Severance' and 'The Pitt' as a matter of choosing the head or the heart.
The loopy 'Severance' tells the story of people in a workplace doing a job they don't understand, partially because they've had chips implanted in their brains to create two selves ('innies' and 'outies') that are both distinct and the same. The show's second season found Outie Mark (Adam Scott) looking to reintegrate his two halves and liberate Innie Mark from his corporate enslavement. Only Innie Mark has questions about how all this will work and whether he wants to sublimate himself and end his relationship with another innie, Helly R. (Britt Lower).
I could go on for several thousand words about all this because 'Severance' trades in the art of indirection, taking its sweet time to reveal the mysteries hidden within the blinding-white offices of Lumon Industries. Some people find the ambiguity confounding. The show's fans disagree, burrowing into the corporate cult(ure) of Lumon with glee. A herd of goats in a conference room? Of course! But why? Off to the subreddit we go! And don't forget the waffles!
'The Pitt' is also set in a workplace, a hospital emergency room. Its 15-episode first season follows what happens during a very eventful shift, each episode depicting one hour of the shift. It's a reunion for several key members of the team that made 'ER,' including creator R. Scott Gemmill, executive producer John Wells (who also directed the season's first and last episode) and star Noah Wyle. Some may consider this sacrilege, but with 'The Pitt,' they've built a better show.
I offer this opinion as one who was devastated more than once by the chaos and drama that Wyle's Dr. Robby and his team dealt with during the season. Their despair became our despair — and if you've had the misfortune of visiting an emergency room recently, you know that the healthcare crisis shown on 'The Pitt' is real and getting worse. When the team's shift ended in the season finale, you were both relieved for its heroic characters and sad that you wouldn't be seeing them again until the second season drops. You felt like you'd been through something together.
When Emmy nominations are announced next month, I'd expect that 'The White Lotus' and 'The Last of Us' will share in the wealth, with each earning up to 20 or more mentions. 'The White Lotus' ensemble alone will account for a chunk of that number. But I don't think either of those shows will win the drama series prize. 'The Last of Us' will be hampered by a story arc that's essentially the first part of a two-season storyline. And while 'The White Lotus' kept us guessing until the end, few would argue that its third season was its best.
That leaves 'Severance' and 'The Pitt,' the head and the heart. Except 'Severance' made viewers feel the tragedy of Mark's plight deeply. And 'The Pitt' smartly incorporated topical issues — violence against healthcare workers, hospital understaffing, sex trafficking, anti-vaccination misconceptions — into its season.
I appreciate both shows, and I don't have to create an alternative version of myself to let these twin passions coexist. But like Mark in 'Severance,' at one point I'm going to have to choose. And like Mark, I'll likely opt for love.
Bold prediction: 'The Pitt' ultimately squeaks by 'Severance' in a barn-burner for drama series.
I mentioned the sometimes stubbornly confounding aspects of 'Severance,' and the show's creators and actors are self-aware enough to know what they're doing and how its audience might react.
'I was scared of some of the risks [the creative team] were taking: 'What if this doesn't work?'' actor Patricia Arquette tells Tim Grierson for The Times. 'They really didn't sit on their laurels from the first year's success — they took a lot more chances in the second year.'
Tim catalogued those chances in a terrific story, noting that the risks were even more palpable given the three-year gap between the series' first and second seasons, a break that happened partly due to the actors' and writers' strikes and partly because it's a hard show to sort out.
'It's a unique show,' star Adam Scott says, 'and in Season 1 we were figuring out what it was as we were doing it. In Season 2, the show was changing and expanding — we were figuring out what it was all over again because it was important to all of us that it not feel the same. Sometimes it takes a while.'
