Breaking down the Emmys' most dramatic battle: ‘The Pitt' vs. ‘Severance'
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.'
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'When I originally started racing, I was kind of at the height of my [acting] career. I had tons of offers to do movies and shows and all that,' said Muniz, who made his stock-car debut in the fall of 2021 in Bakersfield, then accepted an offer to drive full time in the ARCA Menards Series in 2023. 'Very easily could have stayed in that business. But I wanted to give racing a try. And to compete at the top level, you have to put in the time and effort that professional race car drivers are doing, right? You can't do it halfway.' Muniz was into racing before he even thought about acting. Growing up in North Carolina, he remembers waking early on the weekend to watch IndyCar and NASCAR races on TV. No one else in his family shared his interest in motorsports, so when his parents divorced shortly after Muniz was discovered acting in a talent show at age 8, his mother moved to Burbank, where he made his film debut alongside Louis Gossett Jr. in 1997's 'To Dance With Olivia.' 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Because the truck series doesn't run every weekend, racing 25 times between Valentine's Day and Halloween, Muniz had time to tape a 'Malcolm in the Middle' reunion miniseries that is scheduled to air on Disney+ in December. He has also appeared in two other TV projects and two films since turning to racing full time. But his focus, he insists, is on driving. 'If I wanted to go racing for fun,' he said, 'I would not be racing in the truck series. I'd be racing at my local track or I'd be racing some SCCA club events. I want to be one of the top drivers there are. I want to make it as high up in NASCAR as I can. And I'm doing everything I can to do that.' Fame outside of racing can be a double-edged sword in the high-cost world of NASCAR. It can open doors to a ride and sponsorships others can't get, but it can also cause jealousy in the garage, with drivers crediting that fame and not talent for a rival's success. And Muniz isn't the only rookie driver who has had to deal with that. Toni Breidinger, who finished 27th in Friday's race and is one place and eight points ahead of Muniz in the season standings with nine races left, is a model who has posed for Victoria's Secret and been featured in the pages of Glamour, GQ and Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition. She's also a good driver who has been going fast on a racetrack far longer than she's been walking slowly down a catwalk. 'I was definitely a racer before anything. That was definitely my passion,' said Breidinger, who started driving go-karts in Northern California when she was 9. 'I've been lucky enough to be able to do modeling to help support that passion. But at the end of the day, I definitely consider myself a racer. That's what I grew up doing and that's the career I've always wanted do to.' Still, she sees the two pursuits as being complementary. When Breidinger appears on a red carpet, as she did before this month's ESPY Awards in Los Angeles, it helps her modeling career while at the same time giving the sponsors of her racing team — which includes 818 Tequila, Dave & Buster's and the fashion brand Coach — added value. 'It's all part of the business. It all goes back into my racing,' said Breidinger, 26, who is of German and Lebanese descent. 'The side hustles, I like to call them. I don't think that takes away from me being a race car driver.' Breidinger, who won the USAC western asphalt midget series title as a teenager, raced in the ARCA Menards Series for five years before stepping up to truck series in 2021, making NASCAR history in 2023 when she finished 15th in her first race, the best-ever debut by a female driver. That helped her land a full-time ride this season with Tricon Garage, Toyota's flagship team in the truck series. Like Muniz, Breidinger sees the truck series, the third tier of NASCAR's national racing series, as a steppingstone to a seat in a Cup car. 'I want to climb the national ladder. That's what I'm here to do,' she said. 'I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have long-term plans and long-term goals. I'm a very competitive person, especially with myself.' Kyle Larson, who climbed to the top of that ladder, running his first NASCAR national series race in a truck in 2012, then winning the 2021 Cup championship nine years later, said the path he took — and the one Muniz and Breidinger are following — is a well-worn one. 'Anybody racing in any of the three series has talent and ability enough to be there,' he said. Funding, Larson said, and not talent and ability, often determines how fast a driver can make that climb and that might be a problem for Muniz since Josh Reaume, the owner of the small three-truck team Muniz drives for, has complained about the price of racing. It can cost more than $3.5 million a year to field one competitive truck in the 25-race series — and that cost is rising, threatening to price many out of the sport. But having drivers like Muniz and Breidinger in NASCAR will help everyone in the series, Larson said, because it will bring in fans and sponsors that might not have been attracted to the sport otherwise. 'I just hope that he can get into a situation someday where you can really see his talent from being in a car or a truck that is better equipped to go run towards the front,' Larson said of Muniz. 'You want to see him succeed because if he does succeed, it's only going to do good things for our sport.' And if it works out the way Muniz hopes, perhaps he'll someday be the answer to another trivia question: Name the NASCAR champion who once worked in Hollywood.
