Thanks to a host who kept badgering winners to keep the speeches short and a production team that seemed determined to drown out the awards with classic-TV reunions and country music, it took a while for the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards to tell a coherent story about the state of television in 2025. We finally got there, but only with the final few awards, when HBO Max’s The Pitt surpassed the overall nomination leader, Severance, to take Best Actor for Noah Wyle and ultimately Best Drama Series. In doing so, The Pitt denied Apple TV+ two of the biggest awards of the night (The Studio took Outstanding Comedy Series), which would have been a first for the streamer and a clear signifier that the tech company could hang. Instead, The Pitt rode its throwback procedural appeal to an upset victory that feels like the TV industry placing a vote for streaming shows that behave a bit more like the network dramas of old.

To be fair, this wasn’t a sweeping mandate. The Pitt won three awards in total tonight — Drama Series, Best Actor, and a somewhat surprising win for Katherine LaNasa in Supporting Actress — but Severance scored two acting wins, for Tramell Tillman in Supporting Actor and Britt Lower, who knocked off the heavily favored Kathy Bates in Lead Actress. Meanwhile, the writing and directing awards provided no help in reading the tea leaves: Outstanding Directing for a Drama went to Slow Horses, while Disney+’s Andor was the welcome upset winner in Writing. But given that Severance was the overall nomination leader with 27 nods, a loss in Outstanding Drama Series gives the impression that voters got cold feet about naming it TV’s top drama. For as impressive an undertaking as Severance is, it’s hard not to have misgivings about the way it paces its plot and keeps its characters running in loops until the three or four moments per season when something big happens.

One of the many great things about The Pitt is that it packs its narrative with a continually unfolding — sometimes overlapping — series of patients and character crises, so viewers never have to wonder whether they’ll be left holding the bag. The era of prestige TV pushed shows far into the realm of serialization, and the Emmys followed suit, from Lost and The Sopranos to Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and Succession. So many of this year’s nominated dramas are the children of those shows, not just Severance but The White Lotus and The Last of Us, too: auteur driven with big, centralized story lines and short seasons. The Pitt stood out from the pack by harkening back to the ER era of episodic storytelling and longer season lengths. (Compare The Pitt’s 15 episodes to The Last of Us’s seven and The White Lotus’s eight.) For an industry in which job security has everybody on edge, a vote for The Pitt feels like a vote for sustainability, not to mention the homegrown talent operating out of L.A.

This was a transition year at the Emmys, where old juggernauts were either absent (Shōgun is coming back, but not quite yet) or experiencing down years (The Last of Us and The Bear experienced big drop-offs in nomination totals, while The White Lotus didn’t win any major awards for the first time in three seasons). As a result, some of the winners were delightfully surprising. Jeff Hiller’s thrilling Supporting Actor in a Comedy triumph for Somebody Somewhere was the kind of awards-show moment that gives you faith that the voters sometimes choose what really is the best.

If CBS gave off the impression that the network was embarrassed of the Emmys, then Emmy voters tried their hardest to celebrate the year’s best TV. Wins for Hiller, Lower, Tillman, and LaNasa all felt like the voters took a year off from riding the wave of an easy sweep. The Emmys can be frustrating when they fall into ruts and rubber-stamp the same winners year after year. No one’s saying Jean Smart isn’t good enough to win four Emmys for Hacks, but what’s left for her to give in acceptance speech No. 4? Yet that was the only category in which voters fell back on familiar patterns. How disappointing would it have been had Ebon Moss-Bachrach won a third Emmy rather than Hiller? Or if The White Lotus once again got a woozy character-actress performance a win in Supporting Actress? The choice between Severance and The Pitt didn’t allow voters to lean back on old habits, either; both shows would have been first-time winners. But in selecting The Pitt as TV’s best drama, Emmy voters told us exactly what kind of TV they want to be making.

 At an unpredictable Emmys, The Studio and Adolescence dominated their fields while the Drama winners signaled an exciting changing of the guard.