#LMRecommends: Post-Emmy, Four Shows Worth Your Time
The 78th Primetime Emmys wrapped at the Peacock Theater this week, aired at 5:30 AM IST here, so most of us caught the results as screenshots over breakfast rather than live. Widow's Bay set a comedy record nobody saw coming a year ago, The Pitt repeated as Drama champion, and Jean Smart made history that has nothing to do with whether her show actually won. None of that is really the point, though. The trophies are just the excuse to talk about four shows that are genuinely worth your time regardless of who took home what.
The Pitt
The night's other big repeat winner, and it earned it the hard way. Each episode covers a single hour of one brutal ER shift, no time skips, no cutting away. Season two lands on a Fourth of July shift, new med students thrown in headfirst while Dr. Robby holds the department together on nothing but competence and exhaustion. It should be punishing to watch. Instead there's a running joke among fans about it being comfort television, which says everything about how well it earns its own chaos. It won Outstanding Drama Series for the second year running, making it the first drama since Mad Men to take the top prize in each of its first two seasons, and Noah Wyle repeated as Lead Actor, the first actor to do that in a show's first two seasons since Bryan Cranston. Two wins from twenty-five nominations, which sounds modest until you realize most of those nominations were the show competing against itself.
Widow's Bay
The actual story of the night. Nobody predicted this a year ago: a horror-comedy set on a cursed New England island with no cell reception, where a mayor trying to rebrand the place as "the next Martha's Vineyard" keeps running into several decades of very credible local legend. It swings from genuinely unsettling to laugh-out-loud within the same scene, and the Academy clearly agreed. Fourteen wins from nineteen nominations, the most of any show this year, including Outstanding Comedy Series itself. Matthew Rhys made his own kind of history in the process, becoming the first person to win Lead Actor in Comedy and Lead Actor in a Limited Series in the same night, picking up a second trophy for Netflix's The Beast in Me. Kate O'Flynn and Stephen Root both won supporting acting awards, and the show swept writing and directing too. If you've been putting this one off, it's now officially the show of the season.
Hacks
The bittersweet one. The series itself lost Best Comedy to Widow's Bay in its final season, which stings a little given it went in with the widest nomination spread in the category's history. But Jean Smart didn't lose anything, she won Lead Actress in a Comedy for the fifth time on this show alone, her eighth Emmy overall, tying her with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman for the most acting Emmys any performer has ever won. It was also, by definition, her last for Deborah Vance. "What a ride this has been," she said closing out her speech. Worth watching for that alone, and for a final season that clearly gave her the material to earn it
Pluribus
The quiet, strange win of the night. Vince Gilligan's first show since Better Call Saul didn't take Best Drama, but it did something arguably rarer: Rhea Seehorn won Lead Actress in a Drama for playing "the most miserable person on Earth" in a show about an alien signal turning most of humanity into a single contented hive mind, more than making up for years of Better Call Saul snubs. Gilligan himself won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, his first win in that specific category. Six wins total, most of them in exactly the categories that tend to say more about a show's actual quality than a series trophy does.
Whatever you missed on the night itself, all four are worth catching up on now, the wins just confirm what was already true watching them.
