The 2025 Primetime Emmy Awards have come and gone, but not without their share of surprises… and I don’t just mean Nate Bargatze’s attempt to keep acceptance speeches short failing or Andor winning a much-deserved writing trophy. Based on hype and number of nominations, I was expecting either Severance or The White Lotus to take most of the Drama categories. Instead, The Pitt (available streaming now with an HBO Max subscription) won in some major categories, including Outstanding Drama and Noah Wyle for Outstanding Lead Actor.
Considering that I’ve been waiting for Wyle to get an Emmy since way back in ER’s sixth season in 2000, I’m just grateful that The Pitt finally took him all the way there. The medical drama was nominated for thirteen Emmys total, winning five: Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actor for Noah Wyle, Outstanding Supporting Actress for Katherine LaNasa, Outstanding Guest Actor for Chicago P.D.’s Shawn Hatosy, and Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series. As an executive producer, Wyle is also among those credited for the Outstanding Drama win.
But I’m still focused on Wyle finale getting an acting trophy, 26 years after his last nomination for playing John Carter on ER. With new significance to the actor in 2025, I honestly might have been rooting for him no matter who he was up against, and that is because of a very specific episode from Season 6 of ER.
While Wyle wasn’t nominated for Season 6, I still consider it one of his strongest seasons on the long-running NBC series, which is currently streaming with a Hulu subscription. This was the season that featured – spoiler alert for a plot twist from February 2000, I guess, if you're just watching now – Carter and Lucy (Kellie Martin) being stabbed by a psych patient, with Lucy dying and Carter being left with chronic pain.
The episode immediately following Carter and Lucy being attacked stands as one of my favorite episodes of ER, but Carter was unconscious for most of the hour. His arc for the rest of the season involved dealing (or not dealing) with Lucy’s death and coming to rely on painkillers. It came to a head in the Season 6 finale, called “May Day,” when some of the people closest to him at County General staged an intervention.
He was too far gone at that point to listen to reason, and stormed out, prepared to lose everything rather than admit his drug problem and accept help. Benton (Eriq La Salle) chased after his former protégé and wrangled him into agreeing to go to rehab, but not before taking a punch to the face. Noah Wyle switched between anger, aggression, anxiety, and devastation in the course of one extended scene, while keeping it clear that Carter was completely on edge the entire time. Take a look:
I admittedly missed the original primetime broadcast when “May Day” aired on NBC in May 2000, but I caught it via rerun not too long after and was about as near tears as Carter was by the end. Noah Wyle absolutely crushed it, and to this day I can’t believe that he wasn’t at least nominated for Season 6. So, my ER-loving heart was more than ready for him to win an Emmy for absolutely anything to make up for it. How perfect is it that he finally got the trophy for his return to playing an emergency department doctor?
The first season of The Pitt ran for 15 episodes from January - April 2025, and the wait won’t be too terribly long for more. Season 2 will premiere after the end of the 2025 TV schedule, but very early in the new year: January 8, 2026. For now, you can always find The Pitt streaming on HBO Max and ER streaming on Hulu.
