Noah Wyle Hugs and Kisses His ER Costar George Clooney on the Cheek as The Pitt Wins Best TV Drama at the 2026 Golden Globes

The Pitt does it again!

The HBO Max series took the award for Best Television Series – Drama at the 2026 Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 11.

Star Noah Wyle hugged and kissed his ER castmate George Clooney on the cheek as he went onstage to join showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, along with other show creators, to accept the award.

“I’m sure you made a mistake, but we are not giving this back,” Gemmill joked. He went on to thank Warner Bros. and HBO Max, before also recognizing, “the first responders and healthcare workers who are the real heroes who inspire us.”

Highlighting how television brings people together, Gemmill concluded, “We show people what we can do when a bunch of individuals, hundreds of us, have a common goal, and we work together with decency and humanity, and just acceptance and respect for each other. We can do amazing things.”

The night was doubly memorable for Wyle, who also won Best Actor in a Drama Series.

“I’ve been very blessed in my life. I was raised in a family that put a high priority on art … and I’ve been supported by an incredible wife and three incredible children along the way,” he said during his acceptance speech.

Nominees for Best Television Series – Drama included The Diplomat, Pluribus, Severance, Slow Horses and The White Lotus.

The Diplomat follows Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to the UK, as she navigates high-stakes global politics and her tumultuous marriage to Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), a U.S. diplomat. It also stars Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, who play President Grace Penn and her husband, Todd Penn.

After the Netflix series was renewed for a fourth season in October, creator and showrunner Debora Cahn opened up to USA Today about how the writers “spend a lot of time” figuring out how to increase the pressure on the characters both politically and personally.

“We don’t want to just keep ratcheting things up,” she revealed. “But we do want to honestly look at what are the stakes of the decisions that get made in these rooms. And it turns out they’re big.”

Russell was also nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Series – Drama this year.

The Pitt stars Wyle as chief attending Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, who leads a busy Pittsburgh emergency room. The medical drama, which follows one hour of a hectic 15-hour shift in the ER per episode, became one of the streaming platform’s top five original series following its premiere in January 2025 (it was renewed for season 2 one month later).

“I really wanted this show to happen,” Wyle told PEOPLE in March 2025. “I wanted to put this on the air, and I knew this was an important story to tell.”

From the creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, Pluribus follows Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a romance novelist who’s on a mission to save humanity from an alien virus that is slowly taking over Earth. The Apple TV+ science fiction series also stars Karolina Wydra and Carlos-Manuel Vesga.

Gilligan, who reunited with Seehorn after working together on Better Call Saul, previously shared with Entertainment Weekly that the idea for Pluribus was sparked by his interest in “a world in which everyone was nice.”

“What interests me about this show and the possibilities for it is that people, I hope, can watch it and say, ‘What would the world be like if everybody got along?'” he explained. “There’s probably a bit of wish fulfillment in the idea of this show.”

In addition to the show’s nomination, Seehorn won Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Series – Drama.

Severance returned for season 2 in January 2025, three years after its season premiere on Apple TV. It stars Adam Scott as Mark Scout, a grieving widower who chooses to undergo the severance procedure to separate his personal self (his outtie) from his work persona (his innie), as he digs into the secrets behind Lumon, a cult/biotechnology company conducting questionable research on human patients.

Other cast members include Britt Lower as Helly, Zach Cherry as Dylan, John Turturro as Irving, Tramell Tillman as Seth, Jen Tullock as Devon, Dichen Lachman as Ms. Casey and Patricia Arquette as Ms. Cobel.

In March 2025, executive producer Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson announced that the series was renewed for a third season.

“Making Severance has been one of the most creatively exciting experiences I’ve ever been a part of,” Stiller said at the time. “While I have no memory of this, I’m told making season 3 will be equally enjoyable, though any recollection of these future events will be forever and irrevocably wiped from my memory as well.”

Scott, Lower and Tillman all also received nominations for their performances in the show at this year’s ceremony.

Apple TV’s Slow Horses is an adaptation of Mick Herron’s award-winning Slough House book series and premiered in 2022. It follows Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, the leader of a dysfunctional team of MI5 agents whose career-ending mistakes landed them an unwanted spot at Slough House. 

The spy thriller also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Samuel West, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Joanna Scanlan and Jonathan Pryce.

In 2024, Oldman teased the future of the series, which has since been renewed for season 6, during an interview with IndieWire: “If this were to be the last thing I do — and it’s up to Apple whether they keep us on the air, because they write the checks — but if they’re happy to keep us on the air, then I’m very happy to do this and do all eight books. And since we started, [Mick Herron] has written another one, so who knows? Maybe it’ll be nine books, and I’ll be happy to play Jackson Lambe [in all of them.]”

Oldman was also up for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Series – Drama this year.

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Mike White’s hit anthology series The White Lotus follows a new group of wealthy vacationers each season as visit one of the ritzy White Lotus resorts around the world. Their relaxation is always cut short with a death occurs during their getaway.

The most recent third season transported viewers to Thailand, where glamorous guests (played by Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Carrie Coon, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood among many others) encountered enlightenment, spirituality and death.

“I’ve dabbled in Buddhism, and Thailand worked for the themes that I was trying to get into,” White told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “The show is about identity and desire — and then there’s another part of me, the mischievous gay part, that’s just like, ‘How do I create something that’s dirty and funny?’”

The HBO show earned the most nods in television at this year’s Golden Globes, with Coon, Posey and Wood all nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Series – Drama, and Goggins and Isaacs for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Series – Drama.

 See PEOPLE’s coverage of the 83rd annual Golden Globe Awards, taking place at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on Sunday, Jan. 11 at 8 p.m. EST, airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.