Intro for June 15, 2026

Dear Gossips,

As I mentioned on Friday, we are in the Emmy nominating period which means all the “for your consideration” events and Q&As are happening right now. To that end, The Pitt had a season two “for your consideration” discussion panel last week that has gone viral for all the wrong reasons. I watched the panel and thought I must be imagining how bad it was, but then it cropped up across social media and on The Squawk and no, it was not just me. The panel was really bad, and it’s because a bad moderator was hired for the event. That moderator? Podcaster Jon Lovett.

Lovett is best known these days as the host of the Lovett or Leave It podcast, but he got his start as a political speechwriter, working for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and then-president Barack Obama. He left speechwriting in 2011 to become a screenwriter—he worked on The Newsroom, among other shows—and a comedian/comedy creator, which led to co-founding Crooked Media.

Jon Lovett is not without credentials in the entertainment industry, but what he is NOT is an entertainment journalist skilled in interviewing actors and creatives for FYC events. He treated The Pitt panel, which was intended to give insight into the show for Emmy voters, as an episode of his podcast, trying to crack jokes and do bits with the cast. About halfway through the panel, Noah Wyle’s frustration becomes palpable. You can watch whole panel here.

The goal of an event like this is for each person on stage to speak at least once, to make their case for their Emmy campaign, but most of the actors never spoke at all, let alone answer a question about their WORK. Shabana Azeez only got to speak to defend the degree of difficulty of covering her Australian accent. This will not help their Emmy campaigns in highly competitive acting categories.

Lainey has written about the skill and effort that goes into preparing questions for interviews, most recently breaking down how she got Jennifer Lopez to give a full-body laugh during a junket interview, and television journalist Hope Sloop took to social media to talk specifically about what happened with The Pitt’s panel:

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A post shared by Hope Sloop (@hopesloop)

Sloop is right, FYC events serve a specific purpose, which is not to advertise the show to a general audience but to promote it to the people who are nominating and voting for Emmys. This is not an event at a television festival; it’s a campaign event. Jon Lovett’s tone and style were all wrong, and worse, he did not even WANT to ask the prepared questions provided by HBO, the ones intended to prompt the cast and creators to talk about the making of the show so that Emmy voters can contextualize The Pitt against its competition. Lovett actively resisted performing this function.

Usually, the moderator for an FYC event like this would be a journalist like Hope Sloop, or maybe an editor or senior writer from a trade publication like The Hollywood Reporter.

I wonder, though, if the fact that these panels are now uploaded to Youtube is prompting the panel hosts and television networks to outsource to more widely recognizable moderators in the hopes of drawing more views online. Or maybe there are so many of these events happening in New York and LA right now they think a celebrity moderator will put more butts in seats in the room, but I cannot imagine going to an FYC event hoping to learn about the craft and technique of making The Pitt only to hear repeated, bad jokes about vaccines and Noah Wyle thinking he’s a real doctor.

It was a wasted opportunity brought on by outsourcing a job for journalists. As Lainey shows us time and again, being a good interviewer is a skill that takes effort and practice, but as with everything else in the media landscape, that is being devalued. I have seen Q&As go awry at film festivals because an inexperienced influencer was brought in to moderate, rather than a journalist or critic with interviewing experience, because the influencer doesn’t know how to control a crowd and loses against “more of a comment than a question” guys, or worse, can’t stop someone from doing something embarrassing like trying to get an autograph or pass off a screenplay. It IS a skill to manage these events and ensure the brief is fulfilled, just because someone has a lot of followers or a popular podcast doesn’t mean they’re suited to moderate a Q&A. As with so many things right now, bring back expertise!

On another note, Supriya Ganesh was not there. Yes, she is not returning to The Pitt for season three, but she was still part of season two, yet she has been absent from the trophy trail so far, and it can’t be due to the size of her role, several of the actors at the FYC panel had screentime comparable to hers last season. I still have not heard anything resembling a passable reason to write Dr. Mohan off the show, and frankly, I feel like in a few years we’re going to find out something upsetting was happening behind the scenes. I would love to be wrong about this.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah