Yesterday The Bear made Emmys history after receiving 23 nominations, an all-time record for a comedy series. And yet the reception to this news has been decidedly muted, partly because – and this won’t exactly be news for anyone who has seen the show – The Bear isn’t a comedy.
The Bear is a lot of things. It’s stressful. It’s gripping. It’s beautiful. It’s wildly indulgent. But a comedy? Obviously not. It’s a television programme about an ambitious chef whose role models are either horrifically abusive or dead by suicide. One recent episode took the form of an extended trauma montage set to a downbeat Trent Reznor soundtrack. In other words, it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you watch if you fancy jollying yourself up a bit.
But you knew this. We all knew this. The writers of Abbott Elementary knew this because, after the nominations were announced, one of them tweeted: “Proud of Abbott Elementary for all of its Emmy nominations this year, especially Outstanding Comedy series as we are definitely a program where the majority of the running time of at least 6 episodes are primarily comedic, as defined by the TV Academy.”
This isn’t to say that The Bear is bad. The second season (the one nominated yesterday) was easily one of the five best shows to be broadcast last year. But it isn’t a comedy. In fact, it’s worse than that. So long as The Bear keeps submitting itself as a comedy, it is actively hurting comedy.
Last year, for example, Jeremy Allen White won outstanding lead actor in a comedy. But his role wasn’t comedic. Not even slightly. It was compelling, sure, but unless glaring into the middle distance and attempting to clench your way out of internalised anguish is suddenly extremely funny, it was not a comedy performance.
And look who he beat to get it. He beat Jason Segel. He beat Jason Sudeikis. He beat Martin Short and Bill Hader, for crying out loud. Those are comedy actors. They arguably deserved that specific award more than him.
Although, actually, maybe not. Segel, remember, was nominated for Shrinking, in which he played a man so devastated by the death of his wife that he turns to substance abuse while breaching his professional code of ethics. In the most recent season of Only Murders in the Building, Short’s character suffers two near-fatal heart attacks. And while my love for Hader’s Barry will never die, it is by all accounts as funny as drinking bleach.
What all these shows are, though, are 30 minutes long. And because of old misconceptions of the format, a 30-minute show – even one as relentlessly grim as Barry – will always be partly considered as a comedy. Meanwhile, even though it often had a laugh-out-loud sitcom engine behind it, the 60-minute Succession was always deemed a drama.
Sneaking dramas into comedy categories is nothing new. Almost a decade ago, Transparent was winning comedy Emmys all over the place, even though you couldn’t locate a single joke in the entire thing if you went searching with some tweezers and a magnifying glass. But the debate over the comedic merit of The Bear is such that it might be time for the Emmys to start paying attention.
Were something to change – were, for instance, the Emmys to introduce a new 30-minute drama category – then this would free up the actual comedies to stand a hope in hell of winning. For example, as things stand Matt Berry doesn’t stand a hope in hell of winning best comedy actor this year, because he’s up against Jeremy Allen White. But with The Bear out of the way, his swaggeringly uninhibited turn on What We Do in the Shadows would be recognised for what it is: a technically brilliant performance of sustained comic intensity. Similarly, the sheer mathematical density of jokes packed into Girls5Eva would be given more space to be properly recognised. And yet that won’t win either this year, because it faces our old friend The Bear (it wasn’t even nominated in the first place).
On the plus side, a brighter future might be just ahead of us. Talk to any comedy commissioner on either side of the Atlantic right now and they’ll tell you that they want to make proper, unrestrained comedies. Traditional, laugh-out-loud, funny-for-the-sake-of-funny comedies. Not comedy dramas. Not semi-autobiographical trauma memoirs. Actual comedies.
And while this won’t stop networks from taking short dramas and passing them off as comedies, it will help to unblur the lines somewhat. You won’t have to squint at a 30-minute show like The Bear and try to work out if it’s trying to be funny or not. There will be comedy and there will be drama. Let’s hope that, when it comes to awards, comedy will finally win.
