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The Emmys happened a few weeks ago and brought with them a fresh wave of everybody's favorite TV discourse, one that had already popped up when The Bear's third season debuted: Why is this show considered a comedy, beyond its (usually) half-hour running time? Look at all these links I found. "Is this show a comedy?" is a perpetual favorite of TV awards discourse, yet the reverse almost never turns up. Sure, you will occasionally see glimmers of, like, "The Sopranos/Mad Men/Succession is funnier than most TV comedies," but basically nobody argues those shows should be run as comedies at awards shows. The reason for this discrepancy is understandable, I think. TV is one of the few media that has hard and fast delineations between comedy and drama in its award categories, and in all other media, comedy faces a steep uphill climb to win awards against dramas. The number of Oscar Best Picture winners I'd feel comfortable calling a comedy that don't have musical numbers can be counted on one hand, and even if the Tonys are more comfortable with broadly comedic performances winning than the Oscars (James Corden has a Tony), their "Best Play" category typically leans toward dramas. Thus, when TV shows that have no aim but to make you laugh get placed against dramedies, plenty of folks bristle. How can a show like Abbott Elementary possibly hope to defeat a show that can randomly do an episode like "Fishes"? (And let's note that both of these shows lost to Hacks this year, and that's a show that is more dramedy than Abbott but more comedy than The Bear.) There have been a number of proposals for how the Emmys might fix this. The two solutions that make the most sense – switching to categories centered on "half-hour" and "hour, instead of "comedy" and "drama"; just having one big category with a dozen nominees for "best show" – would almost certainly still privilege shows with more of a dramatic flair over those that are joke machines. But also, I don't care about that. What I care about is how we even begin to draw the line between "drama" and "comedy" when most great stories contain elements of both.
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