Week-to-Week: Why the Emmys Don't Care If You Think The Bear Isn't a Comedy

A brief history of the TV Academy's "genre panic" in response to the latest scuttlebutt

Screenshot: FX

Week-to-Week is the mostly weekly newsletter of Episodic Medium, where I react and respond to ongoing developments in television and other media industries. To receive future newsletters and learn about the shows—like The Bear—we’re covering episodically in the months ahead for paid subscribers, join our mailing list below.

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Last week, Variety reported that there was an ongoing campaign from within the television industry to have FX’s The Bear forcibly classified as a drama series after competing—and winning—in comedy for its first season last year. And while the report suggests that this effort is unlikely to be successful, the article did as it was designed: it sparked a debate online about the show’s genre that led to more clicks to Variety.

Truth be told, I didn’t bother reading the actual article until I started writing this newsletter, mainly because I don’t find this debate particularly fruitful. As long as genre is at the core of television awards, and as long as genre remains a subjective evaluation, we will never fix the tension this creates—there will always be shows like The Bear that test our discursive understanding of what comedy and drama are, and expecting the binary system of the Emmys to resolve that is misguided. We all might have an opinion of which category it belongs in, but there’s enough DNA of both for each side to make a compelling argument, and that leaves us without a possible “resolution” of that tension.

But when I pulled up the article, I realized that its limited framing offers a false sense of what’s really at stake when we think about how genre operates in award shows, What’s important to remember about the Television Academy is that they are not concerned with whether or not a show is in the “right” category: they are solely concerned about their legitimacy as an arbiter of quality, which is not threatened by every case of so-called “category fraud.” To understand what type of situations would prompt the kind of response competing networks/publicists seemingly hoped to get regarding The Bear, we need to go back to a decade-old case that the Variety article glosses over but reveals just what it takes for the Emmys to acknowledge their system is broken.

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In the article, it’s suggested that Netflix’s Orange is the New Black “​​famously changed from comedy to drama,” and that is simply not an accurate description of what happened back in 2014 when the show was first eligible for major awards. Debuting in the summer of 2013 after the Emmy deadline had passed, the show was an unexpected breakout hit for Netflix, and after some marginal success with House of Cards the previous year the company saw Orange is the New Black as the next wedge in their plan to use the Emmys as a source of industry legitimacy. And given that creator Jenji Kohan’s Weeds had been categorized as a comedy despite its dramatic elements, and Orange is the New Black’s tone was similar, the initial decision was made to submit the show to awards—specifically the Writer’s Guide of America and Producers Guild of America awards—as a comedy series.

But sometime in late 2013, Netflix changed its mind—we still don’t exactly know why, but they switched the show to a Drama for the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild awards. Regardless of their intent, the end result provided them with some valuable data: while the show garnered major nominations from both the WGA and PGA, they struggled with SAG and the Globes, shut out at the former and left off the series ballot for the latter. The show’s genre was then switched back to comedy for the Emmys race that followed, garnering 12 nominations.

This was the backdrop to the Television Academy’s 2015 decision to arbitrarily assign half-hour shows as comedies and hour-long shows as a drama. It was a decision that was clearly intended as a response to Netflix’s approach with Orange is the New Black, although it would be a mistake to suggest that it had anything to do with the actual content of the show. It’s not as though it was the first series that straddled genre lines: Edie Falco won a comedy Emmy for her incredibly dramatic performance in Nurse Jackie, for instance, and Desperate Housewives contended peacefully as a comedy a decade earlier. The argument within the Emmys had always historically been that if a show—or performer—submitted in the wrong category, then the voters would balance it out: if they didn’t think Nurse Jackie was a comedy, they wouldn’t have nominated Edie Falco for her performance, just as they didn’t nominate Rob Lowe for Lead Actor for Parks & Recreation when his ego couldn’t accept how insane that was.¹

The times they have stepped in have been in cases where it seemed as though networks were consciously gaming the system. For example, in 2011 Fox submitted Cloris Leachman as a “guest actress” for her role on Raising Hope because that was how she was credited for contractual scheduling reasons, but she appeared in nearly every episode of the show’’s first season. The optics of a virtual series regular competing as a guest actor led the Academy to establish the rule that a performer has to appear in no more than 50% of a season to be eligible, which even got Peter MacNicol disqualified from a nomination for Veep a few years later. And when Claire Foy won a guest actress award for a tiny flashback cameo on The Crown in 2021, the Academy applied a 5% screentime rule that had originally been developed for the supporting categories based on Ellen Burstyn’s nomination for a 14-second performance in Mrs. Harris in 2006 (and, per Jim Halterman’s reporting on the history of the guest categories, is disqualifying Olivia Colman for The Crown this year).

This was the backdrop for the situation with Orange is the New Black, which fell victim to the TV Academy’s broader efforts to contain the disruptive force of Netflix as it stormed onto the Emmys scene. Whether or not it was Netflix’s intent, the optics of  “shopping” for the best category in the precursor awards at the beginning of 2014 was the real issue for the Academy. When they announced the half-hour comedy/hour-long drama rules, they allowed shows to appeal the ruling to a nine-person panel, and in the six years the rule stood before it was sunsetted in 2021 they—to our knowledge—approved all of them except for one: Orange is the New Black.² They even approved the appeal of Shameless, which Showtime had moved from Drama to Comedy the previous year exclusively due to reduced competition for William H. Macy in a similar gaming of the system. But because Showtime wasn’t perceived as a disruptor, there was no message that needed to be sent to the Amazons or Apples on the horizon.

The cast of Orange is the New Black accepts a SAG Ensemble comedy award a year in 2016 after the Emmys forced them into the Drama category

You could get into the weeds—pun intended—of the actual content of these shows and make the case that Shameless is closer to a comedy than Orange is the New Black, and I wouldn’t even necessarily disagree. But I don’t believe for a second that the panel responsible for deliberating on those appeals developed any kind of objective system for determining where a show belonged based on the text itself. They were instead sending a message to Netflix and the streamers that followed them that the Emmys are a sacred institution—while it’s one thing to argue that a show has “evolved” from one genre to another over time (debatable still in Shameless’ case), it is another to flip-flop the categorization of the same season across awards in search of the best connection with voters. The result was the bizarre optics of Orange is the New Black winning the SAG Comedy Series Ensemble award in the same year they were completely shut out of the Emmys’ drama categories.

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Returning to the subject at hand, my point is that The Bear competing as a comedy does not threaten the TV Academy in any way. It was categorized as a comedy at the start, and has always contained a balance of the genre binary across its marketing. Just look at how the trailer for season three—which I’m going to review later this month as a “pick some highlight episodes to write about the season over a week” deal for paid subscribers—finds the comic moments within the dramatic premise of the season.

Now, you might be saying “But Myles, the actual episodes have a predominantly dramatic tone, the trailer is misleading!” However, that doesn’t actually matter to the TV Academy, because in this day and age not enough people actually watch any TV show for its categorization to functionally matter. More people are going to watch the Emmys who have never even heard of The Bear than those who have seen it and get mad that it’s competing as a comedy. So long as there’s a paper trail of FX positioning it as a comedy, and marketing materials to emphasize that framing, there is more than enough of a paper trail for the TV Academy to say to the haters that the system is working as it should. If people don’t think The Bear should be competing as a comedy, they can simply choose not to vote for it in the Outstanding Comedy Series category.

Does this create some mess in the acting categories in particular, when the most prominent performers on dramedies are often those who carry the dramatic weight of the story in question? Sure—as I noted in my breakdown of the TCA Awards nominations, it’s a bit silly to see Jeremy Allen White nominated for a Comedy award over Ebon Moss-Bachrach when they’re competing against one another. But again, that just gives TCA members a clear choice: do they care more about the sanctity of subjective genres or their affection for a particular actor whose performance happens to be less comic than his peers?

The simple truth is that genre has no sanctity. It is too chaotic, and while I love a principled stance as it relates to award show categorization (I made several about the TCA Awards), there’s no real footing for an upheaval of the Emmy system along these grounds. On the TV’s Top 5 podcast last week, friend of the newsletter Daniel Fienberg tried and failed to suggest a new method of awarding Emmys that bypassed all forms of categorization beyond “acting” and “program,” but there’s too many granular dimensions to the awards for that to fly. Distinctions between genres, genders, and types of performance don’t exist because the TV Academy thinks they’re sacred: they exist because they allow for more nominees, and more winners, and more reasons for networks, channels, and streaming services to invest money in campaigning that asserts the importance of the Emmys so the TV Academy can continue to exist. An argument about a show being categorized as the wrong genre isn’t enough of a threat to that system for them to act in a meaningful way.

Of course, if they privilege having more winners and nominees, this suggests that the most efficient way to resolve this problem long-term would be to create a set of Dramedy categories—many of Orange is the New Black’s actors made this case during FYC campaigning for the show after the forced category change. But once you start adding more genres, you take an either-or subjectivity and turn it into an even more chaotic process of deciding when a drama or comedy contains too much of the inverse to compete in those categories. It might be dumb to suggest that nine people on a panel can determine whether a show is really a drama or a comedy, but it’s even dumber to suggest that anyone could possibly enforce a system where there’s now a third option that just opens up more opportunities for the system to be gamed and the Emmys’ legitimacy to be challenged.

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I’m not saying the people who think The Bear should be categorized as a drama are wrong, or that the Emmys are right for using genre as their unit of categorization. But as long as the latter point is true, the TV Academy will never be the arbiter of truth that you—or the networks with competing comedies—want it to be, because they only step in when they feel that there is something more at stake beyond a specific case study. Until The Bear does something beyond “be a half-hour show that balances drama and comedy,” it’s just going to stick around as a reminder of the ways the Emmys are broken and the reality that the Emmys will probably die before it ever gets fixed.

Episodic Observations

• For the record, as someone who wrote about all seven seasons episodically, Orange is the New Black was a drama with comic elements, so I wasn’t necessarily made about the Emmys’ decision even if I think they did it for the wrong reasons.

• Although May was honestly a bit of a black hole for me in terms of TV, I did make a pretty good effort at getting to the movies on a weekly basis for the Challengers/The Fall Guy/Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes/I Saw the TV Glow/Furiosa run. A good spring for movies, even if it seems like average folks aren’t making it out to the theater these days. I also saw In A Violent Nature this weekend, which was exactly enough stylistically interesting for me to appreciate how grisly it was instead of recoiling.

• My boyfriend and I will often put on Fox’s Name That Tune on Hulu as background, which became interminable in the past year or so when the show switched exclusively to celebrities who terrible both at the core task of naming tunes and especially the strategy of the “Bid-a-Note” game. So I’m pleased to say that they’re returned to civilian players, although they made us suffer through an episode with the most insufferable Queer Eye host for good measure. That said, go hunt down the episode where David Archuleta slaughters Teresa Giudice.

• I’ll be posting the rest of our summer schedule next week, but if there’s shows that you’re interested in being covered, let me know—not going to lie that July and August are looking a little thin on the ground, but we’ll be back in the swing of things this week with Alex McLevy’s coverage of The Boys and LaToya Ferguson’s O.C. Episodic Classics reviews returning before I return to the House of the Dragon beat on Sunday night. First reviews will be going out to all subscribers, so if you’re curious about any of it, you know what to do.

1. Lowe also famously submitted himself as Lead Actor when he was on The West Wing.

2. When I teach my TV students about genre, I screen the pilot for Jane The Virgin and ask them to play the role of the nine-person panel and weigh its (successful) appeal. They’re almost always close to a 50/50 split.