Is it a drama? A comedy? That question may be as dated as those labels.
It’s hard for some to accept, but not all life experiences, people, and music fit easily into predetermined boxes. One of the joys of getting older, for me, has been finding the wherewithal to evade those boxes, to embrace the gray areas, to float without an anchor.
That’s why I’ve enjoyed the hybridizations of TV genres across recent decades, particularly when it comes to comedy. It’s a happy aesthetic development, freeing up new kinds of storytelling and new approaches to character. As TV writing and TV audiences grow more sophisticated, strict categorization — this is a comedy, this is a drama — is no longer compulsory. So many shows have become nonbinary in their own ways, refusing to rely on pre-made and familiar classifications. Those
Janus masks? Convenient, yes, but simplistic.
As so many embrace “The Bear,” with its tragedies pressed against its comic bits, its PTSD themes bound up in the excited creation of a restaurant, we clearly don’t require pigeonholes. The tone of the series — and other hybrids such as “Fleabag,” “Feel Good,” “Transparent,” “I May Destroy You,” and “Better Things” — is truer to the emotional tempo of our lives, which don’t always come down to either laughing or crying. Personality tests may have it otherwise, but many of us are fluid creatures who bounce among despair, loneliness, gallows humor, and silliness, sometimes all in the same 1/60 of an hour. The hybrids acknowledge this flexibility and instability.
It’s sometimes hard to describe these comedy-drama fusions to others because we’re so accustomed to the old rules; if you tried to turn someone onto “The Bear” by calling it a comedy, that person might well expect to find the broad laughs of a “Seinfeld” or, more recently, “What We Do in the Shadows” instead of the murk that is the Berzatto family and friends. Maybe we need something better than “hybrid,” a “they”-type designation to help us characterize these shows for others. I’m afraid “dramedy,” so often associated with David E. Kelley’s early series, doesn’t quite work; the portmanteau implies a steady tone of whimsy, not the edgy cynicism and deep sorrow of the hybrids. Episode length, too, no longer has meaning, as half-hour shows now often weigh toward drama and hourlong shows stay on the lighter side — “Poker Face,” for example, Natasha Lyonne’s mystery-of-the-week series, which is nominated for Emmys in the comedy categories.
I’ve been writing about this shift since “Scrubs” appeared in 2001 with a tonal elasticity that I hadn’t seen since “M*A*S*H” pioneered it in the 1970s. And I saw the phenomenon grow in the 2000s with half-hour drama-comedies such as “Nurse Jackie,” which, in an effort to find the right word at the time, I called a “grimedy” (ick). When I interviewed “Nurse Jackie” star Edie Falco just before the series premiered, she said, “I always thought I was signed on for a drama, and then I found out that Showtime bought a comedy — so there were times when I had no idea what the hell we were making!” It still throws me when I remember that, playing a desperate pill addict who loses everything in order to keep using, she won an Emmy for best actress in a comedy.
And it’s the Emmys that have me thinking about all this again, after this year’s nominations were announced last month. It didn’t just seem surprising to see “Bad Sisters,” about a toxic man who won’t die despite many efforts, nominated in the drama categories, while “The Bear,” with all of its grief and crisis, got 13 nods in the comedy categories. It seemed absurd, as the former mocks death while the latter explores its devastating impact. Would “Barry,” so ridden with nihilism and violence, still be considered a comedy if it
Many of us are fluid creatures who bounce among despair, loneliness, gallows humor, and silliness, sometimes all in the same 1/60 of an hour. Hybrids acknowledge this flexibility and instability.
were an hour long instead of a halfhour? Are “The White Lotus,” with all its satire and irony, and “Succession,” whose writing regularly makes me laugh out loud, truly only dramas?
There’s no easy fix for the problem, as the Emmys face a blurring of some very basic boundaries. Should the Television Academy follow the Oscars by joining up the categories, so that there are only nominations for best series, and not best comedy and best drama? Should it create a new third category for tonally mixed series? It’s a profound challenge to the annual awards show: How to cope as TV shows improve and get closer to reflecting life in all its many facets.