The Emmys Keep Arguing About Comedy

Ever since the streaming boom began, the Emmys have struggled with how to define a comedy. One of Netflix’s flagship hits, Orange Is the New Black, exploded in the nominations in its first season as a comedy back in 2014 despite hourlong episodic lengths and a relatively dark tone. The Television Academy then ruled the next year that hourlong shows needed to be classified as dramas, forcing OITNB to jump ship. It became the only show in history to be nominated for both best drama and best comedy, with Uzo Aduba winning comedy and drama acting awards for her breakout turn as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren, which happened to be both wrenching and hilarious.

Or take Shameless, which aired in the same period. Showtime submitted the hourlong William H. Macy vehicle as a drama, then switched to comedy, then was forced to switch back to drama — only for the network to successfully petition for it to stay in competition with the funny fare.

With so much of TV now blurring the lines and experimenting with tone — not to mention episode lengths — imposing these genre distinctions can feel like a fool’s errand. And yet they persist. In 2021, the Academy reversed course and removed length as a criterion. In 2022, half-hour smash The Bear premiered on FX and went on to win the top comedy Emmy — ushering in loud complaints from fans and quiet whispers from rival campaigns that the stressful kitchen-set show wasn’t exactly a laugh riot. For its second season, The Bear lost the Emmy in an upset to Hacks, Max’s critical darling about comedians. Go figure.

This season, the race is filled with more fascinatingly fuzzy examples. They collectively speak to a moment in TV when creative risks are still paying off, and those behind them are angling for the best avenues to seeing that risk rewarded. Sure, there are some of the usual manipulations at play to cram a given contender into its most viable slot. But with this crop, I’ll ask: Does it matter where they compete? That the debate is happening at all speaks to their originality.

You’ve got Bait, a cutting and silly Hollywood satire starring Riz Ahmed, competing as a limited series because it’s a closed-ended story. ABC’s crime-solver High Potential is awfully light on its feet but remains a drama in its sophomore campaign, no matter star Kaitlin Olson’s comic bona fides. Two superhero-adjacent programs, meanwhile, are being submitted as comedies: Disney+’s Wonder Man, which is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and executive produced by Kevin Feige, and Prime Video’s Spider-Noir, set in an alternate timeline within Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. The former’s episodes run around a half-hour each; the latter plays like a detective show with the run times of a broadcast drama. The performances are winking and witty, even amid action-packed set pieces and life-and-death stakes.

The word-of-mouth hit of the spring, Apple TV+’s Widow’s Bay, comes from Upright Citizens Brigade alum Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation) and is filled with the hallmarks of a great workplace sitcom, largely set in the office of a mayor of a doomed island town. And yet its brilliance rests in its unclassifiability, whether in the genuine commitment to jump scares alongside the humor (the island, you see, is haunted) or in the stand-alone episodes that range from poignant character study to chilly gothic horror.

“It took years of thinking about it to get to this tone,” Dippold recently told me. “The heart of the show, as I look at it, is: I think life is a nightmare. It’s just an absolute nightmare.” Widow’s Bay has been designated a comedy.

Then there’s the case of CBS’ Elsbeth, which continues in the tradition of Orange Is the New Black and Shameless by making a mid-run category swap. Unlike those shows, however, Elsbeth‘s team is hoping the leap from drama to comedy for season three leads to Emmy success; the Television Academy has ignored it so far despite strong reviews and ratings.

The hourlong show is a spinoff of The Good Wife and The Good Fight, both created by Robert and Michelle King. Carrie Preston reprises her guest-starring role from those legal dramas, this time as the lead. Her character, a quirky, obsessively observant lawyer turned investigator, won Preston an Emmy for guest actress in a drama for The Good Wife, but was always a relatively comic piece of the cutthroat puzzle the Kings created. This remains true for Elsbeth — even though CBS submitted the show initially as a drama.

“When I heard that we were in the drama category, I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Well, if y’all want any awards, they’re not going to happen. Mark my words,’ ” Preston told me last month. “I don’t like to be right about something like that. But once we got going, I think everybody realized, ‘There’s no way we can be in the same category as The Handmaid’s Tale … so it was very affirming when the Critics Choice Awards, the first awards show after we got into the comedy category, nominated us [for best comedy series and lead actress]. It was validating.” It’s further proof, too, that a little strategy can make a lot of difference. We’ll see how these new comedy contenders fare with the Academy, when the field is harder than ever to differentiate. Making the right call is no laughing matter.

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.