When Emmy nominations drop on July 15th, it will only be a matter of seconds before the angry tweets start a’rollin’ in…
“The Bear’ isn’t a comedy series! How is it dominating the Comedy categories, AGAIN!?”
Or, this…
For a long time I have been a massive proponent of systematic change with respect to award shows categorizing television genres; specifically in comedy. It’s pretty obvious that in the “golden age of television,” you’ve got more than just comedy and drama. You’ve got a much larger percentage of series being both of those things…or neither. But for some reason the Emmys and the Golden Globes either don’t agree…or they’re just lazy.
In all likelihood, FX’s standout series, “The Bear” will be heavily represented in the next month’s Emmy nominations for comedy, but there’s clearly beginning to be organized pushback.
Just this weekend AV Club reported Comedy Writers are getting Kind of Sick of The Bear Winning all those comedy Emmys.
As well they should be. If you’re involved with writing, directing or acting in a comedy series that aligns to comedy in the much more traditional sense and you’re losing recognition to a series that very much isn’t comedy, it’s got to be frustrating as hell. If you’re trying to make people laugh, it seems kind of ridiculous that you’d be losing comedy recognition to shows that actively are not.
To be honest, I don’t think The Bear will continue to win or be nominated for a lot more comedy Emmys than it has in the past. The third season was presumably its worst, and the public seems to have lost interest (which is a shame because I personally enjoyed the third season a lot).
Seth Rogen’s “The Studio,” seems poised to possibly take over the crown as television critics’ darling comedy series and perennial winners “Hacks,”and “Abbott Elementary,” are still holding strong. I’d be very surprised if The Bear repeats in more than a handful of its past few wins, if it even does at all.
The Bear isn’t a traditional comedy series in any sense. Neither is Nathan Fielder’s absolutely brilliant second season of HBO’s The Rehearsal which also might garner a bunch of Emmy nominations including one for Outstanding Comedy Series as well as an Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series nomination for Fielder who ironically would probably cop to not even acting in it at all.
At least with The Bear, the harrowing anxiety and top-notch drama is regularly sprinkled with laugh out loud moments.
The Rehearsal is something entirely different. I aggressively hated its first season and was initially mad at it for not being anything remotely as funny as Fielder’s first HBO project, “How To With John Wilson.” I punched out of the first season of The Rehearsal after only two episodes and only returned to it years later when its second season received such massive critical acclaim that my curiosity pushed me back in.
After finishing the first season, I found nothing about it funny, barely believed any of it was real, and didn’t hate it any less.
However, you can now 100% count me in as one of the critics who adored The Rehearsal’s second season and it will not only chart high on my year-end list in December but I’m now actively rooting for it to receive a handful of Emmy nominations (something that didn’t happen for Fielder’s 2023 Showtime series, “The Curse” which I also loved, but sort of watched with glee as less than 10% of people I recommended it to got past its first few episodes before giving up on it). But on the giant laundry list of things I loved about The Rehearsal, I’m not even sure that being funny even appears.
In fact, the first time I found myself cackling at The Rehearsal wasn’t until twenty-five minutes into the fourth episode of its second season.
My laugh came from the absurdness of an “extra” (if you can even call him that) watching his real life girlfriend acting a make-out scene and rooting her on like Timothée Chalamet celebrating an overtime win at a Knick game. Sort of a throw-away laugh that might not have even landed on all viewers.
The Rehearsal’s humor is used sparingly, and quite honestly, that’s a good thing as it doesn’t need to be funny to do its job. But should it be celebrated as one of the best comedy series on television if it’s really not funny?
HBO recently announced that it would be submitting The Rehearsal in the comedy categories at the Emmys when people started to question if it should be submitted as a documentary…or even a drama. HBO’s decision is almost certainly because Fielder identifies himself as a comedian despite the show not really being funny much…if even at all.
…Or is it? Who am I to say? I mean, who decides these things?
“Why Are You Laughing?” is a self-described history of comedy podcast hosted by “Blind” Mike Geary of BlindMike.net His weekly podcast highlights historic moments in stand-up comedy history, memorable stand-up albums and also compiles an annual end-of-the-year ranking of the best stand-up specials of the past twelve months.
Its title reflects the subjective standard of what defines mainstream humor. Geary’s comedy tastes are obviously uniquely his own, but he often attempts to streamline the medium to both acknowledge its standouts and bring awareness to old and new comedians to new audiences who might be unaware of certain performers. As a big stand-up fan myself (I always make it a point to include one special on my year-end “Best of TV” list) “Why Are You Laughing?” has been one of my favorite podcasts since it debuted in 2021.
In a recent episode Geary talked about why he didn’t include Bo Burnham on his list of the top 19 living stand-up comedians.
“I’m a huge Bo Burnham fan,” Geary explains. “I feel like he’s tremendously innovative and influential, but I kinda feel what he does is different from standup.”
It’s a little weird that even in a podcast that exists to highlight stand-up comedians, the podcast host won’t include Bo Burnham as a stand-up comedian when Bo Burnham would obviously describe himself as one…yet in the mind of the TV awards business either you’re comedy or you aren’t, and that’s that.
I, myself, am also a huge Bo Burnham fan. I not only cite his 2021 comedy special, “Inside” as arguably my favorite comedy special of all time, I ranked it as the top series of 2021, and its soundtrack remains one of my favorite musical albums of the last two decades.
It’s at least understandable why you could include Burnham in a list of the top 19 living stand-up comedians. It’s also understandable why you wouldn’t.
But it can be hard to decide when comedy stops and when “it’s not comedy” begins. If the opposite of making you laugh is making you cry, then some of the best comedies on television are failing miserably at it in the best ways possible.
Apple TV’s “Shrinking” (which I regularly describe as “my favorite show on television right now”), is obviously a comedy series, but it also lays on the emotional rollercoaster brutally thick.
Mostly due to Shrinking’s brilliant performances I found myself crying at more than half of the episodes of the second season of it. We’re not talking, “tearing up a little,” crying. We’re talking “all-out bawling on an elliptical in my basement on more than one occasion, crying”….and I quickly learned that I wasn’t alone.
As I started talking about the series to other friends and family who also worshipped it on the same level they all described similar reactions; calling the viewing experience of it akin to therapy.
Shrinking isn’t just funny. It’s touching, beautiful and unmatchably relatable. A far cry from the sitcoms of the 80’s and 90’s; or the absurdity-comedy shows of the 2000’s like Parks & Recreation or The Office.
It’s way past the time to stop classifying comedy series as essentially anything that aren’t traditional drama series.
The award organizations should move toward a system like the Oscars where series aren’t categorically clumped into neat genres and instead reward the series for overall quality and innovation.
But for now we might as well just sit back and bask in the likely epic battle ahead of us between Nathan Fielder and Jeremy Allen White for the title of the funniest actor on television.
Tube Notes with Ryan Benharris 