Most critics agree The Bear is worthy of award nominations, but the popular TV show’s placement in the comedy category at the upcoming Emmy Awards has viewers scratching their heads.
The second season of the FX series, which follows a young chef who inherits his family’s sandwich shop after the suicide of his older brother, got 23 Emmy nominations Wednesday, setting a new record for most nominations in a single year for a comedy series.
Its main actors, Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, were all included in the nominations.
The news set off a debate on social media, with many baffled or upset by the comedy tag, describing the show as dramatic and tear-jerking, even going so far as to describe certain scenes as traumatic.
“I’ve been a big fan of the show since Day 1. It’s one of the great shows on TV, all of the awards attention is justified,” said Ray Richmond, a TV critic who has written for Hollywood Reporter, Daily Variety and other publications.
“The quibble is with the categorization of the awards, not with the quality of the show. And, I mean, it’s not a comedy.”
I love comedy and think it’s really important and it’s already treated with so much disrespect in this industry so yes I think it’s bad when a literal drama with occasional moments of comic relief is given a bunch of awards for comedy!
The Bear also won this year’s Golden Globe Award for best television series, musical or comedy, and was nominated for 13 awards at the 2023 Emmys as a comedy, winning 10 of them.
Every year, networks and streaming services decide what categories to nominate their shows in, and the Television Academy votes to determine which of those shows will be up for awards.
TV studios and networks also run “for your consideration” advertising campaigns every year, specifically targeting members of awards voting groups, to promote their shows. Those campaigns and behind-the-scenes negotiations can also influence decisions about which shows go in which categories.
Richmond says The Bear is going to be this year’s favourite for most of categories, including outstanding comedy series.
Highlighting what some see as the absurdity of its categorization, the record for most Emmy nominations for a comedy series was previously held by 30 Rock, a clear-cut sitcom that scored 22 nominations in 2009.
Richmond describes The Bear, which deals heavily with family trauma and dysfunction, as “very intense” and well acted, but not funny at all.
“The only comedy, if one could call it that, in the first two seasons of The Bear is very dark, very black, very ironic and not really comedic in any traditional sense,” he said.
Taking advantage of the rules?
Richmond says the show is able to run in the comedy category because it’s generally considered a half-hour show, though its episodes vary in length, and shorter shows are typically tagged as comedies.
With stiffer competition in the drama category, he says, the show is able to take advantage of the rules and have a better shot at winning by competing as a comedy series.
The Bear, a show about a family restaurant and the culinary world in Chicago, set a comedy record at the 2024 Emmy nominations on Wednesday with 23 nods.
Richmond says this debate has been going on for 15 to 20 years, prompting some to push for a “dramedy” category to reflect the growing fuzziness between dramas and comedies.
“It’s kind of the direction that TV has gone, where the whole notion of comedy has gotten much darker,” he said. “In the past, a comedy would have been Modern Family, a comedy would have been 30 Rock – shows that are very clearly marked as supposed to be funny and all about drawing laughs.”
True comedies not getting their due
Variety reported in June, citing unnamed industry sources, that other networks have tried to push the Television Academy to review the show’s categorization.
While some say The Bear has an unfair advantage in the comedy categories, Richmond points out that other serious shows have been nominated for outstanding comedy series and lost. He cites shows like Barry, Dead to Me, Nurse Jackie and Orange is the New Black, which entered as a comedy in 2014 before being deemed ineligible and moved to the drama category in 2015.
Ashley Ray, a comedian and TV writer, says a dramatic show like The Bear has an advantage in the comedy category because people tend to look down on pure comedies, no matter how good they are.
Ray says at the core of the anger around The Bear‘s nominations is a frustration that true, “jokes-per-minute” comedy shows that hire comedy writers are getting ignored.
‘A different skill set’
“It is a completely different craft to write jokes, to write a script and say how many jokes per page, what kind of tag can we hit before we go to commercial,” Ray said.
“That is a different skill set. And when shows like The Bear just kind of sweep, that skill set is relegated to the background.”
Ray says while The Bear has moments of comedic relief, it is simply not a comedy.
She’s rooting for Hacks in the outstanding comedy series category and also praises nominee Abbott Elementary. Others in the running include Reservation Dogs, Curb Your Enthusiasm, What We Do in the Shadows, Palm Royale and Only Murders in the Building.
Ray recalls a similar debate over Desperate Housewives being in the comedy category despite being an hour-long drama.
She supports the idea of adding a dramedy category but also suggests reverting to the old Academy Awards model, where all 30-minute shows competed against each other in a general category, for example, as a way of taking emphasis off genre in the future.
For now, she says, The Bear should be running against other dramas.
“This is a good show, but give it what it deserves,” Ray said. “Let it go up against the dramas. It wants to be a drama. You don’t make people cry that much if you don’t want to go for it. So, just give it a shot in its actual category.”
