Is ‘The Bear’ A Comedy? - Awards Outlook
Is The Bear A Comedy?
Awards Outlook will release Emmy Predictions in about a month and the big spoiler alert is that The Bear will dominate once again in the Comedy category… which has been the source of a great deal of controversy as many do not think it belongs there. The Bear is a spectacular show; there is no doubt that it deserves all praise and awards, but so many people are crying category fraud and, while they may have a point,. there may be a bigger problem at play.
The problem is not what is getting nominated for Best Comedy and Best Drama at the Emmys, but that the line between comedy and drama can sometimes be blurred. There are some dramas that are funny and then some comedies that have serious moments and, while it can sometimes be clear when something is meant to be a comedy or meant to be a drama, sometimes it can be trickier. To quote Justice Potter Stewart talking about porn, “I know it when I see it.”
The difficult position throughout is that The Bear is genuinely funny with brilliant dialogue and characters that never fail to incite a laugh and yet there are devastating moments that occur in the background of these characters. The common example some people use of The Bear being a drama is the episode “Fishes” that has some of the most tense scenes in television this year, but leading up to that was some organic comedy, resulting in a trickier balance than one might think.
There is no questioning that Succession is a Drama and yet at the same time it had the funniest writing that surpassed in laughs what most comedies of the time delivered, but the tone said drama.
The Bear is not the first series at the center of the comedy/drama debate. Most recently Barry concluded its four season run to a great deal of wins and nominations in the comedy category of the Emmys and many find that show dark and disturbing. The show is presented pitch black but still runs through a comedic tone and so it was easily considered a comedy through the set up of many scenes.
Orange is the New Black was the most tremendous example of the comedy/drama divide where the show literally jumped from the Comedy to the Drama categories as the show progressed and got more dramatic.
Transparent was another series that was considered a comedy and had a light tone to it but did not really have a lot of laughs at all while was covering some heavy topics, which caused both SNL skits and host cracks about it actually being a drama. It’s worth noting that while these three shows were nominated for BestComedy Series, none of them ever won, most likely because of that consistent debate. That debate didn’t stop The Bear last year and probably won’t stop it this year.
That line between comedy and drama series is blurry on both sides with several shows that are up for Best Series in the Drama categories like Slow Horses, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and The Curse that are plenty dramatic, but also have a great deal of jokes in them and could possibly be considered a comedy.
Some have debated that the category should shift to half hour and hour long episodes but this creates far more problems than solutions. The onslaught of streaming and their shows having several different times in their episodes will make it impossible to restrict to those two categories.
This has also been a problem for films with the Golden Globes famously nominating The Martian and Get Out for Best Comedy. While the former had jokes and the latter is in a genre that is sometimes synonymous to comedy, it was clear that neither belonged there.
The Bear will be going up against comedies like Hacks, which some still consider a new type of comedy, Abbott Elementary, which is the classic format of an older studio comedy, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which has literally been around for more than twenty years and is the clear definition of comedy. All of these are more of a comedy series than The Bear and that could be something that may lead to an upset.
From a binary standpoint, The Bear is a drama and not a comedy, but things are much more complicated than that. As it stands, if something could slightly qualify in one of those categories it should be considered, but these questions are far from easy to answer.