When Is a Comedy Not a Comedy? What Widow’s Bay’s Emmy Sweep Says About the Category
(Prefer to listen rather than scroll; here is the audio version of the post. Read by Jacquie Sarah, so expect warmth, humour, and maybe some mispronunciation)
Last week, the Emmys rolled around again, celebrating the television programmes and people who worked hard to keep us entertained over the past year.
I am not here to argue about who should and should not have won. That would only be my opinion. Admittedly, my opinion matters enormously, but apparently only to me. Rude, really.
Instead, I want to concentrate on one category and the extraordinary success of Widow’s Bay.
This is not an attack on Widow’s Bay. I am not demanding Matthew Rhys & co return their awards in shame. Moreover, Rhys's performance was nothing short of excellent. He is a great actor.
Although, according to social media, I should also be celebrating because Rhys is Welsh and spoke about Wales on stage. Lovely. I am not questioning whether he feels Welsh, but he hasn't lived here for a long time and has no idea how bad things have got here.
I do not care whether Matthew Rhys is Welsh, American, or from Widow’s Bay itself. His nationality has nothing to do with my question.
How has a horror programme just won Outstanding Comedy Series?
It did not merely sneak into the category either. Widow’s Bay won fourteen Emmys, the most ever won by a comedy in a single season. Television history will now record it as a landmark comedy.
My question is whether it actually was one.
What Is a Comedy?
Okay, we have been grappling with that question quite a lot, especially on here.
When I first began this site, I planted my flag firmly in the ground and told you what a sitcom is (Is it a Sitcom? Or Five Rules to Tell if You're Watching or Writing Counts as One.) I stand by it, but comedy is obviously much broader than sitcom.
There is narrative comedy, comedy-drama, dark or black comedy, romantic comedy, farce, and comedy with another genre attached. There are undoubtedly several more labels I have failed to remember.
Shaun of the Dead sold itself as a zomcom, which summed it up perfectly.
Whatever the label, comedy should be one of the programme’s primary purposes. It can scare us, upset us and make us care deeply about its characters, but somewhere underneath all that, it should be trying to make us laugh.
This is the hill I will die on.
That does not make comedy easy or somehow less worthy than ‘straight’ drama. Comedy is hard.
As Amy Poehler said on her Good Hang podcast:
“Every single year at the Oscars, everybody [in comedy] gets blanked and all the serious people get up and accept and accept. It’s some hot bullshit! Because comedy is not easy.”
When a drama with comic moments can simply move into the comedy category, it reinforces the idea that drama is the serious artistic achievement and comedy is its slightly poorer cousin.
Comedy Is the Starting Point
Comedy does not have to consist of funny people standing around saying funny things. It can have complicated characters, emotional stakes and stories that continue across an entire series.
Look at some of the programmes competing in the comedy category.
Hacks is about the complicated mentorship and friendship between two women at opposite ends of their careers.
Only Murders in the Building is a cosy murder mystery about three amateur detectives producing a podcast about their investigations.
Abbott Elementary follows a dedicated group of teachers and a tone-deaf principal working within a public-school system that continually undermines them and their pupils.
All three contain drama, emotion, and continuing stories. Their first and foremost job, however, is to find the funny.
Of course, that other well-known comedy has also appeared in the category.
The Bear.
The Curious Case of The Bear
The Bear was initially presented and entered as a comedy. Its episodes generally ran for around thirty minutes, and it was darkly comic and surreal in places.
Then it grew and developed into something that many people love, including me. It became increasingly dramatic, intense, and psychological. IMDb (whose genre is decided by the programme makers) now describes it as a psychological drama first, which feels fair.
It can still be funny, but comedy is no longer necessarily driving the programme.
Barry followed a similar path. It began as a dark comedy before travelling somewhere so bleak that the jokes became occasional passengers rather than the driver.
Both are exceptional programmes. That does not automatically make them comedies.
Then we come to Widow’s Bay. Its episodes are longer, its story concerns a cursed community being steadily killed off, and its IMDb classification begins with Folk Horror.
Not comedy. Folk Horror.
That is not a description I invented because I disliked the result. Personally, I would just call it horror. There are camp moments and amusing performances, but the plot, atmosphere and stakes are driven by horror.
At what point does putting programmes such as The Bear, Barry and Widow’s Bay into the comedy category move the line so far that we can no longer see where it started?
What Is the Problem?
If we continue placing programmes whose primary purpose is not to make us laugh into the comedy category, we can pretend television comedy is in a much healthier state than it really is.
Look at all these acclaimed programmes being produced, nominated and winning comedy awards. Comedy must be thriving.
Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows it is not that simple.
I keep arguing on this site that comedy is not dead, and I still believe that. It is, however, in trouble.
Awards do more than decorate shelves. They generate coverage, prestige and an idea of what the television industry currently values. If horror and psychological dramas can be presented as evidence that comedy is flourishing, the decline of programmes primarily designed to make us laugh becomes easier to ignore.
There is something important to establish here. The Emmys do not simply allocate every programme to a genre. Programme makers submit their work for consideration within a particular category, although the Academy can review that classification.
Katie Dippold, the writer and creator of Widow’s Bay, has described it as having comedy at its core. However, director Hiro Murai and Matthew Rhys have said they approached it more as a drama so it would not become too broad or self-aware.
To me, the result is a drama wearing a comedy hat.
Apple chose to submit Widow’s Bay as a comedy. I cannot know whether that decision was partly strategic, but it is difficult not to notice that the drama category contained The Pitt, while there was no equivalent horror category available.
Perhaps its creators genuinely consider it a comedy. Perhaps comedy also offered the more winnable battlefield. Both things can be true.
That does not make its submission illegitimate. It does make the system worth questioning.
What Can Be Done?
The Emmys could introduce a comedy-drama or hybrid-series category. Programmes such as The Bear, Barry and Widow’s Bay could compete there.
Unfortunately, that would immediately create another argument. Would Hacks move into it? What about Only Murders in the Building? We would probably succeed only in relocating the same problem to another room.
The Academy could rename the existing award Outstanding Comedy or Comedy-Drama Series, but that would also amount to admitting that it no longer exists specifically to recognise comedy.
Perhaps the simplest test is the most useful one.
Is comedy one of the programme’s primary purposes, or does the programme merely contain funny moments?
If you removed most of the comedy, would it fundamentally change what the programme is?
Remove the jokes from Abbott Elementary and it becomes a very different programme. Remove them from Hacks or Only Murders in the Building and their entire identities change.
Remove the comic moments from Widow’s Bay and you would still have a recognisable story about a cursed community being killed off.
The Emmys already sprawl across the main ceremony and two nights of Creative Arts awards, so I will not hold my breath waiting for another category.
There is, of course, another solution that would have saved me from writing this article.
Stop caring about awards.
Arts awards are notoriously difficult. How can anyone definitively decide who gave the best performance or wrote the best script once everyone has reached that level? Most of the time, it is like comparing one fancy cheese with another.
Widow’s Bay is not trying to be the same programme as Hacks. Hacks is not trying to be Abbott Elementary. All can be brilliant in entirely different ways.
There is also a shining example of a programme that has never won a Primetime Emmy but happens to be America’s longest-running live-action sitcom.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Sunny began in 2005 and now has eighteen seasons and over 180 episodes. It is still going strong.
It even addressed its lack of awards in Season 9, Episode 3, “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award”. The episode is filled with meta references to the programme’s lack of industry recognition.
It may also have sealed its fate.
Will I watch the new season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when it is finally released in the UK? Absolutely.
Will I watch the second season of Widow’s Bay? Maybe.
Comedy will always come first for me. It would be nice if the comedy category felt the same.
I know, controversial. Let me know your thoughts. Unless you argue that Slow Horses should also be in the comedy section... actually, let's discuss that.
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