Here’s Why The Emmy Awards Consider The Bear a Comedy

The post Here’s Why The Emmy Awards Consider The Bear a Comedy appeared first on Consequence .

One of the best things about this era of television is that there are so many shows that don’t fit neatly into the categories of comedy and drama — a wonderful explosion of uniquely told stories that blend multiple genres. These are shows that have gone on to not just popular and critical acclaim, but recognition from the Emmy Awards , still the most highly-regarded awards body devoted to celebrating great TV. This includes FX’s The Bear , which won Outstanding Comedy Series at the 75th Emmys.

And that’s what leads us to the question that has been asked more than a few times in recent weeks, since the cuisine-and- Nine Inch Nails-powered series received 23 Emmy nominations in July. Answering it, though, actually leads to a lot of other questions, a deep dive into the history of the Emmy Awards, and maybe discovering a weird glitch on the official Emmys website. So let’s get into it, beginning with the basics…

Why is The Bear is nominated as a comedy series? Season 3 wasn’t funny!

So this is the most important thing to mention up front: Because of the way eligibility works, The Bear Season 3 has not been nominated for any Emmys yet — it’ll be in consideration for the 2025 awards. It’s The Bear Season 2 which received 23 nominations this summer, and will likely do pretty well when the Emmys are handed out on Sept. 15th.

Is The Bear considered a comedy because (most of) its episodes are around 30 minutes?

The answer to this is actually no, not officially. Here’s how the TV Academy currently makes the distinction in the official rules :

COMEDY AND DRAMA SERIES are defined as programs with multiple episodes (minimum of six), where the majority of the running time of at least six episodes are primarily comedic for comedy series entries, or primarily dramatic for dramatic series entries, in which the ongoing theme, storyline and main characters are presented under the same title and have continuity of production supervision.

Wait, was that always the case?

Nope! There’s been some back-and-forth on this issue in recent years. Hour-long series were eligible as comedy contenders for a long time, but it wasn’t a common occurrence: The first hour-long series to be nominated was Ally McBeal in 1998, subsequently followed by Desperate Housewives in 2005, Ugly Betty in 2007, and Glee in 2010.

When it comes to dramas with episodes around 30 minutes in length, during the first few decades of the ceremony many half-hour dramatic series were nominated for Emmys, in categories like Best Mystery or Adventure Program or Best Dramatic Series. Today, the half-hour drama in general is a bit of a rarity, with harder-to-classify shows like Barry , Atlanta , and (of course) The Bear instead being considered as comedies.

What changed with the Emmys?

In 2015 — the year after the first season of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black competed as a comedy, racking up 12 nominations — the TV Academy changed the rules , officially declaring that:

Any series where the average episode length is approximately thirty (30) minutes is eligible to enter in the Outstanding Comedy Series category; and, any series where the average episode length is approximately sixty (60) minutes is eligible to enter in the Outstanding Drama Series category.

Shows were allowed to request redesignation, like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel did in 2018 . And this policy ended in 2021 , which means that when The Bear Season 1 was eligible for the Emmys in 2023, it was not required to submit as a comedy based on its episode length. And, for what it’s worth, its biggest competitor at the 75th Emmy Awards was the final season of Ted Lasso — which, as you might recall, featured episodes ranging in length from 43 to 78 minutes . Length ain’t nothing but a number, sometimes.

Here’s something interesting: On the official Emmys website, the addresses for Outstanding Comedy Series pages end with /best-series-half-hour-or-less/ , as seen in the screenshot below for the 1999 Outstanding Comedy Series winner — which happened to be Ally McBeal , the first hour-long show to win in that category.

Screenshot via Emmys.com

Weirdly, the Outstanding Drama Series pages are found at the URL /outstanding-drama-series/ . No clarification about length needed.

Why are you mentioning that?

I don’t know, I just happened to notice it. If this leads to someone in the Television Academy’s IT department having to spend some time changing all of those URLs, I am honestly very sorry.

Who decides whether a show should be considered as a comedy or a drama?

The submitting network/producers make that call, though the Academy “reserves the right to have the category placement reviewed by the Academy’s Industry Panel.”

So why does a show like The Bear want to compete as a comedy, if episode length doesn’t matter?

The Bear (FX)

First, I’d argue that while the first season of The Bear isn’t a laugh riot , it’s definitely got some humor to it — certainly more than, say, Season 3. Remember when they drugged an entire children’s birthday party? Oliver Platt had jokes!

Secondly, the popular wisdom in Emmys circles is that a show that’s a little more serious than, say, a multi-cam sitcom has a better chance at connecting with Academy voters in the Comedy category. And when you look at nominees over the past several years, you do notice a lot of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel s and Wednesday s edging out clear comedies like The Righteous Gemstones and Girls5eva .

Seems like it’d be simpler if they just got rid of the genre categories, so half-hour shows just competed against half-hour shows, and hour-long shows did the same.

What’s interesting is that they did actually do this once: In 1957, at the 9th annual Emmy Awards, The Phil Silvers Show (otherwise known as Sergeant Bilko ) won for half-hour series and Caesar’s Hour won for hour-long series. Caesar’s Hour was actually an hour-long sketch show starring Sid Caesar, which means that both Best Series winners that year were comedies.

The 1957 experiment has not been repeated since, but while we’re talking Emmys trivia, in 1965 the Television Academy mushed together all the categories for a new omnibus award entitled Outstanding Program Achievements in Entertainment. From a field of 15 nominees, four entries won that year, including The Dick Van Dyke Show and the variety special My Name Is Barbra . (Barbra Streisand also picked up her first Emmy win that year.) The problem with this format was that only five shows, total, picked up any wins that year .

Ever since, the drama and comedy categories have remained a staple of the Emmy Awards, and a massive overhaul of that framework seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

So in 2025, when The Bear Season 3 is eligible, it’ll compete as a comedy?

The Bear (FX)

Likely yes. If FX wants to change the category Season 3 is submitted in, it’s technically allowed to do so, though according to the official Emmys rules: “Once a series is established as a comedy or drama series, a category change will prompt a review by the Industry Panel.” Since The Bear Season 1 was “established” in the comedy category in 2023 (what with winning and all), if FX does want to shift it to drama, the decision on whether it’s allowed to do so will be made by the aforementioned Academy panel.

The TV Academy isn’t without power, though, because the rules literally change all the time — see above for historical examples of that, not to mention the ways in which the Emmys have recently contended with limited series (especially in cases where a limited series stops being so limited ).

This is an ever-evolving medium, and all of us — creators, studios, journalists, viewers, and awards organizations — are just doing our best to keep up with those changes. The point, at the end of the day, is to celebrate the joy and the power of television. Whether it be a comedy, or a drama, or something in between.

The Bear Season 3 is streaming now on Hulu. New Hulu subscribers can get a 30-day trial by signing up here .

Here’s Why The Emmy Awards Consider The Bear a Comedy
Liz Shannon Miller