There was an understandable oddness that came with having two Emmys ceremonies in one year, especially when the delay happened for something important like the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike. Still, it was odd nonetheless with a restlessness pervading the conversation around the awards, and questions were debated without a clear answer. Though The Bear’s second season was on the docket, the third was most recently on people’s minds, so were votes tendered for season two or for the more recent season 3? Shogun began life as a Limited Series but then was renewed which took it into the Drama category where it could perform more easily without competing with Baby Reindeer; did this constitute some manner of category fraud? And speaking of category fraud, The Bear competed once again as a comedy despite the popular sentiment that it’s functionally more of a drama; is that category fraud? This is all pretty pedantic and very nearly moot because there isn’t some stone tablet that provides hard and fast rules about what’s what, so what are we to do when it seems like the rules of genre we used to know are breaking down?
I first want to point out that genre is primarily a marketing tool. It’s helpful for consumers to understand the broad idea behind the media products they consume so they can make informed decisions. I love to know a movie’s genre because it helps me avoid dropping $20+ on a ticket for something I probably won’t enjoy. Beyond that though, genre doesn’t hold a whole ton of value, at least in terms of how a viewer experiences something. The Emmys supercharged this discussion because it introduces competition into the mix which makes genre less about a jokes-to-drama ratio and more about strategy. Would The Bear win as many awards as it has if it was competing in the drama category? Would Shogun have enjoyed such a sweep if it were going head-to-head with Baby Reindeer as a limited series? While awards are not inherently meaningful, it seems to me that if we’re going to hold a competition between series, it should be as close to fair as one can manage in a world as abstract as art.
Currently, the Emmys separates its scripted series by genre, but only to a point. It’s mainly Drama and Comedy (everything else). It creates a pretty lopsided binary that only seems more arbitrary when you add in all the strategic jockeying I mentioned above. So what are we to do with this genre discourse? It’s not like everyone is going to agree to one set of genre rules; aside from being an impossible consensus, it would represent a decidedly un-artistic rigidity. We can’t keep having the same conversation about whether The Bear is a comedy, a discussion that has become too ubiquitous. Plus, knowing that genre, as far as the Emmys are concerned, amounts to a strategy decision in media conglomerates’ quest for prestige, does it really matter if the comedies aren’t funny or if the dramas are hilarious?
Instead of attempting to administrate genre, why don’t we choose a different metric? Especially with genre being impossible to fully quantify, why don’t we pick something more concrete and less abstract? How about episode length? Sort the shows by length, half-hours in one category and hour-longs in another. There’s a potential snag in how this might pit apples against oranges in terms of mixing genres, but I would argue that genres seem to be changing anyway. Doesn’t the evolution of The Bear from comedy to drama suggest that any given series’ genre can be fluid? Switching to episode-length-based categories instead of genre-based ones would embrace this fluidity and maybe even encourage more of it.
I’m frankly exhausted with the genre discourse, aren’t you? The human drive toward categorization is understandable, but the endless litigation of whether The Bear is a comedy or a drama sucked all the air out of a conversation about a show with much richer material to discuss. Besides, why are we trying to limit something a medium with potential to so many things to a rigid binary? The Emmys aren’t the end-all-be-all, but shifting the categories this way could encourage television to take a few new directions. Instead of drowning in inside baseball conversations about media corp gamesmanship, I would much rather talk about the merits of the shows themselves. I think changing category systems would foster the kind of conversation I’d rather be having about television and would hopefully encourage more fluid genre experimentation.