Funny You Should Mention It

Yes, In Fact, Drama Does Seem To Be The New Comedy

T hose of us looking for this Fall’s Emmy Awards just have to keep looking.

Delayed by the summer strikes, they’re now scheduled for January, assuming the actors walkout is resolved by then. If not? Well, let’s hope that whenever the ceremony does take place it comes with a primer.

One thing is certain, though: These days the Best Comedy Emmy category is no laughing matter. The Bear, with that Christmas episode? Barry, with its sand pit? Wednesday, after Sheriff Galleon’s fate? Ted Lasso, with its heart-over-jokes ratio?

Each is a good awards-worthy series. But collectively this year’s Best Comedy crop seems about as far removed as possible from the half-hour template of not too long ago. Times and TV have changed. In the 2000s, sitcoms have much more dramatic ambitions.

Credit or blame 1987. When the dramedy arrived in full swing.

(The late playwright Neil Simon is credited by some with coining the word dramedy in the 1970s to describe his own funny-sad approach to storytelling. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, actually traces the word back to 1905. Go figure.)

T here was always a bit of a blurring of the lines in the half-hour form. Even shows like Father Knows Best in the 1950s leaned heavy on the kid-centered pathos. And towards the end of its 1972–83 run, episodes of M*A*S*H were sometimes entirely laughs-free. Scores of sitcom between and since folded dramatic topics into their storylines, heavy on the tears. Sexual assault, divorce, death, miscarriage, family alienation, loss of religious faith. WKRP in Cincinnati even did an entire episode about the real-life 1979 Who concert stampede in that city that killed eleven people. But in most of these cases the drama still came within a traditional comedic framework.

It took three high-profile series showing up at the same time in September 1987 — Hooperman, The Slap Maxwell Story, and Frank’s Place — to spotlight a change happening to the framework itself. For the dramatic comedy (dramedy) to work its way into everyday TV life and language.

Hooperman, with John Ritter as a San Francisco cop, was the highest of the high-profile three. It marked Ritter’s return to series television following his long-running Emmy-winning role in Three’s Company and its Three’s A Crowd sequel. And it was co-created by Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher, whose then-year-old L.A. Law had just won the Best Drama Emmy. But it took all three out of their elements — for Ritter, away from the live studio-audience he’d long played to, for Bochco and Fisher, away from the hard-hitting drama their names usually promised. Viewership was meh.

Dabney Coleman’s The Slap Maxwell Story also featured a familiar face, this one in a familiar role. As a cantankerous ego-driven sportswriter Bill “Slap” Maxwell, Coleman was cousin to his cantankerous ego-driven talk-show host from Buffalo Bill a few years earlier. Both shot single camera, but unlike Bill, Maxwell didn’t bother with a laughtrack to remind viewers it was a comedy. All that was left was irascible Coleman. Well done, Slap Maxwell couldn’t convert unlikability into watchability.

F rank’s Place, the quietest entry, actually triggered the most discussion, at least in terms of the emerging new sitcom form. Produced by Hugh Wilson, the man behind WKRP, Frank’s Place featured that show’s Tim Reid as a Rhode-Island-living Ivy League academic who inherits a New Orleans restaurant that, in sitcom fashion, he leaves his old life to help run.

But if the series was built on a prime-time-honored fish-out-of-water formula, its more contemplative story-driven rather than trope-driven approach, often exploring New Orleans culture, set it apart. “Rarely has a prime-time show attempted to capture so accurately a particular American subculture — in this case that of blue-collar blacks in Louisiana,” wrote Mark Christensen in Rolling Stone.

The New York Times cited its lack of laughtrack as “part of a laudable trend” in TV that season. Despite CBS’s efforts to capitalize on good reviews, scheduling it in multiple time-periods to get it sampled, Frank’s Place never caught on, either. (That the shuffling often led to strange pairings — with Kate and Allie here, Designing Women there — only reinforced it as a comedy outlier.)

Of the three new series that premiered that September, only Hooperman survived for a second season, which seemed more a testament to John Ritter’s popularity and to the Los Angeles Times naming the series “the hands down winner of the best new show of the year” than to its marginal ratings. (Its second year would be its last.) As seemed to be the case with The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd a season earlier — a hybrid that predates these 1987 three, but which didn’t generate their kind of attention — this slower laughs-free new approach to comedy seemed a bit hard to get into.

That the seven highest-rated series of the 1987–88 season were The Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers, Night Court, The Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, and Growing Pains — each a traditional live-audience sitcom — seemed to put the dramedy in its place. In the back seat.

B ut the genre had at least gotten into the car. Effective with this season, the word dramedy was part of the everyday TV conversation. Cementing the talk: At the 1988 Emmy Awards, Hugh Wilson (who died in 2018) won Best Comedy Writing for Frank’s Place (his first and only); and ABC’s mid-season replacement The Wonder Years — a fourth dramedy entrant that year 1987–88 season — was named Best Comedy. The genre was here to stay.

More came (and went) the following season, overshadowed by the arrival of traditional sitcom Roseanne. But in 1989 Bochco’s second half-hour dramedy attempt, Doogie Howser MD, joined The Wonder Years as a not-so-different-now ABC hit. The dramedy was its own genre, a regular part of the system, going on to play a role in TV’s course-changing 1990s and 2000s, as new broadcast networks popped up and original cable programming multiplied and new voices and creatives emerged.

From Dream On to Roc to Arrested Development, The Office to Curb Your Enthusiasm to Community, Scrubs to 30 Rock to Modern Family to Weeds, the sitcom — the definition of funny, in fact — was shaped and reshaped as though Play-Doh. (Insert Homer Simpson joke here.) In the early 2000s, even the sitcom’s typical half-hour length came up for grabs (as was the case briefly in the 1970s with Eight Is Enough and The Love Boat). Hour-long soap-opera-adjacent Desperate Housewives began an eight-season run, nominated for a total of 38 Emmys — in the Comedy category. The one-hour action-comedy spy series Chuck followed. And as streaming crashed ashore in the 2010s, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black competed for Emmys in the Comedy category for its first season and then as a Drama thereafter. (It won in both.)

The Boondocks, BoJack Horseman, Schitt’s Creek, Reservation Dogs, Fresh Off the Boat, Transparent, Ted Lasso, Hacks, Abbott Elementary all followed. Comedies with forms of their own. And with laughs … maybe. And sorta. What The Guardian in 2019 called “a new breed of ‘dark comedy’ [that’s] wowing TV critics and audiences.” Enter this year’s Barry and Wednesday and the rest, including Jury Duty, described as a “reality hoax sitcom.” (Okay then.)

Enter, too, a Variety story from last August headlined “Why the Emmys Could Benefit from a Comedy Category Rule Change.” Indeed maybe they could, because never before have there been so many well-written and well-produced comedy series available through so many means that cover so much of the human condition in so many different ways— all lopped into the Comedy category.

That change will probably happen sooner rather than later, even as the current Frasier revival demonstrates continued interest in the tried-and-true. The idea of TV comedy just has a whole new reality. No kidding.