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Winnipeg Free Press

Category confusion mirrors shifting definition of ‘TV'

The 2025 Emmy nominations were announced this week. There were predictable results, such as 23 nods for Seth Rogen's The Studio, partly because this series about anxious movie execs is funny, knowing and nicely crafted and partly because the entertainment industry just loves shows about the entertainment industry. There was the usual scattering of snubs (justice for Diego Luna!) and surprises (so good to see the 77-year-old Kathy Bates getting attention for Matlock — and for network TV!). And as always with the Emmys, there was a certain amount of category confusion. The contentious debate over what qualifies as comedy and what qualifies as drama continues this year. But there are other questions raised by our increasingly complex, overwhelming and overlapping viewing universe. What exactly is a 'television movie' these days? What does 'limited series' even mean anymore? The Emmys started way back in 1949, when nominees included titles like What's the Name of that Song? The Television Academy's awards continued through decades when folks watched three TV channels on a box in their living room. Now we have entertainment being delivered by multi-platforming, vertically integrated global conglomerates, with options spread across broadcast TV, cable TV and proliferating streaming services. Then there's the simultaneous-release model, in which movies debut on big screens and small screens at the same time. The Emmys are ostensibly a way to award excellence in television, but they have also become a way to track the seismic shifts in what we watch, how we watch, and even why we watch. Emmy categories have always modified as viewing patterns have changed. In the early 1950s, for instance, the drama side was divided into 'Best Dramatic Series,' 'Best Mystery or Intrigue Series' and 'Best Western or Adventure Series.' Overall, though, the lines between comedy and drama have remained clear-cut. From the '60s onwards, comedies were generally 30 minutes long, while dramas expanded magisterially to an hour. Comedies often involved catchy theme songs, laugh tracks, running jokes and wacky neighbours. Dramas often meant hospitals, courtrooms, police precincts, serious talk and big issues. Lately, those lines have blurred to the point the straight-up binary of drama and comedy doesn't really work anymore. Partly, it feels as if we're living in a tragicomic era, an 'if you don't laugh, you'll cry' world, and our pop culture reflects that. But TV writing has also evolved, becoming more hybridized, more in-between. There are now feel-bad comedies, cringe comedies and trauma-coms that can be as difficult and draining to watch as Chernobyl. Think Fleabag, a hilarious story about grief. Then there are dramedies where gruelling emotions and big ideas get peppered with jokes. Think Succession, a drama about family dysfunction and late-capitalist crisis that sometimes plays like a foulmouthed sitcom. In this year's Drama noms, The Pitt feels the most like an old-school Emmy drama, covering life-and-death stakes in an underfunded, overcrowded Pittsburgh ER. But The White Lotus? With its uniformly ghastly characters, it probably works better as sharp, nasty eat-the-rich satire. Certainly, its most memorable beats were comic in this latest season. ('Piper, nooooooo!') Or Severance? While the show's continuing examination of the impossibility of work-life balance reached astonishing moments of poignance, the story still retains its core of super-stylized, deadpan absurdist humour. Can a series that features Burt G.'s head carved from watermelon ever really class as drama? Then there's Slow Horses. Because it's a spy series and a lot of people die (like, a lot), it's viewed as a drama. But its titular screw-up spies spend more time wrangling with their crosstown colleagues than they do on proper espionage. And honestly, Gary Oldman as their shambolic but shrewd leader has never been funnier. I laughed more at Slow Horses than I ever did at Season 3 of The Bear. And that brings us to issues in the Comedy category. The Bear was already facing backlash for submitting in the comedy category before its mopey third season. Meanwhile, other shows are testing the limits of comedy, often in intriguing ways. This season of Nathan Fielder's wildly uncomfortable docu-comedy The Rehearsal, which was nominated for comedy writing and directing, was funny — provided you didn't have any plane travel booked. But as Fielder's experimental and deliberately awkward comic approach took on real-life issues in air safety, it was also terrifying. Partly what determines Emmy categories is not subject matter or even tone but strategy on the part of the production studios. This year, there were 126 submissions in the drama category, making for the most crowded and competitive classification, 69 in the comedy and 33 in the limited series category. The limited series category is for shows with a predetermined number of episodes that tell a complete, non-recurring narrative. It's exemplified this year by the British series Adolescence, which felt brilliant, dark and absolutely unrepeatable. But sometimes the studio approach is to make a supposedly limited series and then see what happens. If nobody tunes in, well, it was definitely limited. If the show is a hit, though, then perhaps that self-contained story can be stretched out a little. Downton Abbey started as a limited series — which the Emmys were calling a miniseries at the time — and then just kept going. (And going and going.) This year The Penguin, starring Colin Farrell (and his prosthetics) and Cristin Milioti, makes for an interesting case. It leads the Limited Series pack, but its 24 nominations have created such a buzz, there are already rumours about a possible Season 2. There's a lot going on, then, with this year's Emmy nominations, and in September we'll see how this all plays out. In the meantime, nominees might want to take some advice from those nervous characters in The Studio, who can tell you that awards shows don't matter at all. (Except they do.) Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.