Captain's Log
Pictured: A typical scene from one of the eight funniest shows of the year
Complaining about awards shows is nothing new and is rarely insightful. Yes, the Emmys never reward the weird, brilliant shows I love that about 18 other people watched. The Grammys have finally started pulling themselves into the 1970s. The Oscars reward Most Acting far more than Best Acting. Nothing new here.
I want to focus on a specific complaint that has long been a pet peeve of mine: the general lack of respect for comedy and for how hard it is to do well.
Here are the eight Emmy nominees this year for Outstanding Comedy Series:
I don’t know what stands out to you about this list, but I can tell you what immediately jumped out to me:
One of these eight shows is an actual sitcom.
This is what I mean by the lack of respect for comedy. You can’t get a nomination if you’re just the funniest show on television. You have to be a comedy and something.
One of the shows is a comedy-murder mystery. One is a comedy-horror. One is a rom-com, which I would write as “comedy-romance” if there wasn’t already an established term for the genre. Four of these shows are described as comedy-dramas (although I struggle to see what exactly is funny about The Bear or Shrinking. Maybe it’s all that Trauma about abusive or dead family members).
And that isn’t necessarily for any negative opinions about these shows. Hacks is the rare show I think generally is as good as the Emmys seem to think it is (or at least, a lot closer than most of what they nominate is). This is a category question, a question that comes before any question of whether a show is good or bad. (Before we can decide whether a show is the Best Comedy, we need to decide whether it’s a comedy at all.) And it’s just really emblematic of how, when it comes award time, “just” being funny isn’t enough to be respectable.1
Unlike the Oscars, this seems to be a relatively recent development. Even as recently as ten years ago, the list of Best Comedy nominees was: Atlanta, Black-ish, Master of None, Modern Family, Silicon Valley, Veep, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. While they vary in quality, particularly at the point in time when they were nominated, five of those seven shows are unmistakably sitcoms. (Fifteen years ago, the six nominees were five network sitcoms and Glee.) I don’t know when TV fell into the trap of cinema, where the awards shows don’t value comedy but instead value, as the Family Guy joke about Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night goes, comedy that’s too good to be funny.
And, of course, even the sitcom nominated is one of the most hugging-and-learning sitcoms on TV. I can think of three network sitcoms—actually, just straight-up NBC sitcoms—that were far funnier and better deserving of nominations: Stumble (RIP), St. Denis Medical, and The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. (Heck, not even Daniel Radcliffe was enough to waft the scent of Prestige to voters like a pie on a windowsill.) That isn’t to say Abbott isn’t or can’t be funny— you can look at where I’ve put it in the TV rankings every year for confirmation— but it’s definitely had more stumbles and been more inconsistent the last couple of seasons, and I wouldn’t put it close to the eight best comedies on TV2. But even that is beside the real point: Abbott has Something To Say about underfunded public education and inner-city schools3, and so even though it’s a sitcom, that makes it important enough to nominate for awards.4
What the hell’s wrong with just being funny? Why can’t that be enough reason to recognize a show?
This was an unexpected delight. So, some of you may remember a little show called Ben and Kate that Dakota Johnson starred in before she started getting whipped by Lloyd from Undeclared on the big screen. You may even remember how fond of it I was back then (and still am). Well, I’d long ago seen the 13 episodes that aired here before the show was cancelled… but I only recently discovered that there were three more episodes that never aired stateside! Naturally, I acquired them for my personal collection and I’ve been watching them. How delightful to have a little bit more of this wonderful show. I stand by what I said about Johnson’s performance; would that she got more opportunities to play endearingly awkward women like Kate Fox.
Part of why I’m writing about the Emmys now is that this is a really bare time for the TV calendar. (The other reason is that the Emmy nominations were announced last week and this is the first column I’ve written since then.) I watch House of the Dragon and Rick and Morty on Sunday nights and that’s it for the week. The second King of the Hill revival season will premiere July 20, so maybe I’ll have something to say about that. Just like I’m sure I’ll eventually have something to say about all the shows I keep saying I will.
Not sure when you’ll hear from me next. Keep watching TV in the meantime.
About the writer
Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
It's a gaming ship.
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Department of
Conversation
I honestly think expanding the range of genres the Emmys officially awards would help a lot with the category fraud feeling. Add a dramedy category! I love dramedies! Give them a space to be recognized as their own thing as opposed to forcing them into a space where they don’t quite fit! For that matter, I’d even be happy with “light drama” and “serious drama” categories, or “laugh-out-loud comedy” vs. “gentle comedy.” (I feel like “gentle” sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, but I don’t specifically mean that it’s just there for having a pleasant worldview or, much worse, that it’s there to reward polite chuckles rather than laughs: I mean breezy hangout stories with some absurdity, or comedy in a more Shakespearean sense. I don’t remember laughing a ton at Confess, Fletch, but what it was doing was difficult and delightful and would deserve recognition. I know it’s a movie and not a TV show. I couldn’t think of a better example right now.) Provide actual spaces for best science fiction show and best horror show, etc.! We have a wide variety of TV genres that you can excel in, so there should be a wide variety of categories to recognize them from any award claiming to be representative of the field.
(There’s also the fact that the Emmys have never gotten used to the idea of a half-hour drama. Length should not determine genre.)
We could get really finely chopped with this, but I think I’d be happy with three categories:
Sitcom (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the three NBC shows I mentioned)
Dramedy (Hacks, uh… There are probably others I watch. Oh, The Righteous Gemstones when it was on, certainly)
Comedy/Genre (Only Murders in the Building, Widow’s Bay, The Chair Company, and you know what? A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms)
Even with this, I have no idea where, say, Jury Duty should go, or the works of Nathan Fielder, or even if both of them would qualify for the reality genre instead.
I like the idea of light drama vs. serious drama, too, although I am having a harder time sorting and separating those. Weirdly, most of the shows I would put in the light category are really murder mysteries: The Lowdown, Bad Monkey, I was gonna say Elsbeth but I heard they were submitting for comedy this year. So, other than that we’ve established murder is a consistently light topic, I’m not sure how to sort the rest. Is Matlock serious because it’s got a high-stakes serialized plot, or light because it’s episodic too? Is Andor light because it’s a Star War, or serious because it’s, well, serious? Where does Pluribus go? Where would Justified have gone?
Yeah, I think that drama split would be the hardest to do, aside from maybe determining whether or not crime shows are submitted as genre or dramas (or comedies, where applicable): when is it a mystery or a thriller vs. a drama that includes murder? And would making that distinction err to close to that kind of “transcends the genre” take that I hate? Maybe, per your Elsbeth example, the people behind the show would choose what category to submit to.
What did we watch?
Elementary, “One Holmes, One Watson” – The title (one of the more memorable ones) refers to Joan acting more like Sherlock than usual, as she’s still processing her grief. Obviously by the end of the hour she will revert to form, but this is less about her and more about Sherlock trying to get her to understand the necessity for there not to be two Holmes and not sound like he only cares about himself. Meanwhile, a split within the hacker collective Everyone leads to murder, a murder made harder to solve by how anonymous all the members of the group. And by the actual killer really being a snitch for the FBI. While the NYPD is usually the good guys here, the same can not be said for the Feds. A key to solving the case? Finding the suspect by luring him with a promise of a free vintage Ookla the Mok lunchbox. (That’s Ookla the character from Thundarr the Barbarian and not Ookla the filk band named for him.)
Frasier, “Crock Tales” – The penultimate episode has a series of vignettes, each set earlier in the show than the last, all involving a crock present day Frasier is about to throw out. A very, very weird thing to do with the show about to end, as if it’s important we see how far everyone has come. Or maybe the goal was to create a series of bad wigs to look back at everyone’s awful 90s hair (especially Frasier’s mullet). Fitfully funny, but maybe we could have just skipped to the end? Rosie Perez guest stars as a woman Roz tries to set Frasier up with, maybe a nod to Rosie being a runner up for the role of Roz. And there is a scene where the cast is locked out on the balcony on July 4 with Frasier dressed like Uncle Sam, a clear call back to the time the cast of Bob Newhart, all dressed like Uncle Sam, was locked in the basement.
M*A*S*H, Season Four, Episode Thirteen, “Soldier of the Month”
“We’re running out of beds now!”
“I’m open to sharing.”
“I’m already in charge of Rumour Control.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“He was the first and he had wooden teeth.”
“Right, and every time he told a lie, they chopped one out.”
This has one of my favourite little recurring ideas – kind of a reverse scifi thing where the characters deal with something cutting edge for the time they’re in, in this case, hemorrhagic fever, which was only given a name in the fifties. This comes back on Frank, which makes this a less-famous look into his mind and childhood; he mentions his mother hitting him both when he was sick and when he got better, and once again obsesses over the fact that nobody really likes him. Both Larry Linville and the writing lean in on the fact that Frank is fully aware of who he is and is, most of the time, desperately trying to ignore that.
Fanfan la Tulipe
Swashbuckler Summer #7. This is a French classic I hadn’t heard of before assembling this watchlist, and it’s a fizzy, sharply satirical delight. It upends a lot of genre conventions, trading traditionally honorable and chivalric gentlemen and nobles for a cheerful, brave-but-unscrupulous peasant who only enlists in the army to get out of a shotgun wedding after he’s caught fooling around in a haystack. He’s sure it will all turn out in his favor, since a palm-reader told him he’d be so successful at his adventures that he’d even marry the king’s daughter–oh, wait, the palm-reader, Adeline, is the daughter of the recruitment officer working to get her dad his bonus per new soldier. Whoops. Kings are skeevy. Generals are as fundamentally ridiculous as they are callous. All the embedded social criticism never turns this grim, however, because even with kidnapping and near-execution and attempted coercive rape, this is light and bright and funny and charming as all get-out, powered by Gerard Philipe’s incredible effervescence as Fanfan, Guy Who Is Mostly Having a Good Time.
Very quotable–“War – the only recreation of kings which the people could enjoy” and “Don’t be sad! I don’t love you!” are two of my favorites–and almost Monty Python-esque at times, especially in the ultimate “battle” scene. I quite like the romance. The fencing is only okay, but everything else is great. Vive Fanfan la Tulipe.
House of the Dragon S3E4 – Running into problems, halfway through this season, of (1) lot of stalling and checking in with characters, something that was less of a problem with GoT for me before I watched The Shield – you can just skip around ya know! And (2) I simply dunno if I give a shit about any of this. Paddy Considine’s performance made the tragedy less abstract, you saw a flawed, weak, and warm man trying to keep his family and kingdom together and failing to do so, and without him it’s merely aristocrats squabbling and dying (many of them colonizers given that they’re essentially Normans). It’s less about likeability and more why should I care? Doesn’t help that A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms was funny, gave a sense of what actual life might be like in Westeros day to day, and had a struggling, charismatic protagonist who had a basic goal in mind and wasn’t to the manner born.
World Cup – another irritating England performance, I should have stuck to my guns and boycotted this tournament, haha. “We” clearly had the ability to win this match but the tactical shift to 100% defence after taking the lead was never going to work, and this was surely painfully obvious to just about everyone aside from presumably the manager? You just can’t play that way for 30 minutes against the world champions, it was insanity. Oh well, after watching the other semifinal I didn’t think either of these teams stood much of a chance in the final against Spain. Although my predictions this tournament haven’t been great so I guess we’ll see.
Twilight Zone, “And When the Sky Was Opened” – it was pretty obvious where this was going, but the execution was excellent and very unsettling. Also Rod Serling’s pronunciation of “tarpaulin” was staggeringly odd to my ears, no wonder he was so good at coming up with Weird Situations.
I’m just picturing you angrily turning off “Three Lions.”
“Turns out it’s not coming home!”
There are many reasons to angrily turn off “Three Lions”.
Hey, let’s mix the game and the TZ, as one lion after another disappears till soccer itself no longer existed.
Haha yes! Now there’s a premise I can get behind.
Now, that was a game Americans could understand, because in our football one of the most common causes of blowing games is going into an all-defensive shell too early and with not a big enough lead for it.
Ha! It’s a tactic that almost never pays off, and is miserable to watch. Woo! Sports!
1. I watched one season of Only Murders. The humor was only fitfully funny and the show was better as a mystery. And it was not that good, since I never came back.
2. I will be the first to admit that the last season of Stranger Things wasn’t nearly as good as the first. But the show used to be an Emmys darling and I would have guessed it would have snared some love outside of tech categories.
Year of the Month update!
This July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
TBD: James Williams: Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Jul. 17th: Gillian Nelson: Understanding Alcohol Use and Abuse
Jul. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Guards! Guards!
Jul. 21st: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 24th: Gillian Nelson: Don Bluth
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
Jul. 31st: Gillian Nelson: Big Thunder Mountain
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Ocean’s Eleven
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures