By Dom Serafini
Is it drama, comedy, or dramedy? Steve Pond asked this very question in the June 2023 edition of The Wrap as he pondered the tough job facing the powers that be at the Emmys, who are tasked with deciding “where to put shows when the lines between comedy and drama are all but indistinguishable these days.”
His solution? “Concede that TV is a giant mess, confusing and glorious, and often not completely unclassifiable. Drama? Comedy? Dramedy? Who cares? Celebrate it all and then throw some golden statuettes into whatever boxes make sense at the moment,” he concluded.
Well, let’s ponder this a bit more and recall that this issue is not new. Movie marketing people at the studios wrestled with this problem even before the BBC launched Monty Python’s Flying Circus on television in 1969. To some people it was a comedy, but this writer found its insipid jokes and sketches to be dramatically sad!
In the film business, promoting a movie as one genre when it really falls into another category entirely can spell disaster for its box office. Imagine if a movie were to be promoted as a comedy and the moviegoers came out with tears in their eyes, or it was promoted as a drama and people exited the theater laughing their heads off. In these cases, disappointment would translate into poor reviews and short theatrical windows.
My suggestion for the Emmys is to let the studios’ marketing people decide how they want to classify a show. If they did their research, checked their demos, and analyzed their focus groups, they will surely know the right category for a given series. And if they make a mistake and if the Academy members don’t laugh at their comedies, or don’t cry at their dramas, well… and the Emmy goes to…
Agreed. A big impediment to the travel genre growth in the USA (it’s a massive genre almost everywhere but the USA) is the Acadamy combining nature programming and travel? These two genres may have some similarities (people often travel to experience nature) but are shot and produced very differently. Many true travel shows focus on urban exploration and a focus on culture and people. It doesn’t make sense to throw them into the same category with big budget nature programming.