A Year in Comedy
The year of comedy?
Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic for The New Yorker, noted that “comedy is a much stronger area than drama at the moment” in a tweet on Friday morning. This is an advanced and more polarized version of her remarks at the end of 2014, in which she wrote, “Everything is in flux, in the best way: the TV seasons have dissolved, and so has the distinction between comedy and drama. Directors have begun to flood a medium that used to be run by writers. New variations on television keep pouring through odd outlets, from Netflix and Amazon and probably, soon, your coffee maker.”
Her observation is not unlike those of other prominent television critics this year, such as Matt Zoller Seitz of New York Magazine’s Vulture. In his essay, “How Comedy Usurped Drama As the Genre of Our Time,” Seitz wrote, “We may be headed toward a future where the labels ‘comedy’ and ‘drama’ and ‘hour’ and ‘half-hour’ no longer tell us anything useful about a show, and we’ll have to think about them, live with them, in order to figure out what they are.” It’s true; The Hollywood Foreign Press Association even had to revise category rules this year, as the line between comedies and dramas has been rapidly dissipating.
Saturday Night Live (another comedy experiencing the 2016 re-awakening) recently released a brilliant trailer for a fake “funny new comedy” on CBS that’s really not a comedy at all. CBS’s fictitious goal was to live up to shows like Transparent, so that they could get nominated for and invited to awards shows again. The sitcom, Broken, is “about a family of adjunct professors all diagnosed with depression on the same day.” In it, a morbidly depressed Tom Hanks laments that he’s “tired of being tired” and Cecily Strong drunkenly shouts at him that she likes being hit during sex, before dramatically sliding to the floor and admitting that she has Crohn’s Disease. The trailer jokes that “because it’s thirty minutes, it’s a comedy!” It’s brilliant, and sums up the contemporary landscape of television genres in a way that only SNL can.
…The line between comedies and dramas has been rapidly dissipating.
While my usual go-to brand of television is the crime drama, it’s hard to deny comedy’s rise, especially since I’ve been frequently turning to it, too. This goes for both live, late-night shows (daily, weekly, SNL) and sitcoms. The current political climate of the United States — the world, really — is cause enough for people to go looking for escape in a lighter, usually half-hour format. However, there has also been a legitimate high in the number of comedies being broadcast or otherwise offered on streaming services, and many have been making it past the first season. Variety’s Maureen Ryan calculated that from 2009 until the beginning of 2016, the number of cable, broadcast, and streaming comedies rose by almost 120 percent, while dramas and miniseries grew by only 80 percent. While dramas still outnumber comedies in the world of scripted primetime shows, much of this growth came before the recent spike in political tension, which suggests that the quality of TV comedy is growing. This begs the question: is this seemingly sudden, contemporary passion for the genre due to heightened TV comedy excellence or a renewed sense of need for lighter television?
This year, standout freshmen comedies include The Good Place, Atlanta, People of Earth, and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, among others. The Good Place was by far the most surprising TV joy this season, as its premise left a lot of room for failure. The Good Place was made by Michael Schur, one of the creative masterminds behind The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which was pretty comforting to prospective viewers, but it took viewing that first hit-or-miss (hit, big hit) episode to truly recognize just how brilliant the show is. The basic premise is that Kristen Bell’s character, Eleanor, makes it to the elusive “good place” when she dies, but by a case of mistaken identity. Eleanor is terrified of the “bad place,” where most people end up, and seeks help from some fellow “heaven-goers” to teach her how to be “good.” Amidst all of this, the characters (and the audience) have managed to (at least attempt to) tackle some major philosophical questions.
Kate Knibbs, a staff writer at The Ringer, wrote an article on The Good Place back when it first premiered, and even got the chance to interview Schur. In the piece, she noted Schur’s hardcore love for the late David Foster Wallace (Schur owns the movie rights to Wallace’s fiction masterpiece, Infinite Jest), and even suggested that The Good Place might be a response to two of Wallace’s essays: “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” and “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” Knibbs also compared The Good Place to the cancelled-too-soon Pushing Daisies, which would’ve certainly done well if it had premiered this year.
“In comedy, timing is everything, and the mood of the current era is very different from that of the mid-aughts, when Battlestar Galactica, The Shield, 24, Lost, Deadwood and The Sopranos were on the air,” Maureen Ryan said in the aforementioned Variety article. “At that point, the nation was engaged in two wars and still reeling from a terrorist attack that, for many Americans, destroyed or altered previously held ideas about how the world worked.” Right now, we’re in a different kind of war, one that elicits the need for a comedic medium when it comes to responses.
Returning comedies also came in strong and provided a soothing balm for the craziness that is 2016, with many shows kicking off another great installment despite typical appearances of natural lulls in a show’s organic makeup. Veep is both one of the funniest and most pertinent shows on TV right now, for obvious reasons. Other solid veterans include Silicon Valley, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is currently in its twelfth season. While Broad City’s fourth season hasn’t premiered yet (it will most likely hit Comedy Central in early 2017), it’s already anticipated to be another hilarious and topically groundbreaking cornerstone of contemporary comedy.
Maureen Ryan wrote, “And far from wanting to retreat into half-hour escapes, we are often processing our fears and dreams through the oddball filters of comedy. It’s a measure of how far TV has come that Ilana and Abbi on Broad City can mention rape culture in passing and it’s not a big deal, let alone a Very Special Episode. . . . This new wave of comedy has trained us to expect anything, including ideas and jokes we might not agree with, like or understand. But the adventurousness of these shows, not to mention their cores of kindness and curiosity, keeps me coming back for more.”
Ryan’s examples are keen observations of comedy today, and why it’s working so well. Legitimately good comedies have always been of equally legitimate high quality, much like dramas; however, it has taken this need for not escape, but easier enlightenment, to truly make room for these niche shows. This specific quality of comedy is allowing us to turn to the genre for the harder subjects usually covered by dramas, but in a slightly simpler way.
