FX’s The Bear keeps landing in the Emmy comedy race despite its intense, low-laugh kitchen chaos. The Television Academy doesn’t strictly define comedy, letting producers choose categories. The Bear’s team sees it as a comedy and, strategically, it fares better there than against prestige dramas like Succession, illustrating how awards often reward overall quality over traditional sitcom-style humor.
The Emmy nominations are here, and, so is FX show The Bear’s nomination as the best Comedy drama. Like day follows night, a show about a Michelin-track chef and his slew of chefs having the worst day imaginable gets an easy entry into the Comedy categories year after year. In 2024, it had the second most nominations at the Emmys, right behind fellow FX program Shōgun.
And that is not to say that the Christopher Storer show is not a good one. The first two seasons are nothing short of brilliant. Richie’s transformation in Forks in season 2 is still considered one of the best character redemption arcs in a single episode, three years after the show first aired. Seasons 3 and 4 left a lot of room for improvement, but 5 picked up where they left off and gave a satisfying conclusion to the story.
But still, what makes The Bear get a nod and win in the comedy categories at the Emmys? That too, when classic comedies like The Office barely managed to get a win? And what makes a show qualify for an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series?
Turns out, there’s no fixed answer to this.
Long story short, the Television Academy doesn't police what counts as a comedy. There's no laugh-per-minute quota or tone test grading punchlines. Producers submit their show into whichever category they prefer, and the Academy takes their word for it: a concession has never held still long enough to be legislated.
In fact, plenty of shows filed under comedy never chased big laughs. Gilmore Girls for example, was your bittersweet melodrama. The first season of Orange Is the New Black, which had a plot based on incarceration, grief and violence, was submitted for Comedy before eventually migrating over to drama. The makers of the US edition of Shameless used to list the show in comedy just because they couldn’t really classify it squarely into any fixed genre.
And because of this, the more overtly hilarious shows, like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, went sixteen seasons without a single Emmy nod (they even had an episode to address this, check out The Gang Tries Desperately To Win An Award). If you’re thinking that Outstanding Comedy Series sounds like the dumpster for every show that the creators can’t decide how to categorise, category confusion happens in every department. Season 1 of True Detective, which was an anthology, ended up competing against Breaking Bad for the Best Drama at 2014 (True Detective lost, of course, but boy was it a glorious standoff between Bryan Cranston and Matthew McConaughey).
The Bear is just the more recent and more notable deviation in this long line of culprits. Its laugh-to-drama ratio, if such a thing could be measured, is probably lower than any Emmy comedy that came before it. But the show’s team sees The Bear as a comedy, without qualification and therefore, the Emmys are bound to treat it as such.
There's also a blunter case for the categorisation: The Bear simply wins more as a comedy than it would have as a drama. When the show took Outstanding Comedy Series for its debut season (plus directing and writing trophies for creator Christopher Storer), the clear winner in the drama category (with a few deviations here and there) was HBO’s Succession. In case you didn’t watch the HBO show, this was their final season, which blew up massively because it killed off Logan Roy the way it did (I’m saving you the spoilers here). More than that, it singlehandedly started the quiet luxury trend around the world. The Bear, with all its blue eyes and breathtaking Chicago skylines and delicious indulgence, had no chance against it.
And then, of course, there is the other reason. Comedy is subjective. The Faks, especially Neil and his antics, come across as genuinely hilarious. If it matches your sense of humour, many of the screaming scenes do make you break into a smile. The west thing that you can imagine always happens in this kitchen, and its severely unequipped staff has the worst possible reaction to it. Sometimes, a comedy of errors is a comedy nonetheless.
Again, The Bear is prestige television, which, whether you like it or not, will prevail over your beloved sitcom. It might not be a better comedy, but it’s a better show. And for the Television Academy, a better show is more than enough.