How The Bear Lost the Best Comedy Emmy

To Hacks. Photo: Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty

With Catherine O’Hara onstage, perhaps it was only appropriate that the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards ended with things off-kilter. After The Bear took three of the four acting awards (and five of six when you factor in the Guest Acting accolades from last week’s Creative Arts Emmys), not to mention a Directing award, the FX “comedy” (oh, we’ll get to it) got nipped in the final moments of the evening by a show that is about the very thing that The Bear was accused of not having: comedy.

Hacks walked away on Sunday night with three major trophies: Jean Smart for Lead Actress (her third win in four years for Hacks and sixth career Emmy overall); Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky for writing the third-season finale, “Bulletproof”; and a completely unexpected win in Outstanding Comedy Series. For anyone wondering how Hacks could have pulled off this upset, the picture began to clarify while the producers for the show were still onstage. “Support comedy!” beseeched series co-creator Aniello. “It speaks truth to power! Support your local comedian!” And while the plight of the endangered stand-up comic (or comedy writer) was not central to Hacks’s Emmy campaign this year, you could feel an intentionality to Aniello’s statement. A win for Hacks wasn’t just a win for a show about a comedian but a win for comedy itself. Social media told the rest of the story:

As the Emmys season began, I was more than ready to dismiss the “is The Bear really a comedy?” angle as mere hand-wringing from those of us covering television, for whom things like fraudulent awards categorization and awards voters’ snobbishness in favor of drama over comedy are frequent bugaboos. But as Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk wrote in her piece on whether The Bear is or isn’t a true comedy, there were plenty of not-even-trying-to-be-subtle subtweets from folks at shows like Abbott Elementary that revealed a genuine resentment toward The Bear and its two years of Emmy dominance in the category.

This undercurrent continued throughout Emmy voting season, if not always publicly. When I inquired about the scuttlebutt at an Emmys campaign event, I was often met with incredulity and annoyance that The Bear was campaigning as a comedy. Clearly, I didn’t take this undercurrent seriously enough, but in my defense, the first hour of Sunday’s telecast didn’t make it seem like most Emmy voters had either. Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach both repeated their victories from last year. Liza Colón-Zayas pulled off the upset over the favored Hannah Einbinder (who had campaigned her ass off this year) in Supporting Actress. Jean Smart did win the head-to-head against Ayo Edebiri, but it’s Jean Smart! She always wins. It wasn’t until a victory in the writing category where Hacks began to look like the stalking horse in the comedy race. That’s when it dawned on me that all of those people in writers’ rooms and at Emmys events and on social media — whose resentment toward The Bear had overridden their polite decorum — they all vote. And a show about a stand-up comedian struggling for respect in an entertainment landscape that doesn’t value her was probably going to do pretty well among those voters.

The irony is that Hacks isn’t exactly the broadest of comedies itself. In fact, there are plenty of people — who work for this website especially — who might make the argument that Hacks is weakest when it comes to its grasp on Deborah and Ava’s comedic output, and the show might work better as outright drama. In the end, we can never know for sure if the “fraudulent comedy” argument was the reason The Bear lost. The only way to know for sure is to run The Bear as a drama next year. Just as an experiment! And then we can all start talking about how Only Murders in the Building is the comedic show that deserves our support.