After the Emmy Awards Monday night went to a whole bunch of shows I had never heard of, I started watching Widow's Bay, which I have absolutely loved. I've got two episodes left; no spoilers, please! But as the former showrunner for Key & Peele, Jay Martel, points out: even though Widow's Bay won the Emmy for best comedy series, it's not a comedy:
The demands of streaming, which is now how most viewers watch TV, are not suited to just plain old comedy. Broadcast TV wants you to watch a show and then, after you’re done, watch a different show on the same channel. Streamers have a different agenda: They want you to watch 10 episodes of that same show back-to-back. They want you never to leave.
As a comedy writer for TV and movies, I find this climate daunting. After recently pitching a workplace comedy to a streamer — they passed — part of the feedback I received was “not propulsive enough.” “Propulsive” turns out to be a hot buzzword in development, and the current comedies are slick with propulsion (propulsivity? propulsiveness?).
From the dawn of TV until a few years ago, popular sitcoms like “The Odd Couple,” “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “MASH,” “Cheers,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld” trafficked in situation comedy that reset every week, much like “Abbott Elementary,” allowing the same characters to make similar mistakes over and over again, and for us to laugh at those mistakes. In other words, the characters didn’t learn or grow. Yes, there were sometimes larger arcs woven into their many seasons (Meathead moved away, some of the Friends hooked up, the Korean War eventually ended), but they were peripheral to the comedy, which was focused on those characters, who exemplified our own foibles and exploded them with great catharsis.
These days, the characters in comedies have no choice but to grow.
Unfortunately, growth is antithetical to comedy.
Jeff Maurer shouts "Amen!":
I write a lot about the sudden death of comedy, because it baffles me. How can a genre exist for thousands of years, and then, suddenly — in 2019 — everyone decides: “that’s enough”? Most comedy writers I know are both stunned and wondering how long we can live on residual checks that arrive $3.14 at a time.4 Comedy’s death surely involves many structural and cultural factors — if I was a doctor trying to fill in the “cause of death” line on comedy’s death certificate, I wouldn’t know what to put. But I want to talk about one factor that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else: The fact that comedy writers now come largely from improv, while they used to come largely from standup. I think the standup-to-improv shift might matter far more than most people realize.
Improv is performance-heavy, while standup is writing-heavy. In improv, you need to invoke characters and moods at the drop of a hat; many standups are mildly autistic people who tell jokes while standing perfectly still. Performance helps in standup, but you can scrape by on writing only, and I say that as a standup-turned-writer who couldn’t perform my way out of a wet paper bag. The two forms have different skillsets, and many improv people succeed because they have that mix of extroversion and pathological narcissism that we call “it”. And it makes sense that when they get a writing job, they gravitate more towards characters and stories than jokes.
The improv world is — for lack of a better term — a culture of theater kids.
Put it all together: Improv attracts many people whose strength is theater, not comedy, and they often come from privileged families and incubate in insular environments in big cities. This is a shift from the more joke-heavy, misanthropic, more beer track world of standup. Could this change contribute to “dramadies” with wine track sensibilities crowding out “joke bucket” shows with broad appeal? How could it not? If suddenly, a disproportionate number of comedy writers came from Quebec, and we noticed a concurrent rise in storylines about poutine and moose deterrence, would it be crazy to wonder if the two things are linked?
Widow's Bay is still very good, and I have laughed a lot. Also I would pay to watch Matthew Rhys and Kate O'Flynn read out of phone books. But it's definitely not a comedy, either in the TV sense or in the traditional—especially since many, many people die in the show. (It's a horror show, after all.)
After this, I think I'll give The Pitt another try.
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