Posted by Erin Harrington

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/12/emmys-watch-2025-what-we-do-in-the-shadows-nothing-ever-changes-but-yet-it-does

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Throughout the six seasons of FX’s vampire mockumentary sitcom What We Do in the Shadows (2019-2025), there is a recurring refrain: “nothing ever changes.” The show, created by Jemaine Clement and building on Clement and Taika Waititi’s New Zealand film What We Do in the Shadows (2014), is set in a rambling house in Staten Island and follows the daily lives of four vampire housemates: Persian warlord Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak); married couple Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), an English dandy, and Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetrious), a Greek Romani peasant; and American energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), who lives in the basement and feeds by irritating and boring other people. The immigrant vampires arrived in Staten Island by boat, tasked with taking over the new world by Baron Afanas (Doug Jones), but were too lazy and incompetent to advance beyond conquering their street (and half of Ashley Street); Colin just came with the house. Nandor’s long-suffering and hypercompetent familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) provides a link to the mortal world. His intimate relationship with Nandor and his desire to become a vampire himself offers the show emotional stakes and a narrative throughline.

Like its precursor, Shadows riffs lovingly on the history of vampire media and the absurdities spawned by placing ridiculous characters with high opinions of themselves in banal settings. More interestingly, the formal demands of episodic, longform storytelling quicky butt up against vampiric torpor in curious ways, just as the mockumentary form creates unexpected opportunities to enrich the show’s themes. For the vampires, time is effectively infinite, so boredom and indifference easily set in. Similarly, the repetitive nature of the sitcom format demands episodes that move from order to disorder and back again but limits the amount of character and narrative development that can happen over seasons or shows. Guillermo complains about the vampires’ inability to change, the mess in the house, and the “Groundhog Day” like sense of inertia that comes when you’re surrounded by indifferent immortals.

Nonetheless, What We Do in the Shadows becomes a fascinating exercise in comic storytelling as it takes a well-worn “fish out of water” (or out of time) narrative common to comic vampire media (Bacon 2022) and finds ways to prompt (and sometimes comment on) character and narrative development in the face of formal and vampiric stagnation – something very visible now that the show has wrapped after six highly acclaimed seasons. Shadows is notable for many things: its rich world-building; its terrific production design; its enthusiastic and capacious attitudes towards diverse sexualities; its contributions to vampire lore; its genre hybridity; its international creative and production teams, which result in a unique combination of different national approaches to humour; its melding of the comic and the gothic; its combination of scripted and improvised material. But it is its awareness of its own form, and the strengths and limitations of that form, and formula, that particularly mark the show’s intelligence.

The rubber band ping of a return from chaos to stasis becomes its own kind of comic engine. Each season the setting is the same, but the characters have individual arcs, goals, or preoccupations that drive the situations. Nandor wants a wife (and gets one and regrets it).  Nadja decides to open a night club (and does and ruins it). Laszlo wants to go full mad scientist and build a monster (and succeeds but then must look after it). The vampires ascend to the Vampire Council, with the support of The Guide (Kristin Schall), but renege on their duties. They travel overseas but return home again, or they grow bored with their new hobbies. They run up against old foes and nurture never-ending grudges. In the spirit of playful Gothic “bizzarchitecture,” the “vampire residence” seems to grow bigger and bigger on the inside as new rooms or spaces are discovered.

The show has also been prone to some odd resets, as entire storylines from earlier seasons are not quite retconned but certainly discarded. In season two, Colin, subject to his own peculiar and unknown biological life cycle, ails and dies. In season three he is reborn, and raised through adolescence by Laszlo, before arriving at adulthood with no memory of the transition. (This wryly points to the way sitcoms that are stuck in a rut might shake things up with the introduction of a baby.) The ideological impulse under the sitcom format structurally may be seen as conservative, falling back into the familiar and unable to get traction on meaningful change, leaving its subjects to make do and accept their lot (Mintz 1985). Here that rhythm, and those limitations, enrich an understanding of the vampires’ immortality (and their uselessness!) and form the series’ comic underpinnings.

This creates problems for Guillermo, who offers the audience an emotional anchor. Queer, misunderstood, shy, low status, and full of want, Guillermo starts the series desperate to become a vampire and to be recognised as an equal, if only oblivious Nandor will recognise his potential and grant his wish. It’s a “will they, won’t they” storyline, ripped straight from the romantic comedy playbook (Lord and Hogan 2024), but there is something a little tragic about Guillermo’s character development over the seasons. He learns that he comes from a long line of vampire hunters, which puts him at odds with his beloved master. He is “promoted” from familiar to bodyguard (with very few changes in duties) and eventually has his wish granted, but he struggles with his new vampire identity. He seems to have a closer connection to the film crew than the vampires, but his vulnerabilities are more on display. More than anyone, he finds himself back where he started. The vampires are happy in their elastic afterlife, but Guillermo chafes against various thwarted ambitions. His frustration that nothing ever changes becomes resignation, until he’s able to engage in some drastic soul-searching that honours his character’s vulnerabilities; physician, heal thyself. A dynamic that could be seen as repressive, or even a sideways act of queerbaiting, takes on a different and more complex cast.

These beats and returns manifest in other ways. One of Shadows’s most striking contributions has been its approach to mockumentary. The 2014 film framed itself as an expose of a secret society of the undead, in which the intrepid crew, sometimes protected by crucifixes, gained access to something secret and dangerous. The series, too, is framed as an ongoing documentary about vampires, although for whom (and why) is never really answered. For the most part, the series adopts the conventions of what Brett Mills (2004) has described as “cinema verité.” This refers to a style of situation comedy that embraces the language of observational, fly-on-the-wall documentaries for narrative, comic and aesthetic effect. This includes shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, or Abbott Elementary, which draw from the conventions of documentary form. These shows combine “candid” and hand-held footage and techniques (such as obvious, clumsy zooms) with cutaways and direct-to-camera interviews, even if they are also highly selective in the ways that they acknowledge the diegetic presence of the cameras or even the rationale for the crew’s presence. In What We Do in the Shadows, these features work to fabricate a sense of factuality that comes into comic friction with the show’s ridiculous conceit – namely, that we are following the filming of a “real” documentary (of sorts) about actual vampires who exist relatively normally in the “real world.” This is enriched by the series’ frequent use of other fabricated or altered media, such as paintings and photographs, to establish the vampires’ history and relationships.

As the series progresses, this form offers creative opportunities. Characters frequently engage with the diegetic camera (and the unseen crew), and therefore the audience, in a manner that heightens dramatic and situational irony, and occasionally drives the narrative.  It contributes to the vampires’ characterisation, notably that they are quite happy to be tailed by a crew because they are both naïve and narcissistic; why wouldn’t people want to see the minutiae of vampires’ everyday lives? Over time, the series incorporates other forms of (found) footage in novel ways, including material from surveillance and security cameras, local government meetings, video conferences, social media, behind-the-scenes material, news broadcasts, and – most impressively, in the season 4 episode “Go Flip Yourself” – reality television.

In the final season, this becomes delightfully meta, as in a narrative arc which follows Guillermo into a job at a shady venture capital firm, where his terrible boss is convinced the camera crew is there for him – much to the amusement of the vampires. In the episode “P I Undercover: New York” (season 6, episode 8), the vampires discover that their street and the exterior of the “vampire residence” have been appropriated by a television film crew who are filming a crime police procedural. Nandor and Laszlo must balance their anger at the disruption (including a crew truck damaging their backyard) with Guillermo’s fandom of the show, but despite declaring war on the crew, they become increasingly invested in being involved behind the scenes. Beyond the overt visibility of the workings of a television show, there’s a deeper joke here too, about hyperreality and representation in film locations. The show within a show is using Staten Island to stand in for elsewhere in New York, even as establishing shots of the exterior of the vampire residence are Cranfield House in Riverdale in season 1, then of the Jared S Torrance House in South Pasadena, with other exteriors filmed on a set in Toronto, all of it “authentically” captured by the fictional crew.

This all pays off beautifully in the show’s well-pitched final episode, which finally addresses, head on, the show’s guiding conceit. It’s a finale about a finale, which also intertextually references another notable television finale about the nature of televisual reality. It finally interrogates the role that the presence of the documentary crew has had on the lives of the vampires, who are perhaps more media savvy than we have given them credit for, and on Guillermo in particular, given his various identity crises. It asks questions about how we fashion ourselves for the screen and how this impacts our sense of self. For the vampires, maybe this has just been another entertaining diversion; for Guillermo, maybe not. It’s an impressive and deeply satisfying play that ensures that Shadows ends meaningfully on its own terms, while honouring its sitcom and mockumentary forms – something that rarely happens in comparable shows.

This conclusion challenges other comparable shows to make more of the mockumentary format. Here, it is something that informs narrative, theme and character. I can drive action, rather than just respond to it – especially as this resolution asks challenging questions about what it is that Guillermo has wanted all along. In the world of story, perhaps nothing ever changes, but in terms of its wider cultural impact, What We Do in the Shadows has certainly changed a lot.

Works Cited

Bacon, Simon. “Introduction.” Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Bloodsucking Comedy, edited by Simon Bacon, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2022, pp. 12–35.

Lord, Kristin, and Kourtnea Hogan. “Gay Vampires: Metaphor, the Erotic and Homophobia in Film and Televison.” The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, edited by Simon Bacon, Springer International Publishing, 2024, pp. 1087–102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36253-8_47.

Mills, Brett. “Comedy Verite: Contemporary Sitcom Form.” Screen, vol. 45, no. 1, Mar. 2004, pp. 63–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/45.1.63.

Mintz, Lawrence E. “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 8, no. 2, 1985, pp. 42–51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23412949.

Biography

Erin Harrington is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in critical and cultural theory in the English department of the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she coordinates the Cultural Studies programme. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (Routledge 2018), and has published on topics including female-directed horror anthologies, New Zealand horror, horror comedy, horror and theatre, and connections between horror and contemporary art practice. She is currently completing a monograph on transnational comedy horror, mockumentary form, and the What We Do in the Shadows universe for Auteur (Liverpool University Press). She sits on the editorial boards of the peer-reviewed journal Horror Studies and Edinburgh University Press’s 21st Century Horror series. She also sits on the board of trustees of the books and ideas festival WORD Christchurch and appears regularly as an arts critic and commentator.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/12/emmys-watch-2025-what-we-do-in-the-shadows-nothing-ever-changes-but-yet-it-does

Posted by Jacqueline Johnson

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/11/emmys-watch-2025-all-dr-robbys-children-the-spectre-of-soap-opera-on-the-pitt

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

On Thursday nights in the Spring of 2025, I immersed myself in the chaos of an under-resourced emergency room in my new city of residence. Like Dr. Mel King and Dr. Dennis Whitaker, two of the interns who start their first shift in the pilot, I entered Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center nervous but tentatively optimistic. You see, buzzy, new series on streaming platforms have let me down before. This many years into streaming originals being their own force in the television landscape, I have had my fill of television series that are really “eight-hour movies,” of scant episode orders, and of truly terrible pacing. The Pitt, however, was developed by alums of network television dramas ER (NBC, 1994-2009) and The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006). These people know TV. After mainlining the first few episodes so I could catch up to the weekly release schedule, my cautious optimism transformed into unfettered glee: We were so fucking back!

This essay, however, is not just about my love for a standout new series that will likely walk home with several gold statues come Emmys night. Rather, it’s about television form and narrative and how we collectively speak about one of the medium’s greatest forms of storytelling: the soap opera. Soap operas are characterized by multiple plot lines and a serial narrative that resists formal closure. While the setting of soap operas has changed over the years, they are frequently associated with the domestic sphere and above all with the feminine. As feminist media scholars have argued for decades, it is soap opera’s connection to the feminine that fuels the form’s cultural and critical disparagement and what makes the soap opera emblematic of television as a whole (Modleski 1982; Levine 2020). Television’s most recent cycle of legitimation, marked by cable critical darlings and punchy, single-camera comedies, were praised for being so unlike the medium they were ostensibly rising above (Newman and Levine, 2012). Praise for serialized cable and streaming dramas frequently requires the continual disavowal of the soap opera and its attendant feminized connotations. While watching The Pitt each week, I also regularly visited the series’ active Reddit community eager to engage in a virtual water cooler discussion. In post after post praising the series, viewers celebrated its distance from the soap. I had to ask myself: are we even watching the same show?

Like most medical dramas dating back to St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982-1988), The Pitt blends episodic and serialized narrative. While some cases resolve within the span of an episode, or even within a single beat, others stretch out or are left seemingly to dangle only to be returned to at exactly the right moment. The lives of the doctors and nurses that work in the overburdened ER—Dr. McKay’s struggles with her ankle monitor and her son’s infantile father or Dr. Javadi’s tense relationship with her mother—also provide serialized threads that texture the characters and invite audience investment. Moreover, in some places The Pitt resists narrative closure altogether. Some of the figures that come into the ER leave, their cases still in limbo. (Will we ever see the victim of trafficking again?!?!) While it blends both forms, narrative threads intertwine and build on each other in a way that privileges seriality.

The Pitt’s structure, some of its aesthetic choices, and its placement on HBO Max can obscure many of its connections to the soap opera. In a tactic borrowed from the primetime network drama 24 (FOX, 2001-2010), each episode of The Pitt corresponds with one hour in the hospital workers’ shift. The season length mapping onto a shift length adheres to entrenched ideas about realism, as does many of the series’ other aesthetic choices, particularly the goriness, lighting, and sound design. In her framing of 24 as a “techno-soap,” Tara McPherson (2007) argues that the series real-time conceit and technophilia are used to distance itself from the serial’s femininity (p. 174). Beyond the “real-time” framework, The Pitt aims for a realistic portrayal of an emergency room through blood and guts, stark, fluorescent lighting, and a distinct lack of music. Greg M. Smith (2017) contends that realism, rather than being a static set of aesthetic principles or a true depiction of reality, is “an effect that occurs when our assumptions about what is ‘realistic’ intersect with the techniques that media makers use to portray their world” (p. 166). Realism, too, distances serialized dramas from the soap opera’s oft-derided excesses. Finally, HBO or Home Box Office made its name by cordoning itself off from the medium it sought to rise above (Jaramillo 2002). Critics have likened The Pitt to its 90s network parents over its prestige HBO predecessors. However, in examining its style and streaming home, it can be easy to dismiss The Pitt’s connections to feminized serials.  

While I have seen and read far fewer instances of the creative team behind the show insisting that their series is above the soap or even television itself, this discourse is especially prevalent in discussions by fans in the series’ Reddit community. In a post expressing excitement after discovering the show and catching up, one Redditor stated that they thought to themselves “‘huh, solid medical drama with little no [sic] over the top soap opera bullshit?”. Further, in asking the community for other recommendations of medical shows without “soap opera bullshit” they warned commenters about daring to recommend Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005-). This is a persistent thread. In another post, in which someone inquired why viewers seemed so anti-romance, the most-upvoted comment responds: “Because nobody falls in love in 12 hours.  It would be melodramatic like bad level, like a soap opera.” Of course, this reply conveniently forgets that only a handful of interns are arriving for the first time alongside the viewer; most of these characters have known each other for years. Further, the show does include elements of romance (Dr. Robby and Dr. Collins are exes; Dr. Javadi tries to ask out the attractive nurse Mateo right in front of a patient who watches the scene unfold, riveted as if watching an episode of one of his series). Despite viewers expressing disdain for soap opera, The Pitt is one.

The whole first season is a single shift; however, we do not start on just any day. In true soap opera fashion, Dr. Robby comes to work on the anniversary of his mentor’s death. Throughout the shift, Dr. Robby has several traumatic flashbacks, and his insistence on working through it leads to an emotional breakdown the writers diligently build towards. In another example, Dr. Collins is assigned to a teen girl who travelled across state lines to get the abortion pill in the same shift in which she has a miscarriage. The young girl and her aunt, who is pretending to be her mother, are attempting to terminate the pregnancy in secret. When the real mother comes to the hospital and discovers what is going on, her and her sister have a massive public fight. This is one of the many examples in which soap operatic domestic conflict anchors The Pitt despite its non-domestic setting. At the biggest scale, the season’s final episodes deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting at an outdoor concert at The University of Pittsburgh where Dr. Robby’s surrogate son Jake and his girlfriend are in attendance. Earlier beats build to these arcs, and the viewer watches as the events reverberate through the characters as they try to make it through the day. These emotional threads and heightened sense of drama are core to the series’ identity. In Reddit discussions about the identity of the shooter, viewers suggested that a range of options couldn't be possible because the show was not a soap opera. Indeed, many people said this about diametrically opposed outcomes. It seems then that soap opera came to mean anything a specific viewer thought they were above. Discussion surrounding The Pitt illustrates how “soap opera” functions as a pejorative.

Soap opera should not be an insult. In fact, I contend that The Pitt works so well because of its connection to soap opera. The television soap opera is a unique storytelling form in which narrative threads can build and build and where the viewer becomes invested in not just action but reaction, the way plot points reverberate out through the narrative and the characters and their relationships. The Pitt smartly takes that legacy and runs with it. While watching the first season, Thursday nights were once again imbued with meaning and created the space for a shared sense of community as television watchers, a feeling I had been missing since Shonda Rhimes ran Thursday nights on ABC in the 2010s. (Ironic considering how many strays her longest-running series caught when folks negatively compared it to The Pitt on social media). The Emmys invite the opportunity to grapple with the politics of taste and distinction. The soap opera is embedded throughout the contemporary television landscape. Even as many daytime serials face a grim future in networks’ scheduling, the narrative strategies and conventions of the soap opera are still on shift.

References

Jaramillo, D. (2002). The family racket: AOL, Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the construction of a quality brand. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 26(1), 59-75.

Levine, E. (2020). Her stories: Daytime soap opera and US television history. Duke University Press

McPherson, T. (2007). Techno-soap: 24, masculinity, and hybrid form. In S. Peacock (Ed.), Reading 24: TV against the clock (pp. 173-190). Palgrave Macmillan.

Modleski, T. (1982), Loving with a vengeance: Mass-produced fantasies for women. Routledge.

Newman, M. Z. & Levine, E. (2012) Legitimating television: Media convergence and cultural status. Routledge.

Smith, G. M. (2017). Realism. In L. Ouellette & J. Gray (Eds.), Keywords for media studies (pp. 166-168). New York University Press.

Biography 

Jacqueline Johnson is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Film & Media Studies Program and the Department of English at The University of Pittsburgh. Her work has been published in Communication, Culture, and Critique and The New Review of Film and Television Studies, and she is currently working on turning her dissertation on Black women and the contemporary romance genre into a monograph. When she is not teaching or writing, you can find her patiently explaining to anyone who will listen that Beyoncé is actually underrated.   

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/11/emmys-watch-2025-all-dr-robbys-children-the-spectre-of-soap-opera-on-the-pitt

Posted by Robert Boucaut

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/9/emmys-watch-2025-shrinking-and-mental-healthcare-comedy

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Shrinking has grown from two Emmy nods for its first season to five for Season 2. While hardly a case of field domination, advancing to compete for Outstanding Comedy Series sees it filling a niche in the sweepstakes of prestige television comedy left open since Ted Lasso—the heart-warming dramedy that takes mental healthcare seriously.

That both series share creative personnel shouldn’t be a huge surprise (like producer Bill Lawrence and cast-member/writer/producer Brett Goldstein). And nor is it a coincidence that both shows have become leading figures of Apple TV+ as a streaming service in terms of homepage visibility, awards campaigning, and broader marketing materials for Apple.

My colleague Dr. Alexander H Beare and I have been developing a research project about Apple TV+ as a unique player in the current Subscription Video On-Demand (SVOD) marketplace, theorising how their original and curated content supports the imperatives of Apple as a parent company. Given Apple TV+ has been reported by Variety as a loss-making service that haemorrhages more than US$1 billion per year (Spangler 2025), these imperatives are clearly more ideological than economic.

With this piece, I look to reflect on where Shrinking has come from, and how the unsteady storytelling that comes with addressing mental health within formulas of television comedy is so characteristic of Apple TV+. Spoilers incoming, obviously.

From Ted to Jimmy

Ted Lasso was the first major hit and Emmys-sweeper for Apple TV+ as a SVOD—premiering during global lockdowns during the COVID19 pandemic, it was praised as quintessential comfort viewing. Tanya Horeck (2021) noted this period for its rise in “Kind TV”—whereas comedy narratives have often poised central, antisocial characters as cringey, cynical figures (think Veep or The Office UK), Kind TV repositions antisocial tendencies as foibles for characters who otherwise wholly mean good (think Parks and Recreation or The Office US). As a protagonist, Ted of Ted Lasso (played by Jason Sudeikis) unifies the players, administrative staff, and fans of an English Premier League (EPL) football team through visions of kindness and optimism.

The massive, rapid success of Ted Lasso positioned it as more than just a television comedy and instead something of an all-encompassing philosophy of kindness. In our published research, Beare and I (2024) note how the show was quickly integrated into the cultural zeitgeist: it drove a major push in advertising EPL football to North American audiences, it was intertextually referenced in The White Lotus Season 2, and its cast even met with US President Joe Biden to promote mental health awareness (White 2023).

We argued that Ted Lasso as a character was particularly primed to represent an entire ideological disposition of Apple as a parent company—the kind-of inspirational figure who would readily fit into one of Apple’s infamous Think Different advertisements despite being a fictional character (Beare & Boucaut 2024). Indeed, we quickly observed the show’s characters becoming central in Apple’s broader marketing materials of the time and saw how the show’s slogan of ‘Believe’ was utilised in ways that deliberately evoked Think Different associations.

Advertisements of tech products like iPhones and iPads (which feature prominently as product placement in the shows’ narratives, as this YouTube piece by The Wall Street Journal (2021) interrogates) would simultaneously promote their content imperatives by featuring their starring players, and series paratexts would foreground the shows’ creative uses of Apple tech(Blunden 2020). This strategy would extend to other original comedies such as Loot (starring Maya Rudolph), Mythic Quest (starring Rob McElhenney), Stick (starring Owen Wilson), and Shrinking (starring Jason Segel).

The protagonist of Shrinking is Jimmy—a therapist who, after experiencing the tragic loss of his wife, tries to work through his grief while rebuilding his relationship to therapy. He fits a Lasso-nian archetype in how the show reifies his capacity to think different. This storytelling formula that straddles dramatically heavy themes with light-hearted and affirmative comedy stylings (which also tracks across the spread of shows just listed) carries interesting implications for how challenge and progress are represented in its storyworld.

Is Shrinking a Workplace Comedy?

By taking on mental healthcare as its thematic drive with characters that are actually therapists, one can argue that Shrinking is something of a comedic enquiry into therapy practice on an institutional level. Naturally, it draws from vocationally-specific settings and aesthetics (therapy offices, patient consultations, wellness jargon) in the stories it tells. Yet, the narratives that take shape in Shrinking suggest it is more occupied with mental health as a big picture concept, rather than anything too specific or tethered.

What Shrinking exemplifies best amongst the Apple TV+ suite of original comedies is that the workplace setting is to be approached only secondarily as an occupation: instead, the primary function of these workplaces is to construct a pseudo family.

In the cast photo shown above, only a handful of characters are professional therapists—yet the contrivances by which they keep returning to the central therapy office as a setting are profound. Take Brian (Michael Urie), Jimmy’s best friend, an estate lawyer. When the two begin reconnecting early in the series, Brian starts giving legal advice to Jimmy’s clients on criminal matters and repeatedly interrupts Jimmy’s sessions with patients. Then there’s Liz (Christa Miller), Jimmy’s neighbour—from the outset of the series, Liz steps in as a caregiver to Jimmy’s neglected daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), steadily becomes best friends with Jimmy’s coworker, Gaby (Jessica Williams), and starts a business with Jimmy’s patient, Sean (Luke Tennie). Sean, who suffers from PTSD and has anger management issues, is kicked out of his parents’ home, and so he moves in with Jimmy and Alice. Jimmy’s boss, Paul (Harrison Ford), has also been a confidant to Alice throughout Jimmy’s spiral (making Paul a rival figure to Liz)—Paul also suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and eventually starts a relationship with his neurologist, Dr. Julie (Wendie Malick, not pictured). Gaby is not only Jimmy’s coworker but his dead wife Tia’s (Lilan Bowden, not pictured) best friend—she and Jimmy start sleeping together. There’s even Louis, played by Ted Lasso alum and executive producer Brett Goldstein (not pictured)—Louis was the drunk driver responsible for the accident that killed Tia, and after unsuccessfully seeking forgiveness from Jimmy, Alice and Brian start befriending him out of sympathy.

It maybe reads like there’s a lot going on in that crude summary. However, the cumulative effect of these storylines across two seasons is a show that is ostensibly about the mental healthcare industry feeling remarkably insular and narrow in scope. Rather than being content with supporting characters circulating around Jimmy as a central protagonist, they must insistently relate to one another on very meaningful terms. There’s no understanding in Shrinking of peripheral figures or extended social circles: instead, everyone fits into a pseudo-family structure.

The effect of this is, out of necessity, somewhat degrading to therapy as a practice. What we see of Jimmy’s patients (outside of Sean) are therapy sessions characterised by infantile complaining or unthreateningly compulsive behaviours: because the purpose of the show is to affirm Jimmy’s think different approach to mental health, his patients present with issues that he can work through with plain speaking. Grace, your husband is an abusive asshole – just leave him already! Alan, stop trying to be such a player, and maybe women would see a real you who is attractive. Dan, not everybody is a jerk, actually, so small talk with a barista isn’t really that bad…

So, Shrinking certainly depicts a ‘workplace’—but despite its preoccupation with engaging big-picture mental health thematically, its actual priority of constructing interpersonal relationships of affirmative trust makes its workplace just a convenient backdrop. Therapy is a setting for the show’s central relationships, and its background cast of patients present with frustrating problems that can be solved through Jimmy’s no-bullshit approach. It might be a storytelling convenience to have a jovial interaction between Jimmy’s patient and his lawyer-best friend in the hallways of his therapy office but doing so problematises the show’s understandings of ethics and boundaries—in thinking different about therapy, Shrinking undermines therapy as an entire practice and occupation.

 As for the ‘comedy’…

Is Shrinking funny?

Well, my scholarly contention is not really, but…

Obviously, comedy is subjective, television generic formulas have long been porous and straddled—et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Individual mileage for this style of show will vary, and the most meaningful factor for this is probably how receptive one is for feel-good, affirmative messaging as a storytelling priority.

That’s not to say that Shrinking isn’t without its pleasures. Jason Segel occupies a Lasso-nian central figure with a more grounded presence than Jason Sudeikis did, which makes Jimmy much less cloying, and the pronounced struggles that he goes through more compelling and believable. The rest of the cast is strong—so while the situations of the show don’t readily support memorable jokes, the characters at least have an easy chemistry. It makes sense why Segel, Williams, Urie and Ford make up the totality of the show’s Emmy’s endorsements alongside its Outstanding Comedy Series nod.

But in picking up on the storytelling mission where Ted Lasso left off, Shrinking perhaps over-relies on its cast’s chemistry to carry its interest. By Season 3, Ted Lasso was barely recognisable as a TV comedy—its episodes were long, subdued and meandering, with so little apparent drive towards inducing laughter. For Kind TV, heartwarming affirmation remains the goal—but where this was once achieved through absurdist and heightened situations, texts like these have shifted towards such outcomes being achieved through dramatic, contained, articulated trauma for its characters to overcome.

I wonder whether localising trauma like this—in grieving a dead wife and mother, in an abusive partner or parent figure, in a degenerative disease, in a confidence-busting divorce—is just another neoliberal fantasy of self-fulfilment. These backstories are woven into these comedies to give characters complexity and to justify their antisocial tendencies. Trauma is apparently a formula of the Apple TV+ original comedy: naming, facing, and embracing trauma allows it to be neatly contained within a feel-good narrative, and then overcome with positively affirmative messaging—with the help of iPhones and Facetime, of course.

References

Beare, Alexander H & Robert Boucaut 2024, ‘Positive masculinity or toxic positivity? Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso as a capitalist utopia’, Critical Studies in Television, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/17496020241228162

Blunden, M 2020, ‘Mythic Quest cast use iPhones to shoot hit Apple TV+ show remotely’, The Standard, 22 May, available at https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/appletv-mythic-quest-filming-iphone-a4447431.html.

Horeck, T 2021, ‘‘Netflix and Heal’: The Shifting Meanings of Binge-Watching during the COVID-19 Crisis’, Film Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, pp.35-40. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.1.35

Spangler, T 2025, ‘Apple Is Losing Over $1 Billion per Year on Streaming Service, Has 45 Million Apple TV+ Subscribers (Report)’, Variety, 20 March, available at https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/apple-tv-plus-streaming-losses-1-billion-per-year-1236344052/.

The Wall Street Journal 2021, Hundreds of iPhones are in ‘Ted Lasso.’ They’re more strategic than you think. | WSJ, YouTube, 14 September, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xAvVfJ_xyI&ab_channel=WallStreetJournal.

White, A 2023, ‘Jason Sudeikis, ‘Ted Lasso’ Cast Promote Mental Health Awareness at White House With Surprise Appearance by Trent Crimm Actor’. The Hollywood Reporter, 20 March, available at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/ted-lasso-jason-sudeikis-white-house-trent-crimm-1235356995/

Biography

Robert Boucaut is a Lecturer in Media at The University of Adelaide—his research interests include prestige media texts and celebrities, streaming services and programming imperatives, and mediated gender. His book Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige (Routledge) builds new frameworks for analysing Hollywood media ecosystems and awards. He has published works in International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Television, and Media International Australia.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/9/emmys-watch-2025-shrinking-and-mental-healthcare-comedy

Posted by Melanie Robson

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/9/emmys-watch-2025-severance-a-present-tense-dystopia

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

This video essay explores the place of Outstanding Drama Series nominee Severance (Apple TV+) in the genre of science fiction TV. Severance continues the recent trend of dystopian sci fi shows grounded in a near future, using a ‘mystery box’ narrative structure and demanding an intellectual, committed audience enabled by streaming platforms. This video analyses the visual ways the show builds its dystopian world: a world that feels intensely relatable and present, but simultaneously a horrific warning of technological potential.

The following video contains spoilers for Season 2.

Biography

Melanie Robson is a Lecturer in Screen Studies in the BA program at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has a PhD from UNSW Sydney. She has co-edited a collection on Alfred Hitchcock (One Shot Hitchcock, Oxford University Press) and published in Studies in European Cinema, Mise-en-Scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, Refractory and MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/9/emmys-watch-2025-severance-a-present-tense-dystopia

Posted by Chris Comerford

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/8/emmys-watch-2025-shrinking-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-two-divergent-outstanding-comedy-nominees

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

At the climax of the season’s final episode, a character we’ve come to know threatens suicide. He walks to the edge of a train platform, fully prepared to throw himself in front of an oncoming express train. This character has spent the season agonizing over deep personal pain, inflicted on himself and others, his mental health dwindling from an already precarious position. His suicide attempt is the emotional climax of his arc for the season.

To a casual reader, you might assume I’m referring to The Bear; a character being internally tormented to the point of self-harm is as much a neat description of the FX show’s protagonist, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen-White), as it is of the actual character to whom I’m alluding. Since 2022 and its first season’s exploration of family trauma and workplace drama interwoven with the darkly comedic antics of an eatery in transition, The Bear has gained a reputation for being a deep, dark dramedy; in essence, a series balancing humorous and serious emotional tones and subject matter. It’s also a series whose roots in the funnier side of things have been existentially contested. Last year Pop Junctions hosted a brilliant piece by Megan Robinson illustrating the exasperated humor of the second season’s “Fishes” (2023), an episode exploring the familial eruption of the Berzatto clan over a dinner that ends in a literal car crash. It’s true that The Bear has had a knack for knockout humor that can be both subtle and spectacular: I would personally cite “Forks” (2023), the episode focusing on abrasive anti-hero Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) that includes a purgatory of fork-cleaning, a fist-pumping Taylor Swift car karaoke moment and a pizza preparation that’s shot and soundtracked like a Mission Impossible ticking clock action beat. However, despite its humor The Bear has dwelt in storytelling realms involving mental health, self-harm, personal meltdowns and suicide; to assume the character in the first paragraph comes from The Bear wouldn’t be a stretch.

But the character in the first paragraph isn’t from The Bear: it’s Shrinking’s Louis Winston (Brett Goldstein), the repentant barista who accidentally killed the wife of Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) in a car crash. Louis’s suicide attempt, halted by Jimmy in the final scene of “The Last Thanksgiving” (2024), is a dark turn that’s treated seriously and lacks any kind of comedic or lighthearted undertone until Jimmy’s arrival. In isolation, the scene and the ones leading up to it, where Louis is slowly spurned by his co-workers and disinvited from their Thanksgiving party once they learn of his past, wouldn’t be indicative of what many might consider a “comedy”. But as part of the larger narrative tapestry of Shrinking – which, yes, includes a lot of laughs – it’s representative of the kind of dramedy The Bear used to represent.

Before I explain further, a few caveats. First, I put aside the Television Academy’s frankly unhelpful rules about genre eligibility; saying a series should have “the majority of its running time of at least six episodes [being] primarily comedic” does not provide firm guidance on genre rules. Where once The Bear might have fit that bill, I argue it has since outgrown it. Second, I don’t wish to turn this piece into a reductive delimiting of the types and trends of comedy that pigeon-hole shows into narrow definitions of genre. Part of the appeal of genre’s mutable edges is to make texts slippery, mixing and reconfiguring to present something new. Jacques Derrida’s influential paper ‘The Law of Genre’ (1980) invites this kind of slippage when he highlights the ability for texts to undergo “a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of” multiple genres (p. 59). Both The Bear and Shrinking mix heavy subject matter with comedic frames featuring jokester characters, silly plots and humorous dialogue, showcasing mental health and trauma alongside farce and wry asides. Respective first season episodes “Review” (The Bear, 2022) and “Imposter Syndrome” (Shrinking, 2023) are potently dramatic, yet supremely funny examples demonstrating both shows’ dramedy strengths.

Despite how it might have begun, The Bear has inched further from comedy to focus on drama in its third season. Competing against Shrinking’s second season for Outstanding Comedy Series at this year’s Emmys, The Bear’s third season doubles down on character development that is galvanised by interpersonal drama, contemplative cinematography and a morose atmosphere at the expense of brevity, wit or warmth. The season’s tone is set by its first and best episode, “Tomorrow” (2024), an absorbing half-hour collage of non-linear, largely dialogue-free flashbacks briefly intercut with present-day scenes, entirely scored by an immaculate Nine Inch Nails cue. There is a near-absence of humor in “Tomorrow” and its temporal vignettes; exploring Carmy’s workplace trauma under Chef David (Joel McHale) and its enduring influence on his work ethic, taunting the viewer with scenes of his happy relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon) set prior to their rupture at the end of the second season, further highlights his dysfunctional familial relationships before and after the suicide of his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal). The episode’s quiet, foreboding and low-energy pacing is shot through almost all subsequent episodes, underscoring the season’s main plotlines including Carmy’s failure to reconcile with Claire, Sydney’s (Ayo Edibiri) indecision regarding co-ownership of The Bear, the tension surrounding a food critic’s forthcoming review, and the shock closing of the hugely successful neighboring restaurant Ever, where both Carmy and Richie staged. When things are funny, they’re either perfunctory or all-too-brief, as in the flashback episode “Napkins” (2024) and its warm ending chat between Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Mikey; their banter and repartee cap a lengthy episode that excruciatingly details Tina’s forced redundancy and failed attempts to find a new job. In some cases the season’s humor has even been a source of frustration for viewers and critics, as in “Children” (2024)’s focus on the Fak family – the series’ primary comedic relief characters – and the stunt cast appearance of their relative played by an able but out of-place John Cena.

Don’t get me wrong: The Bear is still a superb series. Throughout its third season – and its more recent fourth, calling ahead to what will surely be another nomination next year – The Bear is a show that excels at introspective and interpersonal character drama. I’d argue that its “serious” elements are what appeal most to creator and showrunner Christopher Storer, who directed seven, and wrote or co-wrote eight, of the season’s ten episodes. Its cast is high-caliber and absolutely deserving of their many accolades. Its cinematography, soundtrack, editing and production are worthy of high praise. Several of its episodes – “Tomorrow”, “Napkins” and the episode-long pre-service meeting of “Next” (2024) – are sublime pieces of television. The Bear is still worthy of acclaim. It’s just, unfortunately, not much of a funny show anymore.

By contrast, Shrinking is a very funny show despite its at-times similarly bleak subject matter. As with The Bear, Shrinking’s second season darkens its tone at the end of its first episode “Jimmying” (2024) by introducing Louis, the source of Jimmy’s grief that sets up the show’s initial premise. Jimmy’s gradual progression towards recognition and acceptance of Louis’s genuine repentance is the emotional spine of the season, interspersed with plenty of the light-hearted yet character-driven storytelling that made its first season successful. An episode like “Last Drink” (2024) exemplifies this balance: on one hand there’s the drama of the car accident’s aftermath and the final bourbon Paul (Harrison Ford) shares with Jimmy before he quits drinking; on the other, there’s the endearing goofiness of Louis justifying his ownership of a Miss Congeniality poster to his girlfriend Sarah (Meredith Hagner), and Derek’s (Ted McGinley) visit to Mac’s (Josh Hopkins) dog-pictured microbrewery and his subsequent inability to be mad at Mac for kissing his wife.

The abundance of chuckles in Shrinking’s dialogue, set pieces and character beats also makes the second season’s other grounded plot elements even more potent. As examples, Brian (Michael Urie) and Charlie (Devin Kawaoka) face set-backs in their quest for adoption, but deal with them in part thanks to a hilarious oceanic group therapy session in “Get In The Sea” (2024); Paul’s Parkinson’s diagnosis further impacts his health, but he loses little of his cantankerous wit when dealing with Jimmy or when forging a new friendship with his quirky former patient Raymond (Neil Flynn); Gaby (Jessica Williams) verbally spars with her recovering addict sister Courtney (Courtney Taylor) over the care of their elderly mother (Vernee Watson), but processes this in part thanks to her awkwardly endearing relationship with Derrick #2 (Damon Wayans Jr.). Both drama and comedy genres are consistently woven well together in service to each other, the end result usually moves the audience towards a smile, if not always a laugh.

To that end, Shrinking is a dramedy that gestures towards a heightened sense of reality. In a manner like creator Bill Lawrence’s previous work on Scrubs (2001-2010) and Ted Lasso (2020-2023), Shrinking’s second season exists in a world where a therapist can get away with significant substance abuse and illegal actions with his patients without losing his licence. A major scene in “Last Drink” is Brian recounting the history of his and Alice’s (Lukita Maxwell) meetings with Louis to a devastated Jimmy; the emotionally heavy confrontation is made lighter by Brian’s exaggerated accents, performative gestures and verbal diarrhea. For a more subtle example from the same episode, Liz’s (Christa Miller) anguished attempt to phone Derek in the wake of her infidelity leads to Derek rejecting her call while making breakfast for his friends in Gaby’s kitchen. Though the weight of the moment isn’t fully lost, the downbeat score of the scene and Derek’s understandably sad expression are briefly and comedically undercut by the sight gag of the Caucasian Derek wearing a borrowed apron emblazoned with “My Black Ass Can Cook”. Despite its move into deeper dramatic territory than its first season explored, Shrinking never forgets its comedic frame exists to serve that drama. Even the season’s darkest moment, Louis’s suicide attempt, is tempered by the subsequent game Jimmy plays with Louis in trying to guess the identities of other commuters on the train platform – something Louis used to do with his girlfriend – without losing any of its dramatic potency. Shrinking is a show whose comedy leans towards hope, even if there’s some darkness on the way to the light at tunnel’s end, and which takes itself seriously but only to a point. It’s a comedy first, and a drama second.

The Bear has become the reverse: a drama series that infrequently employs comedy in a world far more grounded than Shrinking’s. While The Bear’s third season is earnest in how it tackles topics of family, connection and personal growth, it does so without Shrinking’s comedic approach to teasing out drama and in a manner that prioritises realistic impact. Emotionally devastating moments are largely played straight in episodes that rarely contrast with humor for long. Consider “Ice Chips” (2024), the episode focusing on Sugar (Abby Elliott) in labor while unwillingly being assisted by her estranged mother Donna (Jamie-Lee Curtis). As the closest analog to the second season’s “Fishes” it similarly employs the stressful, exasperated family humor that Robinson explored in her Pop Junctions piece, but with its micro focus on Sugar and Donna –the only main characters seen until the episode’s ending – “Ice Chips” unpacks more of their strained personal relationship and attempts to reconcile, both of which largely elide humor. Much of “Ice Chips” is a serious moment of emotional catharsis for both mother and daughter as the latter enters motherhood herself. While uplifting, and ultimately heartfelt, the drama is given priority over the (very sparse) comedy.

The same favoring of drama over comedy is true of The Bear’s third season finale, “Forever” (2024). Aside from Luca’s (Will Poulter) fannish inquisition of a celebrity chef and Richie’s reuniting with the team at Ever who he met when staging, the episode is a largely dour, somber “funeral” for Ever’s closure. Key scenes explore Carmy’s failed attempt to confront Chef David over their traumatic work relationship, Sydney’s continued agonizing over signing The Bear’s co-owner documents while being courted for Adam’s (Adam Shapiro) new restaurant, and several real-world celebrity chefs exhorting the benefits of culinary work and the connections made by food. In an inverse of Shrinking’s finale capping a dark moment with light, “Forever” concludes with a fun impromptu party for the Ever crew in Sydney’s apartment – right before Sydney abruptly has a panic attack and the critic’s review of The Bear is finally released. Sydney’s panic and Carmy’s upset reaction to the (presumably negative) review end the season with an ominous “To Be Continued”.

In the end, what are we left with for these two Emmy contenders for Outstanding Comedy Series?

 If asked the question “Is The Bear a comedy?”, I would have said “Yes” for its first season, “Somewhat” for its second, and “Not really” for its third (and, for that matter, its fourth). Drama can certainly bring the funnies, but I would argue that—to be a dramedy—the overall tone and approach to narrative needs some kind of a levity, a quirkiness, a wry wit or even black comedy undergirding that supports its storytelling with just a dash of distance from realism; in this regard, The Bear’s third season fails to deliver. Recalling the slippery nature of genre and Derrida’s idea of participation without belonging, the season could have shifted nomination gears and really shaken up the Emmys’ attempts at categorization. If The Bear’s third season had instead competed for Outstanding Drama Series – against such shows as The Pitt (2025), Severance (2022-2025) and The White Lotus (2021-2025) that are similarly dramas effectively using comedy for key moments – I could see an intriguing battle taking place. As it stands, in a manner similar to Hacks (2021-2025) and its deserved victory last year, we’re more likely to see The Bear pipped at the post in favor of The Studio (2025) as the current favourite to win Outstanding Comedy. The Bear no longer feels like a comedy.

Concurrently, if asked the question “Is Shrinking a comedy?”, despite its second season’s heavier themes, further unpacking of grief and deeper focus on mental health, my emphatic and enthusiastic “Yes” is supported by the show’s expert (though not always perfect) genre-mixing. In the grand tradition of prior Outstanding Comedy winners Ted Lassoand Hacks, Shrinking threads the needle by being truly funny and deeply dramatic when needed. Maybe in future The Bear’s Carmy could lie on the couch to benefit from Jimmy’s therapizing and absorb some of Shrinking’s comedic spirit.

Or perhaps, much like the restaurant’s transformation from The Beef to The Bear, the series could end its Comedy service and reopen to a different audience next year as a contender for Best Drama Series. Go on, Television Academy and Emmy voters. Let it rip.

References

Berman, M. 2025, “Is ‘The Bear’ Really A Comedy? And Other 2025 Emmy Nomination Observations”. Forbes, accessed 25 August 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcberman1/2025/07/15/is-the-bear-really-a-comedy-and-other-2025-emmy-nomination-observations/.

Derrida, J. & Ronell, A. 1980, “The Law of Genre”. Critical Inquiry 7(1), pp. 55-81.

Giorgis, H. 2024, “Everyone Knows The Bear Isn’t a Comedy”. The Atlantic, accessed 25 August 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/09/the-bear-emmys-comedy/679895/.

Gordinier, J. 2022, “A Conversation with the Guy Who created The Bear”. Esquire, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a40681092/the-bear-creator-christopher-storer-interview/.

Heritage, S. 2024, “The Bear is not a comedy and it’s time to stop pretending it is”. The Guardian, accessed 25 August 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/18/the-bear-emmys-comedy.

Nine Inch Nails. 2020, “Nine Inch Nails – Together (Audio Only)”. YouTube, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehNXOIpRr6c.

Robinson, M. 2024, “EMMYS WATCH 2024 – The Bear”. Pop Junctions, accessed 25 August 2025, https://henryjenkins.org/blog/2024/9/12/emmys-watch-2024-the-bear.

Romano, E. 2024, “Did We Really Need John Cena in The Bear?” Men’s Health, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a61485298/the-bear-season-3-john-cena-fak/.

Scherer, J. 2024, “The Bear recap: Is Marcus the kindest, softest, sincerest man in Chicago?” The AV Club, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.avclub.com/the-bear-review-season-3-episode-5-children-1851570756.

Sepinwall, A. 2024, “‘The Bear’ Season 3 is everything you’ve been waiting for and (maybe too much) more”. Rolling Stone, accessed 27 August 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-bear-season-3-review-1235045666/.

Television Academy. 2025, “77th Emmy Awards: 2024-2025 Rules and Procedures”. Television Academy, accessed 26 August 2025, https://www.televisionacademy.com/files/assets/Downloads/2025-rules-procedures-v2.1.pdf.

VanArendonk, K. 2024, “Is The Bear a Comedy? And Should I Care?” Vulture, accessed 25 August 2025,https://www.vulture.com/article/the-bear-comedy-debate.html.

Biography

Chris Comerford is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research explores digital and screen media developments, fan cultures, serious leisure and digital pedagogies. Chris’s current project is an analysis of television's shifting cultural, social and industrial boundaries in the streaming era. He is the author of Cinematic Digital Television: Negotiating the Nexus of Production, Reception and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2022).

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/8/emmys-watch-2025-shrinking-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-two-divergent-outstanding-comedy-nominees

Posted by Lauren Alexandra Sowa

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/8/emmys-watch-2025-television-that-changes-us-part-1-an-interview-with-the-peabody-awards-jeffrey-jones-on-we-disrupt-this-broadcast

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

To kick off our “Emmys Watch” series, Pop Junctions spotlights a podcast that goes deeper into impactful television content. The Peabody Awards continue to champion what they call “stories that matter”—narratives that don’t just entertain, but engage us as citizens. In this interview, Jeffrey Jones, Executive Director of the Peabody Awards and co-creator of the podcast We Disrupt This Broadcast, speaks with one of Pop Junctions’ associate editors, Lauren Alexandra Sowa, about how the podcast extends the Peabody Awards’ mission. 

Lauren: I wanted to start off by saying thank you so much for joining me today and talking about your amazing podcast, We Disrupt This Broadcast. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the podcast, what inspired this idea, and how does it complement the mission of the Peabody Awards?

Jeffrey:  Yeah, so, a couple things. The Peabody Awards are located at the University of Georgia and, as an educational mission, we feel like we have more to do than just hand someone an award, pat them on the back, and say, “good job, put it on your Vita, see you next year.” Which is to say, everything that Peabody recognizes are what we call “stories that matter,” and we really mean that. Not so much “matter” to us as consumers, but “matters” to us as citizens. That mandate of a story that “matters” to us as citizens means that often the stuff we recognize may not be known by many people, including within the industry itself. We do entertainment, news, documentary, public service, children's, and podcasting. So, there's a lot of materials that aren't always well known. 

The second thing about this was this understanding that, since I joined Peabody in 2013, we’ve been living through what scholars call the streaming era. And the streaming era has been massively disruptive to the typical flow of events, and I don't need to articulate all that here. The system was created in a non-advertiser-centric programming flow, and did accentuate prestige programming. But, in that process, a lot of diverse and emerging voices were allowed to create programming: Mo (Netflix), Ramy (Hulu), We Are Lady Parts (Peacock), Pose (FX), Transparent (Amazon Prime), Reservation Dogs (FX), and, I could go on and on, but you get the point—the industry has opened up, allowing more really creative showrunners and storytellers and creatives to tell their stories, which used to be much more marginalized voices. 

So, the title is, We Disrupt This Broadcast, and it's so focused on disruption. It's focused on the text and the showrunners—the creatives who are producing these texts that we find disruptive to the industry. The focus is on entertainment television. Almost all have won a Peabody. It is one of the ways in which these kinds of stories are doing something a little different from the broadcast era of television.

Lauren: That's great! It's exciting to hear that you're talking about disruption on the content side of things, because I feel like, as you had mentioned earlier, that a lot of discourse surrounding “television disruption” centers the industrial impact side of things. Many of us are familiar with Amanda Lotz's book, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast, which traces that history. What differentiates your podcast and why I find it a compelling listen is how you're focusing more on what that content is, who the creators are, and what they're bringing to the cultural conversation.

Jeffrey: Exactly. It is disruption and a narrative and cultural flow. Peabody feels very good about the diverse and emerging voices. So, a lot of those people that I named—Mo, Ramy, We Are Lady Parts—there are three shows that have Muslim representation. All were very new showrunners when they won a Peabody Award. The same with Sterlin Harjo and Reservation Dogs. So, those are emerging voices, and they often come out of the gate really strong. They produce Peabody-winning shows, and we want to highlight that. 

The podcast is focused on two things: one is an interview with the showrunner and or major talent on the show—traditionally just getting into what they're doing and how and why. The second part of the podcast is strongly emphasized by our producing partners. So, our producing partner is the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University, headed by Caty Borum. In particular, it's an interview with an expert—an academic, a journalist, who can reflect on the kind of cultural, political, and economic dimensions of what makes this show or the showrunner relevant. So, it's grounding the popular, cultural text in the moment of the political, economic, and social context in which it exists.

Lauren: Oftentimes, I feel like we, as academics, try to find this balance between the celebratory part of media and being critical as well. So, would it be fair to say then that in this podcast, you are taking the content that we want to celebrate, and analyzing how it's being critical of culture or critical of these moments?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think the second expert interview is the moment of more traditional critical analysis. And of course, we don't have a monopoly on that. There's plenty of authors. Though we interview lots of professors, they just aren't often media studies professors. One of the great things is we're often talking to psychologists, to economics professors, to sociologists and others. So, it broadens the conversation. I think the critical component is to reflect on how the text sits within culture, what it illuminates. I do think there's a celebratory part to the podcast. I mean, we're celebrating when we give them a Peabody Award, right? But the critical part of the analysis is that it's really hard to win a Peabody Award. You know, only about 7 to 10 shows win a Peabody in a given year. So, critically, we've cut out a lot that don't belong. And the ones that are there, we are celebrating. And again, I think for the right reasons, because they are doing something in the streaming era that wasn't on television when I was a kid. It didn't exist. Frankly, when you and I were growing up, it wasn't the same kind of text. For the industrial reasons of advertising and the kind of competition, monopoly of the three, four networks, etc. 

Lauren: I know that this year, Hacks is an example of a show that has both a Peabody Award and an Emmy nomination, but that kind of crossover doesn’t happen all that often. How do you see the Peabody Awards intersecting with the Emmys? Do you think the Peabody’s can help reach a broader audience? The Emmys often reflect the political canvassing of the Hollywood scene to win. While the Peabody’s seem to focus more on meaningful content without the campaigning. So, in a broader context, what does that say? And how do you think we can bridge the gap between the two to bring that kind of content to a wider audience?

Jeffrey: Yeah, well, I'd start with that, you know, most people don't realize our process. So, Peabody meets 3 times face-to-face. And it is an award that is decided across genres and platforms: television, radio, podcasting, and interactive, which is games and VR, etc. And across genre: entertainment, news, documentary, etc. But in particular, it's decided by a unanimous vote of a board of 18 people. And those 18 people represent lots of different facets. There's critics, which include academics and TV critics, media executives, writers, and showrunners. And I want to compare the face-to-face critical deliberation that we engage in as to who will be a winner is different from a campaign for 26,000 voting members, in which you have no control of what they've watched and what they've not watched. So, they're very different processes. You know, Aziz Ansari was famous for coming to our show and saying, “You know, this is pretty cool. It's like you watch all of our shit, and you just decided it was good, and we didn't have to go to a bunch of weird-ass parties and stuff, you know?”

Lauren: Ha! That’s great!

Jeffrey: So, by being different processes, they are different things. Ours is also not just about the craft: it is, is it a story that matters? So, sometimes the craft can be brilliant, but it may not be a story that matters.

But, back to your question about crossover: yeah, there are popular shows like Hacks (HBO Max), The Last of Us (HBO Max), The Bear (FX), Ted Lasso (Apple TV)—they win Peabody's, they win Emmys. But between the voting process, and really somewhat even the criteria of what we're looking for, that crossover can exist, but may not. And often, it probably doesn't. Peabody will often recognize shows truly on their merits, and not the political forces that shape multi-million-dollar campaigns by the industry players to influence votes.

Lauren: Absolutely. So, now, as someone who has studied and shaped media discourse, what has surprised you most in your conversations about the podcast, or something that was unexpected?

Jeffrey: Not really. It's just a privilege to be able to talk to showrunners about their craft. It's a privilege to look for themes. I mean, I think we probably interview a little differently than journalists, probably because we're academics. We want to dig into the text a bit more than a traditional media trade publication, journalist interview. So, I think about my interview with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein about Shrinking (Apple TV)  and Ted Lasso (Apple TV). You know, I'm a man of a certain age, and so is Bill, and I literally said it in that way, and he laughed, said, yes, we are. And we got to talk about toxic masculinity and therapy, and then with Shrinking, about forgiveness, and the textual themes that are percolating across both of those shows. So, in that regard, I feel not so much surprised as by what a privilege it is to hold that conversation.

Lauren: You had a successful two seasons of the podcast. Are there plans for season three as well? What do you see as the future for We Disrupt this Broadcast?

Jeffrey: There are indeed. We will launch Season 3 either later this year or early 2026. We're very happy. I should give a shout out to our producing partner, PRX (Public Radio Exchange), which produces a lot of quality podcasts. They reached out to us to produce this show, and we couldn't be happier. They're quality folks, and I'm very happy to still support public radio even through the PRX avenue.

Lauren: Well, I think that our audience, or our readers, would definitely enjoy listening to this podcast. I just started, too, and I think it's excellent. Gabe Gonzalez does a wonderful job with his interviews. One of the things that strikes me is that it is academic, but it is incredibly entertaining and very human. I think that's one of the best parts about listening to it, and I think that's what makes it engaging for people who study this and people who don't. I think it's accessible to everyone.

Jeffrey: One of the things that's great about our podcast, I think, and I'm a huge Gabe Gonzalez fan, is that he's a comedian, and extremely smart, and extremely talented.

Lauren: Agreed! Thank you again so much. Is there anything else you want to share or add that I didn't ask about that you would want everyone to know?

Jeffrey: That's a great one, always a great question. One of the things is that Peabody is a very respected award. It's existed for 85 years, it predates the Emmys, because we were recognizing radio broadcasting first. And there's still so much integrity to the award and love for the award in the industry. But the Peabody's, because of its position a little outside the industry, and at a university, there's a little bit of a moral imperative, if you will. It's not just the base to win a Peabody on popularity, but this is the way storytelling does something for us as citizens. So, I think one of the things that's great about the podcast is it's leaning into that. It's not just celebrating entertainment. It's trying to talk about the ways that popular culture and entertainment can deeply shape who we are and want to be as a people, as empathetic citizens in the world. And that's, of course, what Henry Jenkins' whole career has been built on, and why Henry identifies with Peabody and contributed to it for 6 years.

It's that kind of imperative, I think, that we believe, like Henry does, that entertainment can be a positive force, especially in an era when so much news media is seen as rejectable.

As a rejectable truth, as something that you’re buying a brand that's no different than the politics that you adhere to. But when you're telling stories that are deeply empathetic about people and the world that aren't like you, maybe there's an avenue for people to watch it as entertainment and see a part of the world, or even a part of themselves that they weren't in touch with, and that they'll give more credence to, and more love for, and more empathy for. And that's what popular entertainment can do. And to me, that's what the Peabody Awards lean into when we do entertainment programming, but it's especially what this podcast does.

Lauren: That's beautifully stated. I was going to say, that's why art and pop culture (it's all the same thing, right?) makes us human and, like you said, tells the stories about who we are as a people. It's why most of us study this, and why we dedicate our lives to it, right?

Jeffrey: Sure, absolutely, for sure. For sure.

Lauren: That's great. Well, thank you again so much, Jeff. I really appreciate it. This was a really fun, very informative conversation.

Biographies

Jeffrey P. Jones is the Executive Director of the George Foster Peabody Awards at the University of Georgia and Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabodys in the Department of Entertainment & Media Studies. Jones became only the fifth director of the Peabody Awards in 2013. He holds a Ph.D. in Radio-TV-Film from The University of Texas at Austin. In conjunction with the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University and produced by PRX, Peabody launched a podcast in 2023—WE DISRUPT THIS BROADCAST—celebrating entertainment winners through the lens of cultural and industrial disruption in the streaming era. Professor Jones is the author and editor of six books, including Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Civic Engagement, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, and The Essential HBO Reader.  His research and teaching focuses on popular politics, or the ways in which politics are engaged through popular culture.

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and has a BFA in Acting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture and has been published in The International Journal of Communication and Communication, Culture and Critique. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud "Disney Adult" and enthusiast of many fandoms. Lauren is also a Pop Junctions associate editor.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/8/emmys-watch-2025-television-that-changes-us-part-1-an-interview-with-the-peabody-awards-jeffrey-jones-on-we-disrupt-this-broadcast