Are the Emmy Awards Only Rewarding Feel-Good Comedies?

The 2025 Emmy Award nominees were announced on Tuesday, revealing which television is up for some of TV’s biggest hardware. For Best Comedy Series, there weren’t too many surprises. The Bear continued to rack up nominations in the comedy category, despite ongoing controversy about whether it should be competing in Drama. Abbott Elementary and Only Murders in the Building also returned to the list, while newcomers The Studio and Nobody Wants This picked up nominations for their debut seasons. 

Here’s the complete list of nominees:

• Abbott Elementary
• The Bear
• Hacks
• Nobody Wants This
• Only Murders in the Building
• Shrinking
• The Studio
• What We Do in the Shadows

Are you noticing something about these shows? They are all very different, no doubt. We’ve got a family-friendly schoolyard, vampires-out-of-water, shrinks committing professional ethics violations, a true-crime podcast gone awry, movie moguls embarrassing themselves and the most stressful restaurant kitchen on Earth. All the jokes carry different cadences, different levels of lewdness. But there’s something that carries through all of them — a saccharine emotional resonance that softens even the lewdest of jokes.

It’s expected and well-placed in Abbott, and has already been criticized in Hacks. It’s Only Murders’ entire vibe, a sort of cozy ambiance to backdrop murder and scams. Nobody Wants This is as much “rom” as it is “com” and Shrinking is from the same folks who created the Ted Lasso mush-fest.

That’s not to say that any of these shows are bad — all of them are excellent. But it’s interesting now that there seems to be a widespread expectation for great comedy series (and also The Bear) to do more than be funny. Comedy television can’t just be great performances and even better jokes. There needs to be something more — moments that touch on our optimism, our connections to each other, our complicated relationships. 

Even The Studio has a sincere ambition at the center of its Seth Rogen meltdowns, non-stop industry digs and impressive slate of cameos. The Studio is about loving movies and wanting to save them, and there’s an undeniable hope in even the most cynical episodes all serving as a love letter to cinema. 

The Bear’s inclusion in this list, is as usual, the best indication that the Emmys want something more than great bits from comedy television. This isn’t an article about The Bear’s improper genrefication. It’s a question about whether award-winning comedy television always needs to be about more than the laughs in the 2020s. It feels like a distinct departure from the Veep era, when cynical, spiteful, acerbic comedy was crowned victor. 

Shows that operate in an anti-hero comedy space aren’t getting much love. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has never received an Emmy nomination in a major category, and The Righteous Gemstones’ final season was noticeably absent from Emmy nomination lists as well. It’s almost as if there’s a dick-joke-to-emotional-investment ratio that Emmy voters are grading on. 

It’s easy to understand that there’s simply not as much of an appetite for Veep’s ruthless comedy or a show full of irredeemable characters. The show’s own writers said it was hard to imagine more outlandish scenarios than the ones that the first Trump administration was delivering daily. If television is meant to be an escape from reality, entering into worlds where everybody really cares — about each other, or art, or even their careers — that is fantasy in 2025. Maybe no one is interested in watching terrible people on the news, and then again when they’re trying to laugh. 

The Emmy voters are clearly rooting for the shows that have people to root for.