\n<\/p>\n
In what seems to be the series finale<\/a> of Apple\u2019s smash-hit football show, Ted Lasso,<\/em> there are perhaps three mushy, heartstring-yanking scenes for every one mild joke. HBO\u2019s Barry<\/em> definitively concluded its run with a bleak and mordant assessment<\/a> of Hollywood\u2019s processing of real-world violence. FX\u2019s The Bear<\/em> recently debuted its second season, a busy, serious, and introspective<\/a> run of episodes full of everyday epiphanies and setbacks. These shows are all competing for outstanding comedy series at the Emmys this year.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a new complaint that much of what counts as comedy on TV is a lot less funny<\/a> than it is, well, doled out in half-hour segments. (Though episodes of The Bear<\/em> range from 26 minutes to over an hour, and Ted Lasso<\/em> episodes swelled to a similar size in what is believed to be its last season.) Saturday Night Live<\/em> spoofed the trend\u2014with Tom Hanks<\/strong> no less\u2014a whopping six years ago<\/a>. But the problem has only gotten worse and has led to less satisfying television.<\/p>\n When it first premiered, Ted Lasso<\/em> was an amiable and only slightly cloying portrait of a fish out of water: a good ol\u2019 boy from Kansas City, played affably by co-creator Jason Sudeikis,<\/strong> is brought to the United Kingdom to coach an ailing football club, with the intention that he will fail. It was a clever workplace comedy setup, one that offered American audiences a behind-the-curtain look at the world\u2019s most popular sport and reinvented its star as a fount of folksy wisdom meant to uplift in difficult times. (The show premiered during the first few months of the pandemic, and many months into a grinding presidential election year.)<\/p>\n The show was never hilarious. But it still mostly functioned, at its beginning, as a quirky joke machine. The more acclaim and awards Ted Lasso<\/em> received, though, the more it mutated into something different. By its third season, the series seemed hell-bent on creating nothing but viral emotional moments, something more akin to This Is Us<\/em> than The Office<\/em>.<\/p>\n Although The Office<\/em> is partly to blame for this. That series remained true enough to its comedy roots until the end, but its final few seasons were also overly reliant on the human drama of Jim and Pam and other romantic entanglements. The more the series bought into its fans\u2019 maudlin obsessions, the worse it got. And yet, or perhaps because of that, it was a massive success, both during its original run and in its streaming years, when two whole generations seemed to embrace the show\u2019s warmhearted whimsy as the new house style for comedy. Parks and Recreation<\/em> had a similar fate; by its finale, most of the series\u2019s original peppery comedy had been replaced by smarmy coziness.<\/p>\n That same sensibility would inform Ted Lasso<\/em> and ABC\u2019s Abbott Elementary<\/em>. (Some have deemed this genre \u201cnicecore.\u201d<\/a>) Abbott<\/em> has more traditional sitcom rhythms than does Ted Lasso<\/em>, but its humor is typically soft and sweet, sometimes so gentle it barely registers as comedy at all. CBS\u2019s Ghosts<\/em>, an unexpected hit in the last couple of years, is a bit sillier, more antic, but that show too is guided by an undaunted pleasantness\u2014even in the face of, well, death.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s all on The Office<\/em>, I suppose. But that NBC juggernaut shares little to no DNA with series like The Bear<\/em> and Barry<\/em>, graver and artier shows that find their influences elsewhere. In those cases, patient zero may be FX\u2019s Louie<\/em>, a revolutionary kind of experimental comedy that constantly changed shape and tone. That show\u2019s legacy has obviously been diminished by controversies surrounding its star and chief creative force, Louis CK<\/strong>\u2014but its impact is easily apparent across the television landscape today.<\/p>\n Louie<\/em> begat Transparent,<\/em> which begat Atlanta,<\/em> which perhaps led us to The Bear<\/em>\u2019s narrative tangents and Barry<\/em>\u2019s auteur-y ambitions. Barry<\/em>, created by Bill Hader<\/strong>, often hummed with an eerie brilliance, a daring and exciting trip into the dark that featured whizbang direction and sharply articulated performances. It wasn\u2019t very funny, though it\u2019s classified as a comedy by the Emmys, where it\u2019s won piles of awards.<\/p>\n The Bear<\/em>, to its credit, never really advertised itself as a raucous comedy\u2014yet it\u2019s also being slotted into that category, despite its first season\u2019s shaggy moodiness and its second season\u2019s attempts at quiet profundity. Ted Lasso<\/em>\u2019s third season took the characters on a trip to Amsterdam<\/a>, where some lightly amusing things happened but mostly everyone learned little heartwarming lessons and things ended nicely. The Bear<\/em>\u2019s second season takes one character to Copenhagen<\/a>, far from the grimy Chicago kitchens where the show lays its scene. What happened on that monumental trip? Nothing much, really. That portion of the episode is really just a hushed rumination on learning one\u2019s craft: interesting, but not terribly vital.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n