In 1999, David E. Kelley’s hourlong legal comedy-drama Ally McBeal won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series over four half-hour comedies — multi-cam Friends, Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond and single-camera Sex and the City –– and thus the big debate began whether hourlong dramedies belong in the comedy categories.
There have been ebbs and flows but the discussion may be reignited again this year with a large contingent of hourlong contenders in the comedy series categories, some of them pretty dramatic.
The latest to declare as a comedy for the 2026 Emmy race is Prime Video’s Young Sherlock, starring Hero Fiennes Tiffin. The action mystery drama with comedic undertones, which imagines Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character before he became a world-famous detective, comes from Guy Ritchie, who is known for his comedic sensibilities. His other streaming series, Netflix’s hourlong The Gentlemen, also has been competing as a comedy.
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Young Sherlock joins several other new hourlong shows with substantial dramatic quotient that also are being submitted as comedies this year. That includes FX’s noir series The Lowdown starring Ethan Hawke; Peacock’s Cold War spy thriller Ponies, headlined by Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson; and MGM+/Prime Video’s upcoming noir comic book adaptation Spider-Noir, starring Nicolas Cage. Most had been initially marketed as dramas; The Lowdown even competed in the drama categories at the winter awards races.
CBS’ Elsbeth also is joining the fray, switching to comedy for Emmy consideration after submitting as a drama in Seasons 1 and 2. The quirky crime procedural starring Carrie Preston successfully petitioned the TV Academy about the reclassification earlier this year.
Add to the list Netflix’s popular supernatural mystery comedy Wednesday, which already earned one Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy nomination for its first season, and we have a strong field of hourlong comedy-drama contenders that would be going against more traditional half-hour comedies such as Hacks, Abbott Elementary, Only Murders In the Building, Shrinking, Nobody Wants This and a half-hour series that has triggered its own Comedy or Drama debate, FX’s The Bear.
Hacks and The Bear both have won the top Emmy comedy category. Besides Ally McBeal, the only hourlong comedy-drama to take the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy to date is Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
The issue remains controversial because there is no dramedy category, making the classification subjective. Hourlong series like ABC’s High Potential and HBO’s The White Lotus, which have a lot of humor and feature top comedy actors such as Kaitlin Olson (High Potential) and Jennifer Coolidge and Natasha Rothwell (The White Lotus), have been competing as dramas at the Emmys. (The White Lotus has been submitting as comedy for several guild awards, including the DGAs.)
In an effort to streamline eligibility, the TV Academy in 2015 implemented categorization based on length, with hourlong shows automatically submitted as dramas, half-hour as comedies.
The rule created even more controversy. Hourlong series were permitted to petition for a comedy designation. Under that provision, the TV Academy in 2015 allowed Fox’s Glee and Showtime’s Shameless to compete as comedies but denied Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, drawing strong criticism from the streamer. The length-based comedy-drama delineation was eliminated for the 2022 race.
Going the comedy route is usually a strategy employed to avoid stiff drama competition as lighthearted one-hours are more likely to be overshadowed by hard-hitting, dark shows whereas they are perceived to have a better chance among pure comedies.
Elsbeth has seen immediate results from the category switch, receiving its first major nominations at the Critics Choice Awards this year for Best Comedy Series and Best Comedy Actress for Preston.
Under the current Emmy rules, hourlong series don’t need pre-approval to compete as comedies. (They need one to change categories.) Series submitted as comedies are required to be “primarily comedic,” regardless of runtime. The Academy “reserves the right to have the category placement reviewed” by its Industry Panel.