Watch Out, a Dramedy Could Be Coming for Your Emmy

If you look past the gaudy nomination totals for shows like The Pitt, Hacks, and Widow’s Bay, you can spot one of the most quietly revolutionary things about the 2026 Emmys hiding in plain sight. Among the nominees for Outstanding Drama Series is HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a branch of the Game of Thrones tree that was notable for, among other things, being a half-hour comedy series. And while we’re used to seeing TV shows that blur the boundary between comedy and drama show up as nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series, it’s rare that these tweener shows submit as dramas, and even rarer that they crack the Drama Series lineup.

How rare? Well, qualitative judgments on what counts as a comedy are subjective, but let’s start with a more quantitative criterion: Episodes submitted in the Emmys’ Comedy category tend to be shorter (under 40 minutes) than those submitted in the Drama category (over 40 minutes). With an average episode length of 34.6 minutes, one might have expected HBO to campaign its dramedy on the comedy end of the spectrum in order to safely align with historic category behaviors. But no, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now the shortest Drama Series nominee since The Twilight Zone in 1961. (The only other series in that span to have dipped below a 40-minute average episode length was The Mandalorian’s first season in 2020, at 39.4 minutes. Mando was also nominated for its second season, where episode length climbed to 40.4 minutes.) This makes the tale of hedge knight Ser Duncan and his loyal squire Egg an awards-season outlier and, if I had to call it prematurely, a beacon for other comedy-drama hybrids rolling the category dice in the future.

Angst over the increasing prevalence of “dramedies” has long been a part of the conversation, but usually on the comedy side of the debate. Ever since network TV began to lose its dominance over the Emmys in the late ’90s, comedies have gotten darker and more serious. Shows like Ally McBeal and Desperate Housewives introduced hour-long shows into the Comedy Series mix, while pay cable pushed the envelope on darker themes on shows like Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara. By the time the streaming revolution came, shows with quirky premises but angsty executions like Transparent, Atlanta, Barry, Dead to Me, and Russian Doll became the comedy norm, culminating in The Bear driving an industry full of comedy writers up the wall with its joke-free but awards-friendly depiction of a high-stakes Chicago kitchen. All of these newly fashionable hybrid shows campaigned for the Emmys as comedies.

There were myriad reasons for doing this, including the ineffable sense that awards voters are more impressed by drama than by comedy and would thus be more likely to reward a comedy that feels significantly dramatic rather than a drama that feels significantly comedic. The Emmys themselves have at times tried to regulate the divide. After Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black submitted as a comedy and pulled in 12 nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series, for its debut season in 2014, the backlash spurred the Television Academy to instill a rule that all half-hour shows would submit as comedies and all hour-long shows would submit as dramas. The flaws in this approach were pretty apparent. For one thing, streaming shows, not having to adhere to anything as pedestrian as time slots, could be all over the map when it came to episode length. Cobra Kai, a Comedy Series nominee in 2020, has episodes in its nominated season ranging from 28 to 41 minutes. For another, any show that wanted to be considered an exception to the rule could petition the Emmys to do so, as was the case with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a show whose first season — where episodes usually landed in the 50- to 100-minute zone — won the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy in 2018.

The rule didn’t end up doing much to keep complaints about genre creep at bay, so in 2022, the Emmys ended their running-time requirement, leaving hybrid shows to once again gamble on how they should submit. The decision-makers behind a series (showrunners, producers) and/or the invested network executives choose which genre to submit under. In terms of Academy intervention, the rules state only that “the Academy reserves the right to have the category placement reviewed by the Academy’s Industry Panel.”

According to a source at HBO, there wasn’t much consideration given to submitting A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as a comedy. “We’re not eager to put shows in genre boxes before we need to,” they said. “We don’t really think about the episode length at all in relation to genre, either.” Instead, it was the show’s ties to Game of Thrones that was the determining factor. “Where Knight of the Seven Kingdoms definitely crafts comedy in a cadence that is very dissimilar to its Game of Thrones universe origins,” that same source said, “it still very much was from the world of Westeros, and it has a very dramatic narrative that propels it through.”

The case for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as a drama isn’t hard to make. The themes are about honor and destiny; there are massively violent battle scenes; one character ends up with the entire back half of his skull bashed in. Even with more levity and laughs than is typical for a Game of Thrones show, the world of Westeros can really only get so lighthearted. Yet it was that lightness of heart and impishly humorous tone that was what made AKOTSK stand out in early reviews.

Contrast that with the Comedy Series nominees that most blurred the lines between comedy and drama: The Bear and Margo’s Got Money Troubles. The former’s status as a non-comedy comedy has been processed ad nauseam, but Margo makes for a more interesting case as a new show. Like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, its episodes clock in under 40 minutes — actually, at 38.4 minutes, they’re a full four minutes longer than AKOTSK. The plot follows Elle Fanning — who’s no stranger to comedies that blend genres, after starring in the historical dramedy The Great — as a single mom who turns to her semi-estranged pro-wrestler father and a career as an OnlyFans creator to help support her child. In both premise and execution, the show is hugely reminiscent of the Showtime series of the aughts and early 2010s that featured women in harsh circumstances going to extremes in order to get one over on a society that didn’t care about them. Weeds, Nurse Jackie, United States of Tara — all of these shows gave talented actresses the chance to play complex emotional story lines in addition to generally dark comedy. And they all found success in one way or another in the Emmys’ Comedy categories. These shows combined for 17 nominations and three wins in the acting categories alone, and the talent behind them went on to make other Emmy-winning shows like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent.

All of these shows hinge on a collision of mundanity and chaos that creates the conditions for comedy. A suburban mom becomes a drug dealer. A wife and mother in suburban Kansas experiences multiple personalities. A young mom takes up OnlyFans fetish content to pay the bills. But their underlying conflicts combine with a general dearth of jokes to pull things in the direction of drama. And in a contest between a comedic premise and dramatic execution, the premise wins out, at least when it comes to awards. There’s obviously an unmistakable gender component to these designations. Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Gilmore Girls, even Glee (note that the Emmys’ Comedy categories aren’t Comedy/Musical) are all hour-long shows that front-loaded female and queer characters and were designated as comedies. You can look to FX’s legal series All’s Fair as the latest would-be drama starring women to get bumped to comedy.

Still, it’s hard to say whether these shows would have fared as well stacked up against the Mad Men and Breaking Bads of their era. Look at the fate of Orange Is the New Black, which was nominated for 12 Emmys in 2014 when it placed itself in Comedy, then got only nine more nominations in total from 2015 to 2020 after it moved to Drama. Conversely, Shameless could pick up only three Guest Acting nominations over the course of its first three seasons as a drama; then it switched to Comedy, and suddenly William H. Macy is a fixture in the Lead Actor category for the next seven seasons. You can see why Apple would want to push Margo as a comedy.

So does A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms stand as the exception that proves the rule? The would-be comedy that braved the path of the Drama awards and was rewarded? Maybe, but not every genre-blending show will benefit from Game of Thrones’s halo shining on AKOTSK. There’s also the fact that it didn’t land any acting nominations. Would a show like The Bear have been able to replicate its gaudy nomination totals in the acting categories over the last few years if it had submitted as a drama?

The galaxy-brain solution (or the pie-in-the-sky solution, depending on how you look at it) would be to institute a new category for “Dramedies.” Hopefully, we’d think of a better name. Outstanding Comedy-Drama Hybrid? We can workshop it. But there would be three parallel categories of six nominees each: Comedy Series, Drama Series, Hybrid Series. Based on this year’s nominations in the major categories (acting, writing, directing), you’d have plausibly ended up with something resembling this:

Outstanding Comedy Series
Abbott Elementary
The Comeback
The Chair Company
Hacks
Only Murders in the Building
Widow’s Bay

Outstanding Drama Series
The Diplomat
The Gilded Age
Paradise
The Pitt
Pluribus
Slow Horses

Outstanding Comedy-Drama Hybrid Series
The Bear
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Shrinking
Your Friends and Neighbors
Rooster OR Wonder Man

You can see how this is better, right? Eighteen total nominated series instead of 16, which is a lot (if you wanted to be strict, you could mandate five nominees per category and lop off The Chair Company, The Gilded Age, and Rooster/Wonder Man). But the competition feels more cohesive. I kept Widow’s Bay in Comedy Series because it’s significantly funnier than the other hybrid series, but you could make an argument for it in the new category. Honestly, you could fill up Emmys-season newsletters for weeks on end about which shows should and shouldn’t be campaigned as hybrids. Shrinking is a hybrid, for example, because all Bill Lawrence shows are, at their heart, light dramas about silly, silly people.

But in this hypothetical reality, a show like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms suddenly isn’t too slight to compete with the dramas. Margo’s dramatic angst no longer feels like a play for competitive advantage. The Bear’s atmosphere of panic and internalized terror feels on par with the combat arena in AKOTSK. In a category like this, Dunk and Egg could pull off a victory. But I’m not sure that’s the case in our current reality.

Technically, it’s another Emmy for Michael J. Fox, as the Family Ties and Spin City actor is a five-time Emmy winner. And by the time the main Emmys telecast airs, he might have won a sixth for his guest performance on Shrinking. This week, the Television Academy announced he’ll be receiving another Emmy Award, this time the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award. The award has been bestowed only a handful of times since its inception in 2002, going to the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Danny Thomas, George Clooney, and last year’s recipients Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen.

Television Academy president Cris Abrego told Gold Derby that Fox will receive the award in honor of “his extraordinary leadership in advancing Parkinson’s research, transforming public awareness and inspiring global support through The Michael J. Fox Foundation, whose investments have accelerated scientific breakthroughs and the search for a cure.”

In 2023, Fox received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Oscar bestowed by the Motion Picture Academy at its Governors Awards.

August 17: Phase-two voting begins
August 26: Phase-two voting ends
September 5–6: Creative Arts Emmys
September 14: 78th Primetime Emmy Awards

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