Comedy-drama

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Comedy-drama, sometimes portmanteaually called dramedy, is a style of television and movies in which there is an equal balance of humor and serious content. The usual practice, particularly in commercial entertainment, is to strongly favor either humorous or emotionally weighty material, but many films and television shows have found success blending the two disparate genres.

Traditional theatre was divided from its earliest days into comedy and tragedy, terms which primarily indicated whether the story had a happy ending. The term "drama" was used to describe all the action of a play. In the early 1800s, as theatrical writing became more subtle and plays were less likely to end with multiple deaths, the term "drama" began to be used to describe plays that were more sober, with "comedy" meaning plays that were funny rather than plays which ended happily. Since then the terms have remained relatively subjective. Authors such as Anton Chekov and George Bernard Shaw famously blurred the line between comedy and drama.

The advent of radio drama, cinema, and particularly television created greater pressure in marketing to clearly define a product as either comedy or drama. Though in live theatre the difference became less and less significant, in mass media, comedy and drama were clearly divided. Comedies, especially, were expected to maintain a consistently light tone and not challenge the viewer by introducing more serious content.

By the early 1960s, television companies had adopted a universal practice of presenting half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to situation comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a live or artificial laugh track. One hour dramas included genre series such as police and detective series, westerns, science fiction, and, later, serialized prime time soap operas. Programs today still overwhelmingly conform to these half-hour and one hour guidelines.

Beginning around 1969 in the US, there was a brief spate of half-hour shows that purposely alternated between comedy and drama and aired without a laugh track. At the time, these were known as "comedy-dramas." Perhaps the best known was Room 222. Later, the approach of these early shows influenced better-known series such as M*A*S*H, One Day at a Time, and Eight Is Enough. These early experiments also influenced general TV comedy, and later series (especially family themed sitcoms) often included brief dramatic interludes and more serious subject matter.

The term "dramedy" first came into use in the mid-1980s to describe a new wave of similarly genre-blurring series such as Moonlighting, The Wonder Years, and Hooperman. It appears in an early Usenet post [link] in January 1990.

A dramedy may be either an hour-long dramatic series with very strong comedic elements, such as Moonlighting, The West Wing, Northern Exposure, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Minder, Charmed, The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Stargate SG-1 and Boston Legal, or a half-hour sitcom with more serious plots and content, shot on a closed set or on location instead of in front of an audience, and without the usual laugh track, such as M*A*S*H, Hooperman, Sports Night, Early Doors, Undeclared and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. An example of an animated 'dramedy' is Fox's King of the Hill, which unlike most animated shows, attempts to retain some element of realism in its characters and situations.

Hour-long comedic dramas have usually proven more successful in the ratings than half-hour dramatic comedies in the United States. Though the great majority of shows still fall into either one category or the other, the comedy/drama line becomes more and more loose as viewers become accustomed to "off-beat" series, and as younger viewers who were introduced to genre hybrids at an early age become an older and more market-friendly audience (as well as becoming the television creators of today). The divide is further diminished by the increasing popularity of subscription TV services such as HBO and Showtime, where the demands of per-show marketing are not as stringent and viewers are explicitly looking for a product different from traditional television.

Comedy-drama

See also