Nasty Tricks.
Photo: Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty

With Catherine O’Hara on stage, it was perhaps fitting that the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards ended with some strange goings-on. After The Bear won three of four acting awards (and five of six if you count last week’s guest acting awards at the Creative Arts Emmys), not to mention a directing award, the FX “comedy” (oh, we’ll get to that) was throttled in the evening’s final moments by a show that’s about exactly what The Bear was accused of lacking the following: comedy.

Tricks walked away with three major trophies on Sunday night: Jean Smart for Best Actress (her third win in four years for Tricks and sixth Emmy of his career overall); Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky for writing the third season finale “Bulletproof” and a totally unexpected win for Outstanding Comedy Series. For anyone wondering how Tricks could have pulled off this surprise, the picture began to come together while the show’s producers were still onstage. “Support comedy!” pleaded series co-creator Lucia Aniello. “It’s speaking truth to power! Support your local comedian!” And while the plight of the endangered stand-up comedian (or comedy writer) wasn’t the focus of Tricks‘ Emmy campaign this year, you could sense an intentionality in Aniello’s statement. A victory for Tricks was not just a victory for a show about a comedian, but a victory for comedy itself. Social media told the rest of the story:

When Emmy season started, I was more than prepared to take the ‘is The Bear “Really a comedy?” as a matter of hand-wringing for those of us who cover television, for whom things like fraudulent award categorization and the snobbish attitude of award voters in favor of drama over comedy are often a source of irritation. But as Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk wrote in her piece on whether The Bear is or isn’t a real comedy, there were plenty of subtweets that didn’t even try to be subtle from people at shows like Abbott Elementary School who has a sincere grudge against The Bear and the two-year Emmy dominance in this category.

This undercurrent continued throughout the Emmy election season, although not always publicly. When I asked about the gossip at an Emmy campaign event, I was often met with disbelief and annoyance that The Bear campaigned as a comedy. I clearly didn’t get that undertone clearly enough, but in my defense, the first hour of Sunday’s broadcast didn’t seem like most Emmy voters had done that either. Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach both repeated their wins from last year. Liza Colón-Zayas provided the surprise against favorite Hannah Einbinder (who had campaigned ass of this year) in the Best Supporting Actress category. Jean Smart did win the head-to-head against Ayo Edebiri, but it’s Jean Smart! She always wins. It wasn’t until she won in the writing category, Tricks was starting to look like the stalking horse in the comedy race. Then it dawned on me that all these people in writers’ rooms and at Emmy events and on social media — whose resentments toward The Bear had overridden their polite decorum — they all vote. And a show about a stand-up comedian fighting for respect in an entertainment landscape that doesn’t appreciate her would probably do well with those voters.

The irony is that Tricks is not exactly the broadest comedy in itself. In fact, there are plenty of people — who work specifically for this website — who could argue that Tricks is weakest when it comes to its hold on Deborah and Ava’s comedic output, and the show would work better as an outright drama. Ultimately, we can never be sure if the “fraudulent comedy” argument was the reason The Bear lost. The only way to know for sure is to run The Bear as a drama next year. Just as an experiment! And then we can all start talking about how Only murders in the building is the comedy show that deserves our support.