The Hottest New Genre Is the Anti-Dramedy
'A Simple Favor' and 'Barry' have ushered in a new flavor of genre that feels as fresh as as the shows and movies themselves are absurd
Look, I’m not a coiner of words or terms or anything, so I’m willing to workshop this. It’s time we talk about the rise of the Anti-Dramedy.
I’m also not a media historian, so it’s possible this has always existed and a Smart Person has already defined it. But I haven’t heard of it yet, and like most white men before me, I’m choosing willful ignorance and taking credit.
A Simple Favor—the 2018 masterpiece about two women drinking too much and laughing about incest before one of them goes missing—changed me. I was in awe throughout its entire 1-hour-and-59-minute runtime. I was convinced I had watched something entirely new. Not new in the way that any new movie is new, but new in the way the first person to slice bread must’ve felt. Nay, whoever discovered fire.
On most days, I consider it one of my favorite movies of all time. I even made it Letterboxd official. I’ve been a stan since day one. The evidence:
A Simple Favor is a thriller. It’s a comedy. It’s a drama. And comedy-dramas, or dramedies, are nothing new. But this one felt different. Between guffaws for being a “brother-fucker,” the stakes of the drama felt as high and important as the punchlines. It wasn’t 50 percent comedy and 50 percent drama; it was 100 percent comedy and 100 percent drama—together. It was like oil and vinegar; they don’t blend together, but somehow it works.
It’s difficult to explain an emotion or feeling, which is why I don’t do this professionally. I love the way Anna Kendrick, who starred in A Simple Favor, described the movie in an interview on Late Night With Seth Meyers. The clip has since been removed from YouTube, but it’s still up on the Internet Archive.
It’s like Sex and the City, but if Samantha went missing. But it’s not like, “Oh, my gosh! Where’s Samantha?” It’s like, “For real. Where’s Samantha?”
I feel the same way about HBO’s comedy Barry, a show about a hitman who wants to be an actor. Barry often straddles the line of both genres by showing us what’s at the periphery of the main action. A season three scene includes Gene Cousineau (Harry Winkler) running for his life, trespassing people’s yards to get away from Barry Berkman (Bill Hader). As a viewer, you fear for him intensely. Then, the show cuts to a scene of a longterm couple breaking up in their dining room. “Why?” one of the women says, as Gene can be seen through their window sprinting across their backyard. “You have too many dogs,” the other woman responds. Cue dozens of dogs chasing after Gene.
So why the term anti-dramedy? A dramedy—think Chuck, Gilmore Girls, Juno, etc.—works by blending elements of both genres together, in dialogue and structure. Often these elements inform one another, and the flow between them feels seamless. Consider dramedies to be like liquids of two different colors stirred together to create a new color. In the end, you wouldn’t be able to extract one color.
Anti-dramedies also mix elements of both genres, but they subvert the expectation of most dramedies—that they should blend. It’s like constant mood whiplash over and over again. Consider anti-dramedies to be like blocks of different colors mixed together in a box. You can clearly pick out the different blocks no matter how much you mix. Or maybe consider it like LEGO sets; you can discern between each piece while understanding how together they’ve created something new. Or better yet, think of it like pieces of chocolate in a bucket of salted popcorn. Anti-dramedies are dramedies—except for going against the grain of absolute cohesion.
They achieve this by combining extremely high-stakes drama (death, murder, the destruction of society, which we’ll get to) with absurdist and goofy humor. Often, the drama in a dramedy is grounded. If there are high stakes, they undercut it by making it humorous, especially if the dramedies includes life-or-death situations. Take, for example, Chuck, where most of the drama came from the characters’ relationships. With few exceptions, you knew the core characters were safe while dabbling in the spy world. In fact, it was often the source of the most heightened comedy. The same can be said for something like Jane the Virgin, where the grounded storylines were related to the main characters, the three Villanueva women. As you spiraled outward—toward the telenovelas, the Marbella hotel—the storylines got more outlandish and humorous, even though they were about murder. While Sin Rostro was killing people, there was always a little wink to the audience about how over the top the entire premise was, allowing the viewer to laugh along. When these worlds collided, like when Jane’s newborn was kidnapped, the humor grounded to a halt.
Anti-dramedies don’t have the same respect when intermingling those worlds. If a character is in a life-or-death situation, the viewer anticipates the character could actually die, but at any moment the show or movie could inject an eccentric sight gag or silly line of dialogue, to the point of being almost cartoonish or slapstick. Anti-dramedies disregard boundaries, causing confusion or a sense of chaos.
It’s why we have so many think pieces about whether TV shows are comedies or dramas these days. Google “Is Atlanta a drama?” or “Is Succession a comedy?” Admittedly, I haven’t watched Atlanta, and I’m of the opinion that Succession is a drama. But more and more, shows (and movies) are blurring the lines and toying with the expectations of their genre.
The Good Fight is the show we should have more think pieces about when it comes to this. The Paramount+ spinoff of The Good Wife began as a legal thriller and, delightfully, barreled toward being an absurdist satire after Donald Trump’s win of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The show is infused with outlandish gags, often cementing them as legitimate storylines. While debating legalities, the show might cut to news clips of floating lightning balls or have Diane (Christine Baranski) under the influence of hallucinogenics witness two people wearing Trump masks having sex in the window of the office building across the street. Or it’ll tell a season-long story about a man who built his own court outside the law behind an off-brand Kinko’s.
We talk about how 9/11 ushered in an era of superhero shows and movies. The Trump era—and, maybe more precisely, the years of nonstop information and disinformation—have birthed anti-dramedies. It’s not lost on me that Atlanta premiered in 2016; The Good Fight premiered in 2017; and Barry, A Simple Favor, and Succession all premiered in 2018. The height of the Trump era was filled with headlines about catastrophes that seemed implausible. You wouldn’t be blamed for being outraged every day, but there was also a sense of dissonance—Is this really happening? Anti-dramedies harness that dissonance: should we be laughing or crying? The situation feels all too dire, something out of a dystopian novel, something that would never happen to the everyday person, and yet it is. We pushed through that calamity by wavering between concentrated outrage and embarrassed, nervous laughter once we examined ourselves. Though, it was misguided; it was right to treat it with the seriousness we thought it deserved, but sometimes you’d catch yourself thinking it felt unearned. On The Good Fight, democracy is crumbling, but it doesn’t mean we can’t micro-dose psilocybin and laugh about it.
You see echoes of this in shows and movies about social media, like 2017’s Ingrid Goes West. That movie was a comedy about an intense parasocial relationship. There were plenty of laughs, but you were also acutely concerned about Ingrid’s mental wellbeing. I recently wrote about Everything Everywhere All at Once capturing the chaos of Trump-era social media feeds, too. Though EEAAO contains tons of whiplash, it does so by ratcheting up its chaos.
I’m sure it’s been attempted before, too. There are also echoes of this anti-dramedy feeling in something like the wrongfully-disliked pilot episode of Moonlighting, the 1980s comedy-drama-romance about private detectives. Of course, Moonlighting is sometimes credited as building the foundation for the dramedy. That pilot episode feels different to me, though. I was keenly aware of the life-or-death stakes, surprising myself whenever I let out a belly laugh—that unique un-blended mix of comedy and drama.
Sometimes shows unwittingly become anti-dramedies, particularly spoofs or parodies. This year’s hilarious (and, again, wrongfully-disliked) miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window was a takedown and celebration of domestic thrillers. It was a parody, yes, but also worked as a thriller in its own right, as it kept viewers guessing. However, the show used humor that was so post-ironic it became earnest, confusing viewers. A few months ago, I was speaking with my mom and cousin who binged the show all in one day.
“It was so mysterious, we had to keep watching,” they said.
“Agreed! I needed to find out who the murderer was, but at the same time so funny,” I said.
They cocked their heads. “You thought it was funny?”
I think we’ve reached the natural conclusion of this here stream of consciousness. To restate my point: we’re seeing the rise of a new genre or subgenre. Are we really? I don’t know. I’m just some guy. But there is something, a certain je nais se quois, about the shows and movies mentioned here that feels, dare I say, groundbreaking. Anti-dramdies are paradoxes. They’re structured in disarray, in a melodious lack of harmony. They thrive off leaving viewers in a constant state of disorientation or bewilderment.
I’m thrilled by them each time.
After I saw your tweet I needed to hear more of this thank you this was amazing!
I know you’re just some guy but I’m so on board with this line of thinking. Are we all going crazy collectively? We have reached the time of wink and nod from creators, which of course Riverdale did first.