Before Season 3 Begins We Have To Be Clear The White Lotus Is NOT A Drama

 

 

Right now the biggest debate surrounding the Emmys and awards show is the fact that so many people are convinced that The Bear is not a comedy. I’ve devoted multiple articles to this subject, one most recently as last week, as to why I’m certain that The Bear without question is a comedy. I could add to all of those people who want to qualify The Bear as one if they are comfortable considering it in the same breath as, among other series that will be coming back this year House of The Dragon, Severance and Squid Game. However that is not the purpose of this article because there’s a more pressing and, to use an inappropriate term, serious issues the Emmys are going to have confront in 2025 – one that was all but ignored when it happened the last time.

I am covering some familiar ground for readers of mine and I do apologize if I’m beating a dead horse. But it didn’t escape my notice that for all the mumbling that there’s been about The Bear not being considered a comedy over the past year, no one seems to have even blinked at the idea that The White Lotus is a drama. So let’s revisit this particular argument because a lot has happened since Season 2 of The White Lotus aired.

A brief refresher course for those who might have forgotten: the biggest winner of the 2022 Emmys was The White Lotus which even having aired a full year before the Emmy nominations came out still managed to win an incredible ten Emmys, including Best Limited Series, Best Directing, Best Writing (Mike White won both) Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series for Murray Bartlett and Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series for Jennifer Coolidge.

While I expressed some dismay that every single member of the cast seemed to be nominated I had no problem with any of the wins the show got. I was already eagerly anticipating the second season which we were already seeing trailers for on HBO and was scheduled to premiere that October.

The second season was, if anything, more highly acclaimed then the first with TV Guide naming it the Best Show of 2022. I didn’t hold with that distinction – my choice was the final season of Better Call Saul  - but I saw no signs of the sophomore slump in Season 2. The second installment was full of some of my favorite actors and actresses (F. Murray Abraham and Michael Imperioli in the male category; Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy for the females) and it was just as hysterical watching these absolutely clueless millionaires spend all their time in Italy giving into their worst impulses, not learning a single lesson and being completely bamboozled by two Italian courtesans. When ‘the gays tried to murder’ Tanya I was overjoyed and I was sorry to see Jennifer Coolidge die, though of course that was her own fault as much as Armond’s had been in Season 1.

It was clear to me by the end of 2022 that The White Lotus was just as assured another sweep to the Emmys in the Limited Series nominations and wins in 2023. At that point I hadn’t seen much of the competition but by the end of the year the only other serious contender was Dahmer, a show I had absolutely no interest in watching and couldn’t understand why anyone would. (If you remember my columns you know that not only did I see but did a complete mea culpa by the time 2023 Emmys finally happened.) There wasn’t much else in the way of competition from other networks in the leadup to the end-of-year awards and certainly nothing that worked up much enthusiasm among critics: no one found much joy in Fleishmann Is In Trouble (the right call) Welcome to Chippendale’s (the wrong one) and the other major contender was Black Bird (an absolutely worthy choice)

I was paying closer attention then some to the 2022 Golden Globes that year, which were in a state of crisis and by the middle of 2023 would dissolve its current system when the controversies that had surrounded the Hollywood Foreign Press since the pandemic ended caused it to completely go under. As someone who was watching it for the purpose of the Emmys only I was looking for bread crumbs.

That year Jeremy Allan White won what would be the first of an endless stream of Best Actor awards for his work in The Bear. No one seemed to object that was nominated as a comedy back then, perhaps because Abbott Elementary was the big winner of the night. It won three Golden Globes for Best Comedy, Best Actress for Quinta Brunson and Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy or Drama for Tyler James Williams. The White Lotus was nominated for Best Limited Series (something it hadn’t managed the previous year) and won that prize. Jennifer Coolidge took Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or TV/Movie and no one objected certainly not me.

Later in January the Critics Choice Awards took place. For the first time The White Lotus had been listed in the Best Drama awards. I paid this little mind for two reasons: the Critics Choice has always been eclectic with what shows it nominates and where and more importantly Jennifer Coolidge was the only nominee for the series. I was somewhat annoyed when Coolidge beat Rhea Seehorn for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama but that was barely a blip because Better Call Saul essentially won everything else it was nominated for that night, including Best Drama. When Liz Merriwether accepted her prize for The Dropout and the first people she thanked was The White Lotus for choosing not to compete in this category I laughed with her. The idea of The White Lotus being a drama was, to put it mildly, laughable.

Then the SAG nominations came out and I had to start taking it seriously. I’ll be honest; even then I could at least partially understand the logic. For whatever reason SAG-AFTRA has never given a prize for Best Ensemble in a Limited Series or TV Movie. Considering that they fundamentally  haven’t changed their basic awards at all for television since they were founded in 1994 I think this is an incredible blunder on their part. So I assumed that The White Lotus had decided to compete in the Best Drama category because a series that had arguably the best cast in all of 2022 deserved recognition in some form. The wins for it both as Best Drama ensemble and Best Dramatic Actress for Jennifer Coolidge I could accept but I still figured it was an anomaly.

Then the Emmys officially ruled that because of Coolidge’s presence in both seasons The White Lotus couldn’t compete in the Best Limited Series category this year. If you’ve read my columns during that period I was irked at the Emmys for this issue and truly thought this was a mistake on their parts. I now realized I wasted a lot of time an energy pointing my guns in the wrong direction.

Because it’s one thing to argue that The White Lotus doesn’t meet the qualifications of Best Limited Series or Anthology. I’d say that the Emmys have been very strange about this rule – they never seemed to have a problem when it happened for Fargo and there was a connection running through the first three seasons at least – and I did think this was the smallest of nits to pick. But the fact that HBO chose to nominate The White Lotus as a Drama – that’s an even bigger joke that anything we saw in two seasons and not at all funny.

I defy anyone to look at just the other HBO series that were nominated for Best Drama that year – Succession, The Last of Us, House of The Dragon – and tell me with a straight face that they all deserve the same classification. Even the comparison to Succession, which many considered a black comedy as much as it was a drama, doesn’t come close to applying when one considers the final season. The people at Waystar Royco may be rich people with no moral compass but if you think Logan Roy’s death deserved to be considered the same way Tanya’s does, you’re really lost – and yet the Emmys nominated both for Best Writing. (To be fair White was nominated for writing the entire series which in itself is a sign that the two shows don’t belong in the same category.)

And look the other nominees: The Diplomat, Better Call Saul, Yellowjackets, The Crown. Even the most diehard fan of The White Lotus has to acknowledge that putting this show up against The Crown or Yellowjackets is ludicrous.

Indeed there’s a better argument that The White Lotus is more of a comedy than some of the comedies that were nominated by the Emmys that year. Setting aside The Bear, which in Season 1 was far closer to a comedy than Season 2, Barry was so dark in its final season many people wondered if it should be classified as a comedy at all. Jury Duty was so format-breaking it could have been more comfortable in a reality show series and Wednesday is closer in spirit to The Last of Us then Only Murders in the Building. If The White Lotus had been nominated instead of the latter two shows in that category, I certainly wouldn’t have questioned it and neither would anyone else. Yet no one seemed to blink at the idea of The White Lotus in the drama category.

And by the way let’s get back to some of the nominees for writing. Does anyone truly think that any of the moments in all of Season 2 deserve to be in the same category as the series finale of Better Call Saul? ‘Conor’s Wedding? The already classic ‘A Long, Long Time’ episode of The Last of Us?! To put them in the same breath is a louder obscenity than anything Logan Roy ever uttered when alive.

And that’s before you get to the biggest crime of all: everyone in the cast seemed to get nominated in the Best Supporting Actor and Actress category. Set aside everyone from Succession who was nominated in the former category. I realize as much as people love the double act of Cousin Greg and Tom, we all know that the reason Matthew MacFayden won his second consecutive Best Supporting Actor award had everything to do with the knock down, everything on the table argument he and Shiv had in the ‘Tailgate Party; episode where they finally laid out every horrible thing about their marriage that had been building for four seasons. We know that because that’s the episode Sarah Snook almost certainly (and deservedly) won her Emmy for. All of the work in The White Lotus is brilliant – but if you’re trying to tell me its at a level of drama on display here, no. I’ve seen F. Murray Abraham deliver brilliant dramatic performances in Homeland; we all saw what Michael Imperioli can do. Nicholas Braun is a clown but he’s comic relief in a dramatic show.

And the same is definitely true of The White Lotus. As I said before I am  huge fans of both Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy. I wanted them to be nominated for Emmys and I advocated for it. But I did so under protest because in good conscience to compare their work with Elizabeth Debicki or Rhea Seehorn was a travesty in my mind. And the idea that Jennifer Coolidge – who won a prize from the MTV Movie and TV Awards for Best Comedic Performance just two months before the Emmys for her work here – has to share the spotlight with them is crazier than anything we saw Tanya do.

And all of this is before you consider that with the presence of these nominees and Succession’s overwhelming presence there was no room for any of the supporting cast in any other drama that aired in 2022-2023. Setting aside my issues with ignoring Saul which I’ve already beaten to death – nothing for any of the incredible female performances in Yellowjackets? Nothing for the brilliant supporting performers in The Crown including Lesley Manville and Jonathan Pryce? Nothing for the cast of House of The Dragon, which many were sure would see nominations for Matt Smith and Paddy Considine? Nothing for John Lithgow, who’d already received a Golden Globe and Critics Choice nomination for Supporting Actor for The Old Man? Some of these actors did get another bite at the apple by the time of the 2024 Emmy nominations and others are likely to get a chance again as these shows return to contention. Others like Considine and  Juliette Lewis never will.

So the question is with all that in mind, how could anyone think The White Lotus deserves to be considered a drama in the first place? It can’t possibly be the fact that it’s an hour long instead of half an hour: Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was nominated in this category that same year and no one was questioning its comedy credentials. And this past year the Emmys nominated Palm Royale for Best Comedy where the title place is for all intents and purposes a White Lotus resort in 1960s Florida. For the record it takes itself and its characters more seriously than Mike White does, even with the same attitude towards rich white people. No one had a problem nominating it as a comedy.

It;s clear the Emmys must correct course with The White Lotus. There is precedent for this: Shameless was submitted in the drama category the first five years it was on the air before the creators decided to nominate it as a comedy for the rest of its run. The voters seemed willing to make the leap: they nominated Joan Cusack for five consecutive Emmys for Best Guest Star in A Drama and then William H. Macy for four Emmys for Best Actor in a Comedy. And of course Orange is the New Black had absolutely no difficulty being shifted from Comedy in its first year to drama in its second.

I’d say there’s still a valid argument that The White Lotus deserves to be considered as an anthology series and that the disqualification that forced it out of the limited series category was one of the biggest technicalities in Emmy history – and this is an organization that almost never deals with technicalities when it comes to nominations. Season 2 was in a completely different setting, had a completely different theme and an almost completely different cast of characters: to change it because one character was in both settings really is stretching the boundaries of it and seems incredibly subjective.

But failing that when The White Lotus finally debuts the Emmys and all other awards show have to put it in the comedy category. The White Lotus is many things, but it is not remotely serious. Even the character deaths are not considered as such. And considering how bright and shiny and buoyant every technical aspect of it is, you’re breaking your own definition of what prestige dramas are. The theme music alone tells you what you’re in for.

So let’s do that for the next year’s Emmys. And hey, as a result, there will be a gap in the drama nominations next year. Maybe we can talk about putting The Bear in and see just how well it does against Stranger Things and The Gilded Age.