The State of TV Comedy in 2025

While Hacks is on hiatus, we've entered an era of toothless streaming comedies and devastating 30-minute dramas. How TF did we get here?

There was a time, not long ago, when a thing called a “TV comedy” existed. They were usually 30 minutes in length and if they weren’t actually funny, they at least tried to be funny.

However, we’ve entered an era where many of the newest shows seem barely concerned with delivering laughs, or much of anything. They just light themselves brightly and the actors speak in upbeat tones and the creators let that vague comedic glaze do all the work.

So how did we get here? Let’s retrace our steps.

Late 2000s/Early 2010s: The Era of Brilliantly Stupid Network Comedies

In the late 2000s we had our heyday of Brilliantly Stupid Network Single Cam Comedies (30 Rock, Arrested Development, Parks & Rec, Community, The Office). This makes sense, in retrospect, as we we’re just exiting what was (at that time) one of the stupidest eras of American political history with Bush and the Iraq/Afghan war blunders. We longed, subconsciously, to see smart characters (Liz Lemon, Jim and Pam, Leslie Knope) deal with Very Dumb people and triumph at the end of it.

It should be noted: TV Comedy is always on a bit of a delay from reality. It takes creators/writers time to digest the world and present their interpretations. So, it makes perfect sense these shows rose to prominence just as Bush was leaving office.

It also makes sense why it took an entire Obama term before the next big shift in comedy occured:

Early/Mid-2010s: The Era of Socially Reflective Cable Comedies

Comedy is always on a bit of delay from reality. The rise of Obama, social media, and overall social awareness arguably led to the tends of Socially Reflective Cable Comedies (Louie, Girls, Atlanta, Veep) that dominated the mid-2010s. Audiences were smarter, more discerning, and wanted our comedy to both make us laugh and challenge us. This was also prime Daily Show/Colbert Report time, when we all thought comedy could Change The World.

As a colleague who wrote for The Daily Show once explained to me, there’s laughter and then there’s “clapghter,” which is when someone feeds an audience a political point disguised as a joke and they clap in agreement as they laugh.

The early/mid 2010s was certainly the golden era of clapghter (brought to an almost immediate end by the 2016 election, when we collectively realized “Oh wait, it’s almost as if clapghter serves no greater purpose other than to make us feel good/smart/morally superior and absolutely does not change anyone’s mind about anything.”)

The 2016 election and all its bubble-popping glory, combined with the quick rise of streaming platforms, then led us to a shorter, but distinct new era of TV comedies that partially overlapped the Socially Aware

Mid/Late 2010s: The Era of Genre-Expanding Streaming Comedies

This was, in retrospect, one of the most fascinating eras in TV comedy history.

With streaming now competing (and quickly overtaking network and cable) in the TV show biz, they needed to stand out and had money to burn. This led to a firehose of Interesting, Genre-Expansding Streaming Comedies that either presented unique/quixiotic protagonists (Transparent, Russian Doll, Insecure) or pushed the definition of TV comedy to new limits (Barry, Fleabag) or were just extravagantly choreographed dramas that happened to be about the comedy biz (Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).

Attention spans were starting to dwindle in this era, so streamers (and network/cable channels that had to become streamers like HBO) bucked the historic trend of trying to find cookie cutter ideas that comfortably resembled already-successful shows and instead seemed to be in a race to present the most Unique Show Possible.

This era would’ve likely lasted longer, had it not been for one very significant event: the global pandemic.

Suddenly, we were all inside, all anxious, unable to escape a global reality, so our tastes shifted abruptly.

Behold:

Early 2020s: The Era of Gentle Comedy

We were stuck inside our shitty apartments, we need to ESCAPE, GURL. Plus we’d just survived 4 years of you-know-who and the last thing we wanted was to be reminded of anything bad outside our doors. Instead of Big Idiot characters, instead of clapghter, instead of Crazy Concepts, we wanted sweetness and warmth and loveable characters. We wanted a bowl of mac and cheese and a kitten curled at our feet.

Enter Schitt’s Creek, Ted Lasso, Abbott Elementary, and Only Murders in the Building.

Oh, the feels we have felt with these wonderful shows. And they are wonderful! We need to feel like the world and people can be good again, because so much of the news is telling us otherwise!

And while not really a heartwarming show, What We Do In The Shadows also provides a simple escape and a fun, safe world full of lovable characters, so I’d consider it a subset of this trend. Same with Abbott, which is generally more laugh out loud funny than heartwarming, but it still provides that safe escape and sunny disposition.

But, as all trends do, This One Got Me In The Feels is on its way out. And what’s replacing it hasn’t quite taken shape yet. I do, however, see two new trends. Let’s split them in two.

Mid-2020s Era #1: Comedies That Are Literally Dramas

The biggest news in comedy in the past few years hasn’t even been a comedy. I’m talking of course about The Bear, which is FX/Hulu’s devastating, highly stressful family drama that just happens to be edited to 30 minutes an episode. It has thus been considered a comedy, and entered in all the comedy categories at the Globes and Emmys and such, and has deprived of us of I don’t know how many Steve Martin and/or Martin Short acceptance speeches.

Somebody, Somewhere is much funnier than The Bear, but holy fuck is it also deeply depressing, to the point I think the comedy is more incidental than instrumental. It’s about the pain of losing a sister, mid-life crises, troubled parents, lots of heavy stuff.

No Good Deed is chock full of great comedic actors but feels more like a low-grade thriller, and isn’t written with jokes in mind.

It’s almost as if the one-two punch of T***p and the pandemic and the evasive comedy of the Gentle Comedy era left Hollywood with a deep desire to just process.

But now, even as we try to process, we enter yet another hell-era in global politics, so who knows what comedy will look like in five years, once much of what we’re experiencing and feeling has been synthesized.

What I do know is that in the meantime, the second era of the 2020s is not going to help.

Mid-2020s Era #2: Comedies That Barely Try To Be Comedies

Different from the outright dramas masquerading as comedies, these are shows that are perfectly pleasant and bright., they just aren’t funny, rarely try to be funny, and instead just sort of…are. Welcome to the stage our newest contestants: Mythic Quest, A Man on the Inside, and Running Point!

They’re not all bad. In fact, A Man on the Inside is actually quite lovely! But it’s not funny. It’s not comedy. It’s just brightly lit. And it’s also kind of really sad sometimes?

Running Point and Mythic Quest all present interesting concepts that should be launching pads for great comedy, but they each feel weightless and rushed.

A couple things are happening here:

1. The streaming bubble has burst! Streamers are creating less content and are less incentivized to create huge-budget, Maisel-esque comedies. They know they still have to create something so now we get cheaply made, colorful, vacuous paper doll versions of comedies.

2. How can you possible laugh anymore when (gestures at literally the entire world)??? Life is deeply depressing now, so comedy is harder despite arguably being more necessary for our souls than ever. But, then again, we know we can’t clapghter our way out of this shitshow. We know the Feel Good Fuzzies can only distract our brains for so long. And we know shit’s scary out there so all we can do is kind of go through the motions, which exactly what the creators/writers/stars of these shows feel like they’re doing (A Man on the Inside’s cast is innocent, they’re wonderful).

Save Us Hacks, You’re Our Greatest Hope!

Truly, one of the brightest beacons of comedy right now is Hacks, which manages to somehow incorporate pieces of every era I’ve mentioned thus far in an effortlessly brilliant way. It’s brilliantly dumb at times, it has pepperings of social commentary, it expands the comedy genre in new ways and gives us an unexpected protagonist, it has moments of true warmth and tinges of drama (without the drama swallowing everything), and, most of all, it’s funny af.

Whatever the next era of comedy ends up being, it is my sincere hope it’s far more influenced by Hacks than The Bear. We can confront the grimness of our lives and still earnestly laugh. We need to, in fact, now more than ever.