Are audiences really so easily bored that they can’t be trusted to enjoy just the one genre?
Now it has to be a zombie movie plus heist or a comedy plus a thriller, or any of the many combinations that seem to be coming out of Hollywood. What happened to the pure play, single-genre story?
It’s a chicken or egg thing, right? Train viewers to expect everything to be a cross-genre proposition and you can’t be surprised when they will no longer show up for a straight drama or comedy.
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While promoting The Housemaid last year, director Paul Feig laid this out perfectly about the evolution of the comedy movie, although in that context, he wasn’t saying it was a negative.
“Most comedy now is coming in the package of horror or thriller,” he told The Nightly at the time. “Or other things that are higher stakes.
“(Characters) are being put in a situation that is more dangerous and more unpredictable, and audiences have become used to that, and they crave that more.
“Comedy can be frivolous to a lot of people, and I love comedy, it is my bread and butter, but at the same time, I think we need to give them a little more these days.”
God bless Feig, who’s a seemingly good human and a wonderful filmmaker who has gifted the world with treasures such as Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids and Spy. But I hope he’s wrong, I hope we don’t have to subscribe to the philosophy of more is more.
The Housemaid and Spy are two perfect examples of the difference between a single-genre and a cross-genre movie.
Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy and Rose Byrne, might seem like it’s both a comedy and a spy thriller, but it’s actually foremost a comedy. The film is a semi-spoof of spy movies and follows the principles of comedy and uses the espionage thriller as tools rather than the framework.
Whereas The Housemaid is really a thriller with comedic elements, although it is underpinned by tropes and rhythms from both genres. Just for the record, Spy is so much better than The Housemaid.
It’s OK for storytelling to evolve, it doesn’t have to be so rigid. Genres are ripe for reinvention and more and more so, there are films and TV shows that don’t exactly fit into a singular basket.
This is always apparent during, for example, the Emmy Awards season when debates over where a particular title should land becomes an annual sport (is The Bear or Atlanta a comedy or a drama?).
But the problem is that the industry seems more obsessed with heightening the stakes of every project, instead of trusting that viewers can handle just watching characters interact with each other.
Last week, I wrote about The Five Star Weekend, a drama starring Jennifer Garner, Chloe Sevigny, Gemma Chan, Regina Hall and D’Arcy Carden. It’s a female-led series with a prestige sheen that has a lot going for it.
But its number one selling point was that it wasn’t also a thriller whose story engine is either a murder or a disappearance. It had the confidence to just be a show about these women and their relationships to each other and themselves.
They talked, they danced, they fought, they ate, they spa-ed, they shopped, they had interesting and challenging jobs, they had emotional revelations and at least a couple of them got some sexy action.
At no point did any of them do any life-or-death detecting, nor interact with the cops beyond being told off for being too loud at night.
This was so much more enjoyable than, say, All Her Fault or Apples Never Fall or any of the mediocre Big Little Lies copycats that try to do too much.
“Yes and…” is the guiding principle for improv comedy, but it doesn’t have to be in how every TV series and film is crafted. It can be just about characters. Seinfeld was famously about nothing.
The Sopranos was a mob drama that didn’t also try to have parallel universes, and the inverse was sci-fi drama Sliders didn’t try to double as a 19th century historical war epic.
We need more character-driven stories with real depth, and fewer plot-driven ones where the people that populate its fictional world exist only to serve the story momentum.
We love new innovations in storytelling but sometimes, you can just stick to one genre. Especially when the motivation for being so many things all at once is because you think people won’t like you if you don’t overstimulate them.
It’s too much, we’re exhausted.
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