Emmy's Surprise Nom and the Case for Multi-Cam
I speak with director Mary Lou Belli about the format's resurgent future. Plus: Who's stumping for Kamala in Chicago
We’re still technically in campaign season in Hollywood, with Emmy ballots due back a week from today and last-minute press pushes still rolling out — read on for today’s conversation with a contender!
But if your attention strays to Chicago this week — and a campaign that even I can admit has a bit more importance to the world as a whole — I promise you won’t be the only one.
With the Democratic National Convention kicking off tonight, it won’t just be delegates and frazzled political reporters who have descended upon Chicago. A constellation of celebrities, including many Emmy and Oscar winners, are teaming up with various PACs and advocacy organizations to take part in the convention.
The Creative Coalition, founded and still led by some of Hollywood’s major players, will send a delegation that includes Uzo Aduba, Busy Philipps, Yvette Nicole Brown, Danai Gurira and many more, and will co-host a party on Wednesday night led by Octavia Spencer. Former Scandal co-stars Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn will join Mindy Kaling and Ana Navarro as official on-air hosts for each of the convention’s four nights.
To bring it all back to our usual themes here, there will even be some active Emmy contenders in attendance. Sheryl Lee Ralph will be part of the Creative Coalition crew, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, Reese Witherspoon is expected to attend as well. The team behind The Daily Show, including Jon Stewart, will be hosting their show live from the convention center all week.
Although previous RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants Chad Michaels, Silky Nutmeg Ganache and Jackie Cox don’t share the show’s eight Emmy nominations this year, their performance tonight in Chicago’s Boys Town might just nudge a few Emmy votes — and, ideally, votes for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, too.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, and my conversation with someone who’s been a “surprise” Emmy nominee for the past three years running — so maybe that means it’s no longer a surprise? Even with Emmy’s other comedy categories dominated this year by dramedies like The Bear, Hacks and Only Murders in the Building, there’s a slot in the directing category reserved for more traditional multi-camera comedies — and this year, once again, that slot belongs to Mary Lou Belli and BET+’s The Ms. Pat Show.
Belli is a governor for the Television Academy, which likely gives her an edge with her fellow directors who select the nominees. But she also has a formidable resume and a reputation for supporting rising talent both onscreen and off. A few days before she left for New York to direct an episode in the upcoming second season of CBS’s Elsbeth, she told me about the bright future she sees for the multi-camera comedy, and what’s seductive about “going to work every day and laughing.”
The Threepeat
Mary Lou Belli had worked hard to get where she was. After starting her career in sitcoms — from Charles in Charge to Wizards of Waverly Place — she’d shifted in recent years to shows focused on drama and action. In the past decade she’s directed 10 episodes of NCIS: New Orleans and two of the True Lies television adaptation, among many others.
She told her management team she’d only return to sitcoms for the “right one” — and then she saw what her old friend and mentor Debbie Allen did with the first episode of The Ms. Pat Show, which debuted in 2021. “The subject matter was like nothing I had ever seen,” Belli says now. “It was groundbreaking. It felt like when my husband and I first watched Sex and the City together— we’d look at each other like, did they just do that on television? On a minute-to-minute basis on Ms. Pat, I still do this.”
The Ms. Pat Show, which airs on BET+ and in slightly more family-friendly form on BET, is in many ways the most classic sitcom there is. Built around standup comedian Ms. Pat, it’s a multi-camera family comedy featuring spunky children, kooky neighbors and the warm sense that everything will turn out okay by the end of the episode. The DNA of everything from I Love Lucy to Roseanne is evident in episodes like season four premiere “I’m the Pappy,” for which Belli has received her third consecutive Emmy nomination for best director for a comedy series.
You only have to look at Belli’s Emmy competition—directors of The Bear, Hacks, Abbott Elementary and The Gentlemen—to know that The Ms. Pat Show is an outlier in the current comedy landscape. Part of that is by design; in 2018 the Television Academy adopted a rule that made room for at least one multi-camera comedy to be nominated each year, so long as enough multi-camera shows were submitted to trigger the rule.
Belli serves alongside Anya Adams as the governor of the Television Academy’s directors branch, and says she’s backed a number of rule adjustments that shine more light on television directors and the many roles they play. “When Anya and I became governors, we had a mission to keep almost every kind of format for directors alive,” Belli says. “We've expanded and made sure it was diverse in terms of our peer group.”
After more than a decade of being dominated entirely by such single-camera titans as Modern Family, 30 Rock, Transparent and Ted Lasso, the comedy directing category has made room for shows filmed in front of the traditional live studio audience — CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, Mom and the short-lived B Positive, the Will & Grace reboot and now The Ms. Pat Show.
“There’s something seductive about going to work every day and laughing,” says Belli, who has directed 20 episodes of The Ms. Pat Show in front of a live audience. “It’s that wonderful hybrid [of television and theater], and the authenticity of the audience laughing. They never lie.”
Belli knows her work is an outlier compared with her fellow Emmy nominees, but stresses that what “most” of the competition has in common — it’s not hard to imagine the exception she has in mind — “is that they’re funny.” She acknowledges “it would be suicide not to vote for myself,” but lavishes praise on Guy Ritchie of The Gentlemen and especially Lucia Aniello of Hacks, who would probably get her vote if she had another. After all, both Hacks stars Jean Smart and Belli got their start in 1980s sitcoms and are still thriving in this strange new world of TV comedy.
A Sitcom Renaissance?
The Emmys would give you the impression that the multi-camera sitcom is all but dead — Ms. Pat and the Frasier reboot are the only shows to receive nominations outside of categories specifically reserved for multi-camera comedies. But as the television industry contracts and tries to figure out how to spend less while keeping audiences happy, one of TV’s oldest genres may be poised for a comeback.
“In the last two or three months, everybody’s asking for multi-camera comedies,” says Belli, who has eight new projects in development. “The generation that’s coming up grew up on Disney multicam shows [such as Wizards of Waverly Place and Hannah Montana], and from an economic standpoint, they’re way less expensive to do than anything single camera.”
As more television viewing moves to tiny phone screens, Belli says, the sturdy visual style of the multi-camera show may have an edge there, too. “I think Steve Levitan said it with Modern Family — he said, people don’t come back to watch the camera shots,” Belli says. “Even though that show was breaking new ground in terms of the documentary style of it, that’s not why they come back. They come back because they want to laugh.”
Belli is optimistic not only about the future of multi-camera comedies, but also the new voices that might be making them. She’s been on the directing faculty at USC and works with programs at NBC and Warner Bros. that champion up-and-coming talent. Her three Emmy nominations, she says, aren’t going to change her life — “No one’s going to care if I do another episode or another series. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I’m established, I’m respected.”
“But if I could bring up the next generation of directors and it can reflect the world,” she continues, “if we have authentic people telling their authentic stories — that legacy would be so vital to me.”
