As a commercial enterprise, television piques audience members’ interest and attracts viewers, at least in part by offering innovations on familiar genre forms. Thus, while dramedy may have taken the final step from invention to genre evolution in the 1980s, several series during the 1970s occasionally experimented with individual “dramedic” episodes, including M*A*S*H (1972-83). Barney Miller (1975-82), and Taxi (1978-83). After Moonlighting (1985-89) had garnered both popular success and critical acclaim, a number of television producers turned to dramedy’s unique duality as a means of attracting audiences. Other television series that some critics have called dramedies include The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (1987-91), Hooperman (1987-89), The Wonder Years (1988-93), Northern Exposure (1990-95), Brooklyn Bridge (1991-93), Sports Night (1998-2000), and Ally McBeal (1997-2002).

Arguably one of the clearest examples of the dramedy genre emerged in 1985 and 1986, when the Directors Guild of America nominated the hour-long television series Moonlighting for both best drama and best comedy, an unprecedented event in the organization’s previous 50 years. Moonlighting combined the semantic elements or conventions of television drama (serious subject matter, complex and rounded central characters, multiple interior and exterior settings, use of textured lighting, and single-camera shooting on film) with the conventional syntactic features of television comedies (four-act-narrative structure, repetition, witty repartee, verbal and musical, self-reflexivity, and hyperbole).

Not all dramedies, however, are an hour long. For example, the half-hour series Frank’s Place (1987-88) and Sports Night dealt with serious issues; had rounded and complex central characters, textured lighting, and multiple interior settings; and featured single-camera shooting on film with no studio audience or canned laugh track. However, given the economic organization of the American television schedule, in which “half-hour” is usually equated with “comedy” and “hour-long” with “drama,” creators of dramedies have frequently had some difficulty persuading television networks to air their half-hour genre hybrids without laugh tracks. In the case of Sports Night, for example, producer Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme spent much of the series’’ first season trying to persuade the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) that the laugh track the network demanded was destroying the series. 

Television, like most popular culture forms, is strongly generic; audiences come to television program viewing experiences with definite expectations about genre conventions; indeed, according to Robert Warshow, audiences welcome originality “only in the degree that intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it.” So, too, do the networks. Frank’s Place lasted only one season, while Sports Night lasted only two. In the case of the latter program, however, as New Yorker critic Ted Friend noted, producer Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme managed during those two years “to take the half hour visually, where Steven Bochco had taken the hour with Hill Street Blues.”

Ally McBeal, an hour-long dramedy on the FOX network, featured one of the most innovative settings on television–prime time’s first unisex bathroom–as well as the series’ self-reflective visual special effects (such as Ally fantasizing herself and her high school/college/law school lover sharing a steamy kiss in a giant coffee cup and Ally’s breasts growing to the point where her bra bursts as she looks in the mirror and acknowledges to herself that she does wish her bustline were a little bigger).

Critics have praised television dramedies’ sophistication and innovation, calling these innovative series “quality television” for “quality audiences,” and have suggested that the appearance of such creative hybrids whose self-reflexivity and intertextual references require a substantial degree of both popular and classic cultural literacy from viewers for full appreciation of their allusions and nuances signifies a change in relationships among television, audiences, and society and indicates that television has “come of age” as an artistic medium.