The Emmys must be a frustrating night for network TV executives trying to get their 10,000 steps in—they certainly don’t get to walk to the stage much. “Even when broadcast shows do step more outside the box, it can be a challenge to fight the perception that cable/streaming is just cooler and more ‘prestige,’ ” says Justin Spitzer, who created the new NBC series American Auto. “The slogan ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO’ has translated into a lot of network writers’ empty trophy cases.”

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

Broadcast shows can’t explore the dark side of human behavior like cable networks and streamers can, but surely a comedy Emmy or two should be doable? In 2010, when ABC’s Modern Family won best comedy series, executive producer Steven Levitan told the crowd, “We are so thrilled that families are sitting down together to watch a television show.” It was a sly reminder that the TV set was once the new fireplace, and that more families means more eyeballs and more advertising dollars. But Modern Family turned out to be the last network sitcom to win the award. Audiences have continued to fracture, and Emmy voters have championed shows—Veep, Fleabag, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel among them—that you watch after the kids have gone to bed. Network series like Black-ish and The Good Place have been nominated, but the best-comedy statuette has always eluded them. In 2014, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings predicted that broadcast TV would be extinct within 20 years: “It’s kind of like the horse, you know. The horse was good until we had the car.”

This year, the horse has made a comeback. One of the biggest success stories of the season hasn’t come from streaming or paid cable but from ABC. “I think whenever anybody says broadcast is dead, something comes along, like Abbott Elementary, that really strikes a chord and gets people talking,” says Channing Dungey, chairman of Warner Bros. Television Group, which produces the show.

Abbott Elementary, nominated for seven Emmys including best comedy series, is a cheerful, mockumentary-style sitcom about teachers at an underfunded Philadelphia school. Quinta Brunson, who created the show and stars in it, first found success on the internet making Instagram and BuzzFeed videos but wanted her show on ABC from the start. “I was really interested in making Abbott for network specifically because I wanted it to be watched by families,” she says. “Although we’ve gone so far with streaming—and streaming shows can be the most popular shows in the world—I felt like I hadn’t quite seen sitcoms really thrive in those spaces yet.”

Abbott, along with American Auto and CBS’s Ghosts, has snagged both the aging broadcast audience and the streaming-focused younger crowd, essentially meeting every generation of the modern family on their platform of choice. Says Brunson, “When you want to create something that inspires family viewing—but is still funny, is still fresh, is still moving the needle a little bit—network is still the best place.”

“It will probably always annoy me a little bit that some people can just easily whisk away network shows as somehow being an inferior product,” says CBS Entertainment president Kelly Kahl, a self-proclaimed “network guy” who worked at Warner Bros. Television before joining CBS in 1996. “I’ll stack our shows up against any on any other platform.”

Ghosts is the top new broadcast series for the 2021–22 season. Joe Port, who runs the show with Joe Wiseman, says people are always telling them how wholesome the show is: “I guess it’s meant as a big compliment when they say that.” But the series, which follows a pair of New Yorkers who inherit a country home inhabited by spirits, is full of PG-13 story lines and innuendo, from a pantless, hard-partying Wall Street bro ghost who says he died after having sex with a limo driver, to a pair of ghosts attempting to create a throuple. “It’s not that wholesome in my mind,” says Port. “But we’re getting to do the show that we want to do, so we’re happy.”

Wiseman believes the show has grabbed audiences because it’s about tribes of very different people learning to coexist. If the living and the dead can get along, in other words, there’s hope for all of us. “Wholesome” may just be code for “funny” and “feel-good”—adjectives that, with the exception of Ted Lasso, aren’t thrown around a lot in the era of dark prestige shows like Barry and Atlanta, which have recently dominated the Emmy comedy categories while expanding the definition of comedy itself.

Abbott Elementary has a feel-good sheen to it too, and, far from giving off a broad, bland network vibe, it’s grown its audience exponentially throughout its first season, particularly with the coveted segment of viewers ages 18 to 49. (It’s also the most tweeted-about comedy series of 2022, according to Twitter, a sure sign that viewers are engaged.) Disney aired the Abbott premiere on ABC on December 7, then put it on Hulu the next day, giving audiences a month to find it before airing the rest of the series. “That was the best advertisement for the show—the show itself,” says Craig Erwich, president of ABC Entertainment and Hulu Originals. “That gave it a month or so for people to discover it on demand and evangelize on our behalf.”

Kahl is similarly “platform agnostic” in terms of how people discover his network’s shows: “Of course, we want them to see it on CBS, but it’s a new world.”

Thriving in that new world also means taking risks, even within the confines of a traditional sitcom. “I think network is letting us do more than they ever have before, in terms of pushing the envelope,” says Spitzer, whose, NBC series American Auto centers on the hapless corporate team at a Detroit car manufacturer struggling with one P.R. nightmare after another, from a driver­less car that only hits Black people to a serial killer using one of their cars in a high-speed chase. The show plays on Peacock the day after it airs on NBC, and more than one showrunner says that the pressure on ratings has eased somewhat because network execs are aware that audiences are finding the shows on streaming as well. Spitzer, who previously worked on The Office and created Superstore, says his live ratings are in line with those of other NBC shows—numbers, he jokes, that “they would’ve shot me for four or five years ago and now gets us renewed.”

The streamers are coming around to the appeal of network-style sitcoms too. Even Netflix is reportedly looking for a good old horse to ride—citing New Girl as an example of a show it would love to emulate. So as streamers hew closer to the broadcast format they once claimed to be rendering obsolete, perhaps the Emmys will swing back as well. Creators are certainly giving voters enough comedies to take seriously. “It feels like there’s just starting to be a bit of a blurred line between broadcast and streaming,” says Port. “So I think as those terms lose their meaning, so too will any residual bias against so-called broadcast. Because it’s really all just starting to be the same thing.”