‘Killing Eve’ is a sign of TV to come.

Reviewing Succession in June, I characterized it as a pitch-dark workplace satire stretched out into a prestige-drama format. By the end of the show’s 10 episodes, it felt more like a tragedy, grander in scope and emotional weight, despite the quippy and ingenious humor of its creator, Jesse Armstrong. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Armstrong declined to define it. And Succession’s executive producer Frank Rich told me that when it comes to categorization, the people working on the series simply don’t care. “I think a lot of this discussion [about genre], largely among critics and people who determine awards categories, is happening in another world from where shows are created,” he said. “We never talked about whether it was a comedy or a drama. We just wanted good writing.”

In prestige television, Rich says, networks are drawn most of all to the creative vision of writers and showrunners. And the most original and distinctive ideas tend to be ones that don’t fit neatly into the old network-television boxes. “Look at Barry, look at Insecure, look at Atlanta and Girls,” he says. “They all come from the distinct voice of a particular writer.” He also cites The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men as earlier examples of shows that frequently incorporated elements of comedy and inherently comic conceits. But those series also functioned neatly as dramas, conceptually and structurally. With contemporary series like Orange Is the New Black, The End of the F***ing World, and Better Things, the question of what label to put on a show is a more perplexing—and perhaps more arbitrary—one.

Awards ceremonies, though, still insist on putting TV shows in simplistic boxes. In 2015, the Television Academy, which bestows the Emmy Awards each year, changed its rules to mandate that half-hour shows automatically qualify as comedies and hour-long shows as dramas. Networks can appeal if they want to be considered in a different category, but they aren’t always successful (that same year, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black petitioned to be included in the comedy category but had its request rejected).

The rules change was received at the time with some bafflement. “So many shows on TV right now are a mixture of comedy and drama, but because we do not yet have the word to describe this genre-mixing, genre-poaching TV … it is easier for the Emmys to pretend it does not exist,” wrote Slate’s Willa Paskin.

Three years later, the Academy’s insistence that shows fit into one of two categories only seems more archaic, given the wealth of acclaimed new series that defy generic labels. Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Emmy Awards agreed to set up an interview with an Academy voter only on background, then stopped replying to multiple email requests altogether. But in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter this week, an anonymous Emmys voter expressed his frustration with in-between shows, stating of Atlanta, “Maybe it’s kind of an old-school idea, but to me a comedy should make you laugh.”