This year’s nominees for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series are an interesting bunch. There are the category favorites also vying for Outstanding Comedy Series, like Hacks, Widow’s Bay, The Bear, and Abbott Elementary. There’s also a nod for The Chair Company, HBO’s absurdist paranoid thriller in which Friendship director Andrew DeYoung marries the styles of I Think You Should Leave and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
The sixth Comedy Directing slot, however, went to a series that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the ballot. In fact, through this series’ five seasons, it’s only ever been nominated three other times — in 2024 for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, in 2023 for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, and in 2022 for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series.
Mary Lou Belli has been directing television since the late ’80s, when she helmed an episode in the third season of Charles in Charge. Since then, she’s directed more than 200 episodes of TV, ranging from multi-cam sitcoms like Girlfriends and Sister, Sister to single-camera procedurals like NCIS: New Orleans and even three episodes of the superhero series Black Lightning. She also directed two episodes of Elsbeeth‘s most recent season. She’s the author of four books on directing and acting, the current governor of the directors branch of the Television Academy, and a four-time Emmy nominee — all for the BET+ sitcom The Ms. Pat Show.
So why, after nearly 40 years as a director of television, did the Emmys finally nominate Belli for four seasons of The Ms. Pat Show in a row?
“I absolutely have no idea,” Belli told Gold Derby.
If she were to guess, Belli would credit the series itself. Based on the life and stand up of comedian Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams, The Ms. Pat Show has recently become more widely available after moving over from the now-defunct BET+ to Paramount+ on April 15 of this year, two months before Phase I Emmy voting began.
Another explanation for Belli’s repeat nominations may be a detail written into the Primetime Emmys Awards’ rules and procedures for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. According to the official category guidelines, “Entries will be recognized in two genres: multi-camera and single camera. The number of nominees will be proportional to the number of submissions in each genre, with at least one nomination for each if the genre has a minimum of 5% of the total number of submissions and provided the 5% is no less than three submissions.”
In other words, as long as the number of submitted nominees from multi-cam series crosses those minimal thresholds, a sitcom director from that genre is guaranteed a spot. And for four of the last five years, that spot has gone to Belli. (Last year, when The Ms. Pat Show and Belli weren’t eligible, the multi-cam slot went to TV icon James Burrows for the since-canceled Mid-Century Modern.)
Out of the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards’ 99 submissions for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, six of the directors were for multi-cam sitcoms — bringing the genre’s percentage to 6, just a single point over the minimum.
From Belli’s perspective, the genre is worth protecting, and the rule is one way of doing that as TV tastes continually shift. “I think it’s important that it doesn’t go away,” she told Gold Derby. “I’ve been around a long time. I’ve seen the popularity of it ebb and flow, and ebb and flow. Sometimes it takes a show like Friends to go, ‘Oh, it’s a hit. We get so many eyeballs on this.’ The fact that it’s cheaper to produce will always factor into it, but also there’s a generation, because of the popularity of Disney and Nickelodeon shows, that grew up watching this, and they want to laugh.”
But even in the midst of an industry-wide contraction and audience fragmentation because of social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Belli loves the work and is invested in helping to secure the medium’s future, mentoring upcoming television directors and voluntarily reducing her number of episodes to allow others a chance in the chair as orders decrease.
“I love going to work every single day,” Belli said. “I learn something new every single day. It might be about directing. It might be about people. I always think I know exactly where the jokes are, I know exactly when they’re going to laugh, and then the surprise is that they laugh earlier than I expect.”
