Since great television comedy always begins with the script, this series of posts considers the individual episodes that have claimed the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series over the years.

The Bear won just about every Emmy it was up for when its first season went through the awards cycle. It swooped up three trophies for regular cast members, and also prevailed in categories for casting, editing, sound editing, and sound mixing. Of course, it also won for Outstanding Comedy Series. Among its haul, were also Emmys for both comedy directing and comedy writing, each honoring Christopher Storer, the series creator and co-showrunner. That’s not all that unique of a feat. It’s relatively commonplace for a series to score both prizes in the same year. Typically, though, it’s the same episode that comes out on top in each category. The Bear notched those respective wins with different episode, the first time a comedy series had done that since Frasier, in its second season, won writing for “An Affair to Forget” and directing for “The Matchmaker.”

Set in a Chicago restaurant specializing in hot beef sandwiches and newly run by a skilled, high-end chef (Jeremy Allen White) with a self-punishing streak, The Bear depicts the culinary corner of the service industry as a place of constant pressure. The season one directing Emmy was for the episode “Review,” which took the show’s already kinetic style and intensified it with a plot driven by an error made with the establishment’s online ordering system that causes hundreds of orders to come in at the same time, creating an impossible challenge that the harried staff nevertheless tries to surmount. In the uneven, ambitious first season, it probably is the epitome of what The Bear could be.

The episode that won the writing award is a slightly different matter. “System” is the first episode of The Bear, and it’s stuck with all the heavy exposition required of an inaugural outing. A remarkable amount of the dialogue is clunky as characters are obligated to spell out relationships and histories in an explicit fashion that feels clumsily constructed for an audience (“Yeah, I mean…you were the most excellent CDC at the most excellent restaurant in the entire United States of America. So, what are you doing here?”). Personalities are revealed in the bluntest of ways, and conflicts are laid out as clearly as sentences diagrammed on a chalkboard. The episode sets the overall tone and philosophical edge of the series effectively, but that has as much — or more — to do with Storer’s aggressive directing as anything on the page.

The strongest argument in favor of “System” earning its writing win is that it lays the groundwork — in both narrative basics and prevailing attitude — for far better episodes to come. The Bear had plenty of champions after its first season, but the vastly superior second season was generating deafening buzz just as Emmy voters were casting their ballots for the television year that including those first eight episodes. Practically everyone, probably including all the creative personnel involved with The Bear, believes that the fresher episodes added a shine to their predecessors when the show dominated the Emmys, just as the spotty third season probably cost the second season a couple trophies when the pattern repeated a year later. It’s maybe appropriate that a series that has such a strangely out-of-sync awards history possesses its sole writing Emmy to date for an episode that is a less successful showcase for that particular stage of its production.

Other posts in this series can be found at the “Golden Words” tag.