The death of syndication drove the rise of genre-melting dramedies.

Evidence

Since syndication is no longer part of the business model, sitcoms give way to the long tail subscriber reach of short-arc topical genre mixing. Lights, camera, action, “dramedy”! Tonally mixed comedies with tragic content, dramedies are signature for streaming because they blend network aesthetic forms with cable quality expectations, dispensing with traditional comedies’ laugh track, episodic plotting, and multicamera framing while incorporating more exterior locations and techniques like flashbacks or interspliced animation sequences. … When dramedies do flip the coin to sixty-minute dramas larded with laughs, grave ills like mass incarceration, racialization, and rape burble with dark humor—an indistinction key to immersive engagement and mass appeal. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 234

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘dramedy’ and ‘genre melt’ mean as formal categories — exactly the named-feature inventory the reader needs to identify immediacy in real works.
• XREF: Dramedy as indistinction connects to the book’s central claim that immediacy blurs previously distinct aesthetic categories — relevant to the reader’s tools for spotting immediacy.