Original ‘SNL’ Cast Member Laraine Newman Deleted This Outraged Tweet About Emmy-Winning ‘Comedy’ ‘The Bear’
Original Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman wasn’t happy when her daughter, Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, left last night’s Emmy Awards empty-handed — then Twitter reminded Newman that a golden statuette pales in comparison to a silver spoon.
Ever since the FX series The Bear first started to treat the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ annual awards ceremony like a trophy vending machine in 2023, fans of the other shows represented in the comedy categories have questioned whether the Emmys should really allow a series about a brilliant chef’s experiences with addiction, abuse, trauma and suicide to compete against shows centered around, you know, comedy.
Last night, Hacks, a critically beloved and explicitly hilarious HBO/Max series about comedians doing comedy in a humorous way, gave The Bear a run for its lunch money as it toppled Christopher Storer’s self-serious series in the Emmy categories Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. However, The Bear cleaned up basically every other comedy category — including Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, wherein Newman’s daughter was also nominated.
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Following The Bear supporting star Liza Colón-Zayas’ Emmy victory last night, the first-ever win for a Latina artist in the category, Newman took to Twitter to protest The Bear’s continued success at the Emmys, writing in a since-deleted tweet, “FUCK. THE. BEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” before the rest of Twitter reminded her that Einbinder simply being nominated in the category is still an impressive achievement on its own — unlike being born into a famous family.
There’s a line in Hacks Season One that sticks out like a sore thumb when you’ve read the Wikipedia page of the show’s incredible supporting lead Einbinder (as well as that of her mother): While lamenting the sorry state of her professional and financial life in a smokey Las Vegas cafeteria, Einbinder’s character Ava asks the universe, “Why does everyone have rich parents except for me?” In the world of the show, it makes sense — Ava, a canceled comedy writer from a middle-to-upper-middle-class family, feels frustrated at being an outsider in an industry riddled with inequality and nepotism.
In the real world, Einbinder’s upbringing probably wasn’t as lavish and tabloid-worthy as, perhaps, that of Deborah Vance’s daughter DJ, played by the incomparable Kaitlin Olson, whose own family took her Emmy loss to The Bear’s Jamie Lee Curtis in the Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series category much more graciously than Einbinder’s famous mother took her daughter’s loss in her Twitter rant. However, Ava’s complaints about the unfair allocation of opportunities in the entertainment industry feel deeply ironic when you consider that, not only was Einbinder’s mother a famous and accomplished comedic actress, but Newman’s sister Tracy is a comedy writer who has an Emmy win of her own for her work on Ellen.
Colón-Zayas, on the other hand, doesn’t come from a comedy legacy family, having worked her way up from the theatre school of SUNY Albany by carving a career for herself Off-Broadway as an actress and a playwright, first breaking through with her original one-woman show Sistah Supreme in the mid-1990s. Throughout the early millennium, Colón-Zayas continued to establish herself as a forefront theatre artist while slowly building a list of on-screen credits, including guest roles on shows such as Law & Order and Sex and the City, finally breaking into the mainstream at the age of 50 with her historic performance as Tina Marrero in The Bear after decades of hard work and uphill climbs.
We wouldn’t begrudge Newman for having private misgivings over the categorization of The Bear when it affects her daughter’s career, but the SNL star’s decision to publicly attack the show and, by extension, the barrier-breaking Colón-Zayas for preventing her daughter from adding to the family trophy case is in bad taste and beneath the station of an artist who once understood what it’s like to make TV history.