Where do you draw the line with White Fever? As previously discussed, it’s perfectly fine for what it is: it’s just that what it is isn’t a comedy. Which is a problem, because if a half hour scripted series airing on the ABC at 9pm on a Wednesday isn’t a comedy, what is?
As you’ve possibly heard, Gruen is due back on our screens May 15. Well, not our screens; fucked if we’ll be putting ourselves through that for a 16th season. But it’s a timely reminder that the ABC “comedy” timeslot – roughly one hour on a Wednesday if you don’t count Hard Quiz and who does – increasingly doesn’t bother with comedy.
For example, White Fever. It’s a prime example of one of the many genres the ABC likes more than comedy: an issues-based series aimed at young* people. As we all know, pretty much every show aimed at young people on Australian television is going to be promoted as a comedy whether it’s funny or not. What have young people got to be worried about? Nothing: therefore comedy.
It’s also about young people’s relationships. That usually sets off alarm bells when the ABC is involved because they seem to only take on stories that feature young characters whose primary relationship is with being annoying. Over and over again they serve up series where the main idea seems to be “what if we reinvented the concept of screeching harridans for the 21st century?”. Clearly the only way any character under 40 could be funny is if they were some hideous caricature even Chris Lilley would think twice about playing.
Remember All My Friends Are Racist? Of course not. How about Why Are You Like This? Not that we’re saying they’re the same show, but the ABC does have a type when it comes to young people’s programming. And if you manage to get your eyes to unfocus like you’re looking at a magic eye poster, White Fever kinda sorts fits the formula.
Fortunately, White Fever is better than your average ABC young person’s relationship comedy. That’s not difficult: it’s a grim lineage that stretches back at least as far as Laid. Unfortunately, the way it manages to be a better program is by not even trying to be funny for long stretches.
Again, it’s good at not being funny, in large part because it’s actually about something beyond the lead’s romantic entanglements. Remember Please Like Me? The hilarious sitcom that ended every season with a main character’s death (or coma) bumming everyone out? Was that ever about anything beyond Josh Thomas making out with various handsome actors?
To take a wider view, it’s been extremely obvious for the last few decades that, thanks to Australia’s model of television funding – where your real audience is funding bodies – actually making a completed television series comes a distant second in importance behind the funding body crafting a press release announcing that they’ve given your brilliant concept some cash.
White Fever works because creator and star Ra Chapman had a story she wanted to tell. More often, we just get a concept that sounds good to the funding bodies. When it comes to the finished product, the execution falls over.
And when you’re making a comedy, execution is everything.
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*for “young”, read “under 50” – after all, this is the ABC we’re talking about
The ABC is excited to announce filming has commenced on the third six-part season of award-winning comedy Fisk. The series is created, written, co-directed by – and starring – one of Australia’s most beloved comedians, Kitty Flanagan.
Having captured the hearts and funny bones of millions of Australians, the laugh out loud series returns, along with cast favourites Julia Zemiro, Marty Sheargold and Aaron Chen. As with the two previous seasons, each episode will guest star some of the best in the comedy business as they navigate their way through the world of wills and probate.
Helen (Kitty Flanagan) is now a name partner at Gruber & Fisk which means new responsibilities and pressures, largely due to Ray (Marty Sheargold) having other things taking up his time. Things like his new (age-appropriate) lady love and her “fashion psychologist” business. Meanwhile Roz (Julia Zemiro) has a midlife crisis, Viktor (Glenn Butcher) resigns as Roz’s assistant and George (Aaron Chen) jumps ship to work for Conch Mediation. On the home front, Helen has finally moved out into a place of her own. But true to form she soon gets her new neighbour offside. And in an ironic twist, Helen and Viktor become the stereotypical, over-emotional, irrational, bickering family members when Dad (John Gaden) decides to update his will.
Kitty’s Fisk role has won her back-to-back Silver Logies for Most Popular Actress on television, as well as the AACTA Award for Best Comedy Performer, with Julia also being nominated at the Logies and AACTAS for her performance. On top of multiple other Logie and AACTA nominations, Fisk won the AACTA Award for Best Narrative Comedy Series in 2021, the Screen Producers Award for Best Comedy Series, and, internationally, it won Best Series in the Comedy Competition at Series Mania, France.
Kitty Flanagan says “I’m delighted to be back in the brown suit and on set with all of my favourite funny people. This is such a fun show to make and we have got our fingers crossed that everyone loves it.”
ABC Head of Scripted, Rachel Okine says “Fisk has become such a beloved character on our screens, both in Australia and now also around the world, we cannot wait to unleash another much-anticipated season onto ABC’s audiences”.
VicScreen CEO, Caroline Pitcher says “We are proud to continue supporting the award-winning comedy Fisk for a third season. This series has proven that unique, Australian comedy can truly crack-up audiences not just here in Australia, but also internationally. I’m looking forward to delighting in more of the adventures of Helen Tudor-Fisk and her enviable sense of fashion.”
Fiskseason 3 will air later in 2024 on ABC TV and ABC iview.
The key to all this is “now also around the world”. But hey, no complaints here if the Netflix effect is working to make an Australian comedy internationally popular for once. Later in 2024 can’t come fast enough.
So The Weekly isn’t funny. No news there. You know what else contains no news? The Weekly itself.
Wait, hang on a second. The selling point of the current version of The Weekly is that “we watch the news so you don’t have to”. As the ABC Youtube channel put it:
“Charlie Pickering takes all the news and puts it back together again to make sense of the nonsense.”
The entire point of the show is that it provides a week’s worth of news – only, you know, funny*.
So this week we tuned in to see… well, we tuned in to see Guy Montgomery, because he really is funny. Turns out the ABC are planning an Australian version of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee with Aaron Chen as co-host! We hate comedy game shows and yet we love this idea. Kinda weird to announce something funny on The Weekly though.
But besides that, it’s also been a big week in local news, what with there actually being some local news these last few days. Not exactly cheery comedy news, but like they say,
“Charlie Pickering takes all the news and puts it back together again to make sense of the nonsense.”
Not seeing any qualifiers near “all the news” there. No suggestion that it’s only the light, frothy news. All the news. All. Of. It.
Come their coverage of Saturday – a somewhat news-heavy period in the Sydney region – and what did we get? The by-election for Scott Morrison’s old seat, because The Weekly likes few things more than making the same three Scott Morrison jokes everyone else stopped making two years ago.
And Monday? A segment on Bluey followed by “let’s roll into Tuesday”. It may have been a big few days for edged weapon attacks and mass chaos in Sydney, but on The Weekly? Hey, South Korean election coverage doesn’t just happen, y’know.
Sarcasm aside (there’s a first time for everything – ed), obviously it’s a massive relief that the crack team of gagsters at The Weekly steered well clear of a couple of serious news stories. Imagine just how impossibly shit their attempts to find an angle on a mass stabbing would be. On second thought, don’t.
But it’s not like this version of The Weekly is in any way amusing. There’s nothing at all wrong with only covering soft news – so long as you make it funny. Half the time they don’t even seem to be trying. “Let’s get Margaret Pomeranz to review yet another TV game show!” Yeah, that’s some comedy gold right there.
So if they aren’t funny, and they are claiming to cover “all the news”, why not just have an actual serious segment? They used to have them all the time. Remember when Pickering would appear in some fake cosy home office and explain some serious news topic in a slightly informative fashion? Those segments weren’t much good, but at least they weren’t trying to be funny.
Once again, the result is bland, nothing, pointless viewing. The Weekly could try to be funny… but no. The Weekly could try to actually cover the news… but no. “To get good, you have to be bad first,” Montgomery said during his appearance. But what if you just keep on finding different ways to be bad?
Not quite a sitcom and not quite a drama, White Fever, categorised on ABC iView as ‘Comedy’, ‘Offbeat’ and ‘Feel-good’, is lots of things but not really a comedy. Co-written by and starring Ra Chapman (Wentworth), White Fever is inspired by Chapman’s experience as a South Korean-born adoptee, raised in Australia by white parents. Chapman is one of more than 3,500 people adopted from South Korea to Australia, and White Fever draws on her experience and those of other South Korean adoptees she has met.
As Jane Thomas, Chapman explores the identity and sexuality of a Korean adoptee with issues. Jane is only attracted to big, hairy white guys, kind of like her adopted father Jack (Greg Stone) and worries that her “type” is problematic. Should she try dating Asian guys, or is that, as a fellow South Korean adoptee suggests, “like kissing yourself.”
As the show proceeds, it becomes clear that Jane’s preference for white guys comes from her childhood spent in the country town of Mount Whiteman (geddit). Internalised racism is a strong theme in White Fever, and there are some pithy scenes involving big, hairy white guys Jane dates, and Jane’s adoptive family, in which both their fetishisation of and racism towards Asians are brought to the surface. A birthday meal, at which Jane’s adoptive family are shown as both loving and caring but also insensitive towards her heritage and her search for her birth father, is indicative of the internal conflict driving Jane throughout the series.
Hera (Cassandra Sorrell), a fellow Korean adoptee and vlogger/influencer, who discusses the concept of “white fever,” a preference for white boyfriends and white culture, in her videos, becomes a sort of mentor for Jane, but Jane finds confronting her inner demons hard.
Jane’s “white fever” plays out as a fever dream. Hyper-real, fast-paced scenes in which multiple friends and associates throw potential or actual home truths at Jane, drive her into a sort of mania, leading to some questionable romantic encounters with both white and Asian guys, an episode where her cute, blonde-haired childhood doll Cindy (Susanna Qian) comes to life, and some not entirely necessary K-Pop sequences.
Ra Chapman as Jane Thomas with Susanna Qian as Jane’s childhood doll Cindy
Along the way, Jane loses her long-standing friendship with Edi (Rosehaven’s Katie Robertson), after she knocks over her wedding cake, and recalls suppressed memories of participating in an egging of Mount Whiteman’s Chinese restaurant, owned by the mother of the only Asian guy she genuinely seems to fancy, childhood friend Yu Chang (Chris Pang).
White Fever does include some elements which suggest a comic intent – puns like Mount Whiteman, some hyped-up performances, a cast which includes Mad As Hell’s Roz Hammond as Jane’s adoptive mother – but this isn’t a comedy. Its bigger influence is theatre, hence the multi-dimensional characters, and how Jane’s inner life and traumas often play out through monologues, or long, dialogue-heavy scenes. (Unsurprisingly, the idea from White Fever came from Ra Chapman’s previous theatre work.)
As for what we think of White Fever, it’s perfectly fine for what it is – a light, surreal, theatrical drama about identity. Our main beef is that White Fever occupies a timeslot which was previously for comedy. And this would be fine if lots of comedies were being made and screened on the ABC at other times…but they’re not. Drama has always been and continues to be well-funded by the ABC. But where’s the money and the timeslots for sitcoms, sketch shows and topical programs which aren’t The Weekly?
The Cheap Seats Returns To Cover The Important Stories.
Premieres Tuesday, 30 April At 8:30pm On 10 And 10 Play.
Some have said that The Cheap Seats hosts, Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald, took a superficial approach to news and current affairs last season.
This feedback has been taken seriously and is something season four plans to rectify.
Melanie Bracewell said: “Despite Tim and I not being on speaking terms, I’m willing to fake it for the 2024 season of The Cheap Seats. I’m hearing whispers that “Across The Ditch” will be returning, bigger and better than ever! I am the one doing the whispering.”
Tim McDonald said: “We’re so excited to be back for Season 4! New year, new stories, but the brief remains the same – Media Watch meets Love Island. 2024 will be a year of big events, from the Olympics in Paris to the US Election. I think there’s even a pickleball tournament in Launceston. We’ve got it all covered.”
Comedians Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald, alongside their Cultural Correspondent Mel Tracina, will return to cover all the important stories. Plus, all new instalments of Mel’s Markets, Timfomercials, Across The Ditch and What’s On What’s On In The Warehouse.
So… still no regular sports reporter? Eh, we’ll live with that.
So yeah, things have been pretty dry around here of late. There’s only so many weeks you can watch The Weekly expecting to see something new (or funny). Other options? They’re somewhat slim. What’s going on? Don’t people like to laugh any more?
We’re a comedy blog, so don’t expect any great insights here. But in our search for things to watch, there are a couple of things we’ve noticed in recent months. Yes, despite the lack of posts we have been working behind the scenes to try and find fresh televisual comedy content. We’re slack, but we’re not that slack.
The first point is pretty obvious: there’s no money out there. Australian television doesn’t really have non-ratings periods like they used to, where everything went on break and a bunch of weird US imports filled the schedules from November to February. But there’s not enough money for year-round programming either, so at some stage the plug has to be pulled. And that stage is now.
From around mid-November through to sometime after Easter, Australian television largely assumes you’ve got better things to do. There’s the occasional new program or returning regular, but they’re few and far between. The ABC isn’t putting to air their first sitcom of 2024 until next week – a third of the way into April. Sure, The Weekly was back at the start of the year, but that proves our point. We’re currently in a dead zone where garbage rules.
On the one hand, this slow start to the year makes sense from a comedy perspective. Right now the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is in full swing, and a lot of Australia’s prime comedy talent is hard at work trying to make a year’s worth of cash in a month. Telling them nope, they’ve got day jobs to go to wouldn’t be popular; this way everyone wins.
On the other, this makes zero sense from a television perspective. You suddenly have Melbourne jam-packed full of primo comedy talent with ongoing shows to promote. Any half-decent talk show* – or format that uses live performers – would be swamped with quality guests. And you do see them cropping up where they can. It’s just that if there was a decent, respected show currently on air where they could appear, it’d be handy for them and great for audiences.
(this, however, would require Australia to have comedy talent under the age of 60 who didn’t make a living from stand up)
The other big problem facing Australian television comedy right now is that a lot of people out there just aren’t as funny as they think. We have a bit of a reputation for going hard on shit television shows, but it’s not like we’re grabbing stuff you’ve never heard of and dangling it in front of your face before giving it a good kicking. Once you get a profile, then we’re interested in your quality. If we’re not talking about you, it’s because we’ve got nothing useful to say.
And just quietly, in recent months we’ve had our attention directed towards a lot of shows about which we’ve decided to keep quiet. It’s never been easier to put together a semi-professional product, but putting together something that’s funny? Yeah, keep at it buddy.
Partly this is the fault of the way the attention economy currently works. People are encouraged to start putting things out there early and often, because you never know what will work. Have an idea, bang it into some kind of shape and get it out in front of people. Either it works or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t just do it again.
The idea of developing into someone who’s good at comedy has become kind of pointless. You do it until you start getting attention, then you just keep it ticking over while you figure out how to turn that attention into money. If you somehow hit really big with a clip, you can just live off that (for a while). And if you have talent but it’s going to take a while to figure it out, don’t worry. You’ll burn out long before then.
People who want to be funny are off doing stand up. People who see comedy as a means to an end make comedy clips. Australian television is the result.
The Nut Farm is an Australian comedy movie, which means you might want to hurry if you want to see it on the big screen. You know, so in a decade or so’s time when the youth start asking questions like “What’s an Australian comedy movie?” and “What’s an Australian comedy?” and “What’s an Australian movie?” you’ll be the life of the party.
Here in 2024, The Nut Farm feels like something that could have been made in 2004. This is not automatically a bad thing. Unlike more recent Australian comedies, which largely don’t exist, this is content with being a comedy. The jokes are silly but there are plenty of them, while everything else comes a very distant second. Which, and we can’t stress this enough, is what you want in a comedy.
Arj Barker isn’t exactly our favourite comedian, but he is a comedian. Putting him in the lead of a comedy? Makes sense because – lets say it again – this is a comedy. And not the kind of “comedy” where the premise is a bit out there so the marketing team are hedging their bets. Jokes require someone comfortable around jokes to make them work. Barker is by no means a great actor, but a great actor wouldn’t be seen dead in this.
Barker plays a San Francisco crypto bro who inherits a macadamia farm in the middle of nowhere when his uncle (Roy Billing, always welcome) vanishes. He comes out to try and sell it to cover his losses (his latest cryptocoin melts down while he’s spruiking it live on stage), only to be told by his uncle’s lawyer and lover (Tiriel Mora, always a pleasure) that first he has to bring in a nut harvest. Uh oh.
While the rest of the film isn’t entirely nut jokes, don’t worry. There are a lot of nut jokes, including a neighbour (who also has a nut farm) named Dee. We’ll wait. Oh, and Madeleine West plays another nut farmer, so technically this is a romantic comedy. Technically.
There’s also a subplot about an evil fracking scheme involving a lot of underground digging and New Zealand accents. It’s pretty silly, but not so silly that it wrecks the film, which was pretty silly to begin with. Much like the nut harvest, it’s more about quantity than quality here. There aren’t a lot of classic gags, but the overall strike rate gets it over the line.
A big problem with a lot of recent comedies is that they struggle to maintain a consistent tone. Here’s a funny bit, now here’s a dramatic bit. They don’t really go together but hey, that’s modern storytelling for you. The Nut Farm is pretty broad and not exactly highbrow stuff, but across the 90 minutes it holds together because each scene and character and subplot feels like they fit in with everything else. It’s consistent; that’s not something to be laughed at.
Unfortunately there’s also a fair bit here that’s also not to be laughed at. This may not be a shocker like, oh, let’s say the last Wog Boy movie, but it’s no classic either. Here’s the poster quote: it’s a reasonable way to pass the time if you’re in the mood for some local comedy.
Are people still in the mood for local comedy? You’d have to be nuts to think so.
Earlier this week 10 broadcast a stand up comedy special from Aaron Chen, If It Weren’t Filmed, Nobody Would Believe. It’s ok. One of the best jokes is hidden in the opening title; Chen also undergoes a mystery costume change halfway through that is never (directly) commented on.
The show is pretty good, not amazingly great. It’s worth the price of entry for a live experience, probably not something you’d purchase to watch again and again. But that’s where we are with comedy on Australian television. Not quite a dumping ground, not exactly a showcase.
Stand ups don’t record their shows when they’re exciting and new. That’s when they’re out there milking their new jokes for all they’re worth. A decent show can generate a year’s worth of work, maybe more if they can tour it overseas. You’re not wasting that on television.
But while recording a show at the end of the run makes financial sense – now you can flog it to the people who’re interested enough to watch you but not interested enough to go see you live – artistically we’re getting a dead fish. Fresh new work from a comedian engaged with the world around them? Nah, just the last gasp of a bunch of ideas they had eighteen months ago.
When someone’s clearly on the way up and getting better all the time – ie Aaron Chen – this kind of show is a time capsule. Nothing wrong with that; we laughed a lot. Drowning during a boring story: so good.
But the more Australian television puts to air stand up specials, the more it stops being the place to go for the best in Australian comedy. If only because the best stand-up comedy is always going to be out there, live on stage.
The Australian Roast of John Cleese, which aired recently on Seven, had a few decent laughs in it, but, mostly, it was a slapdash affair. You’d think you could expect better from a show with 15 credited writers[1] and a group of comedians and entertainers roasting the British comedy legend which included Joel Creasey, Lehmo, Damien Power, Lawrence Mooney, Tom Gleeson, Christie Whelan Browne, Alex Lee, Rhonda Burchmore, Steve Vizard and Stephen Hall.
But as each roaster delivered their bit, it became clear that the 15 writers had all gone off separately to write their assigned speeches and had produced roughly the same set of easy gags. We lost count of the number of fat jokes directed at host Shane Jacobson. We’re not saying some of them weren’t funny, but man, it’s not like he was the guy being roasted. Similarly, how many gags did we need about Mooney’s substance abuse and firing from Triple M? Or Gleeson’s red/bald head and Gold Logie win? Or Burchmore’s age and plastic surgery? Write some different material for each person, guys![2]
But even when the speeches eventually got around to roasting Cleese, each one of them felt pretty much the same. It’s almost like the writers had a series of dot points to work through:
Cleese has had a lot of wives. CHECK!
Cleese must be really broke from his divorces if he’s doing this show. CHECK!
Wow, almost every film Cleese made after A Fish Called Wanda was total crap. CHECK!
To be fair, the above-mentioned things are all true – especially the gags about Cleese’s recent terrible film work – but why wimp out in mentioning The Very Excellent Mr Dundee? Or even better, why not roast Cleese about his dodgy recent TV work, like his plan to resurrect Fawlty Towers.
There were a few highlights, though. Rhonda Burchmore singing an original song called “John Cleese is Dead,” in which Cleese pretended to die halfway through, was pretty funny, in a The Producers sort of way. And Stephen Hall (also one of the credited writers) recounting how he’d played the Cleese role in the 2016 stage adaptation of Fawlty Towers, alternately impersonating and ribbing Cleese, to Cleese’s obvious delight, was also good value. But then it was back to the divorce gags, including some from surprise guest Camilla Cleese, John’s writer and actor daughter. Although, hers, were at least a bit more pointed, like how Cleese’s current wife is 18 days younger than Camilla’s elder sister.
But eventually, after more than an hour of this, it was time for the man himself to get a right to reply, which he did in typical John Cleese style. He may be old, and he may be problematic, and he may not be great at picking films to appear in, but somewhere within him, he still has it.
P.S. Was it just us who noticed that no one on the production team seemed to have a clear idea as to what the show was called? Throughout the show, host Shane Jacobson held a card reading “John Cleese Roast Live!” but the podium which Jacobson and the various roasters stood behind had “John Cleese Roast” on it, while the titles sequence and advance publicity had “The Australian Roast of John Cleese.”
[1] Or you would if you’d never seen an average episode of Saturday Night Live, which employs a great many more writers. And is always average.
March 12, 2024 – Stan, Australia’s leading local streaming service and unrivalled home of original productions, announced 25 Stan Originals across television, film and documentaries during an intimate Stan Originals Showcase held at the iconic Sydney Opera House.
We know what you’re thinking: comedy is back baby! After all, with 25 Stan Originals heading our way, there’s got to be a bunch of comedies in there, right?
And that’s the biggest laugh you’ll get here. Oh sure, there’s stuff like this:
comedy crime thriller Population 11 starring Ben Feldman premiering Thursday
Which, as we all know, really means “crime thriller where people act like dickheads”. But otherwise the line-up is full of this:
psychological drama series
And this:
gripping psychological thriller
Plus this:
A psychological thriller
And of course, this:
10-episode LGBTQIA+ drama
(presumably there’s a psychological angle there somewhere)
The closest we get to a local comedy in the whole 25 shows announced is this:
SUNNY NIGHTS
Starting production in 2024, darkly-comedic drama series Sunny Nights is about how a little bit of sun, a change of scenery, and a touch of violent crime can help a person find their true self. The series follows two siblings who venture to Sydney determined to grow their struggling spray tan business, but when they get caught up in the city’s criminal underworld, they must figure out how to stay alive, out of prison, and in the black. Directed by Trent O’Donnell, with writers Ty Freer, Nick Keetch, Marieke Hardy, Lally Katz, Clare Sladden and Niki Aken. A Jungle Entertainment (Stan Original Series Population 11) and Echo Lake Entertainment Production (The Great), with major production investment from Stan in association with Screen Australia.
Hey, Marieke Hardy’s still getting work! Guess that’s the second laugh here.
You might not want to hold your breath waiting for a third.
