10’s Pilot Week 2018 was a bold experiment in broadcasting, where eight budding comedies were pitted against each other in a battle to the death to see which programs featuring white men would make it to our screens. And having copped a fair bit of flack for having a white men-heavy line up last year,... Read More »
Remember how we were wondering if we were ever going to see Seven’s long-promised sketch show Orange is the New Brown? Seems we are – and sooner than we expected: New Seven sketch comedy Orange is the New Brown, featuring Nazem Hussain, will debut next week (that’s 8:30pm Thursday November 8 on Seven) Following on... Read More »
Remember how Pilot Week was going to bring us Ten’s next hit comedy? How it was kind of exciting to work out which of the pilots would get a series? How we’ve been waiting for ages to hear which shows are going to series, and have heard nothing? Well, it turns out, that Ten’s next... Read More »
Pilot Week’s final installment Bring Back… Saturday Night was in many ways the least surprising: Rove doing a live tonight show. Now there’s a fresh new format. The show itself was… fine? Rove is Rove, which is to say he’s the best light entertainment host in the country so long as you don’t expect him... Read More »
As the only sitcom of Pilot Week, Dave O’Neil’s Dave looked like a breath of fresh air. Until we started watching it. Dave is about one day in the life of Dave O’Neil, suburban comedian and family man. He takes his kids to school, hangs out with his mates, has to find a famous friend... Read More »
As suspected, Trial by Kyle was just Judge Judy hosted by fading media question mark Kyle Sandilands. Not surprisingly, it completely failed to hold our attention, had none of the spark of the original (where the original joke was that a real judge had to deal with this rubbish) and couldn’t even be considered comedy.... Read More »
Hey look, Kinne’s back! And we mean that in the truest sense of the term, as Kinne Tonight is pretty much identical to Troy Kinne’s previous show on Channel Seven: there are traditional sketches, rapid-fire listical skits, a bit of live stand-up, the kind of harmless street prank that Hamish & Andy used to do,... Read More »
So was Taboo any good? That’s the wrong question to ask, and by wrong we mean offensive: as a show about the heart-warming struggle of a group of disabled people, we should be applauding the very fact they’ve made into on Australian television screens. But it does make it a little tricky to review… and... Read More »
One of the big problems the Australian commercial television industry faces is that it’s small. There are plenty of perfectly good ideas for television shows that we could do decent jobs of, but they’ll never get off the ground because if you’re not a massive crowd-pleasing success you’re not going to be shown in prime... Read More »
Ten’s Pilot Week started with the ensemble sketch show Skit Happens and Sam Dastiyari’s Disgrace, in which the ex-politician and a panel analyse gutter journalism. And while the latter was a Gruen-style peek behind a curtain we’ve looked behind a number of times under our own steam, thanks, and Dastiyari and panel didn’t tell us... Read More »