Get Krack!n Hits the… wait, what?

Get Krack!n this week tackled the hard-hitting issue of… hang on a sec, we’ll get back to Get Krack!n eventually, but did you see the promo the ABC ran just before (and after) it this week? Let’s hit the big notes:

1): The Weekly will be back March 20th

2): It’s going to have a new “correspondent”

3): They didn’t announce who, and

4): They obviously didn’t announce it in a Married At First Sight parody because that would be pretty demeaning to the mystery new host and… oh hang on a second.

Where to begin with this shit? To get the obvious out of the way first: either they don’t actually have a new correspondent yet or (more likely) whoever they do have is someone we probably haven’t heard of, because otherwise they would be shouting it from the high heavens.

This almost certainly means that our hopes and dreams regarding The Weekly have once again been dashed – instead of hiring someone who could shake up the place, or even just work as a counterbalance to the imperial smugness of Pickering and Gleeson, there’ll be some occasional guest appearances from someone who’s clearly a distant third in the scheme of things. Which was always going to be the case, but we like to keep our hopes alive for recreational purposes.

After all, if you needed any more of a reminder of how much of a boy’s club The Weekly is, just rewatch that promo.

https://www.facebook.com/theweeklytv/videos/818446385187501/

Married At First Sight might be the hottest thing on television right now, but is this really the way the two male hosts of a semi-serious news program want to announce the hiring of their new workmate? No wonder Briggs was nowhere to be seen.

(if it turns out that the new correspondent is a dude, then this promo suddenly becomes a lot better… though The Weekly itself would become much worse)

It’s been a long running sign of just how kak-handed The Weekly is in general that they’ve never really managed to figure out a way to promote it accurately. This promo would work fine for a show that specialised in pop culture parodies and sketch comedy, or even to peddle some kind of doofus panel show where wacky hijinks are the norm. But if you’ve ever watched The Weekly you know that around 70% of it is pretty much straight news with its tie slightly loosened – and yet every single promo for it is trying to flog it as the funniest thing since Fast Forward. Come for the comedy, stay for the seven minute lecture on plastic in the environment.

But the juicy filling in this particular shit sandwich is that air date. Here’s all you need to know:

The 2019 Australian federal election will elect members of the 46th Parliament of Australia. The election will be called following the dissolution or expiry of the 45th Parliament as elected at the 2016 double dissolution federal election.

The next election must be held by 18 May 2019 blah blah blah

It seems the ABC, in their boundless wisdom, has decided that the satirical news program they want to cover the 2019 Federal Election is the toothless sack of used nappies that is, and has consistently been for the last few years, The Weekly. When the nation turns to the ABC for comedy to cut through the waffle flowing freely from this election campaign, they’re going to find Hard Chat working its hardest to make our pollies seem like funny buggers in on the gag and Pickering trying his best to pretend he’s not going to be voting whatever way Daddy’s accountant advises him to.

(our current best guess for the new correspondent? Julie Bishop)

Baseless personal attacks aside, over the last few months there’s been a lot of discussion about the way the ABC board and management have been pandering to the current government. Is giving the prime election comedy slot to their most provably pissweak “satire” program yet another example of this? That’s not for us to say.

What we can say is that if you were an organisation desperately, palms-sweatingly, pants-wetingly afraid of doing anything to annoy your current or future political masters, and you had two satirical news programs to choose from when it came to election coverage, choosing The Weekly would make you look pretty gutless whatever your publicly stated reasons (if any) for doing so.

Having people paying attention to The Weekly for once isn’t exactly good news for anybody either.