The Week(ly) Shall Rise

Ok, so you know how, week after week after week, we complain that The Weekly is the same old thing? This week they changed it. And in a development that shocked us to our very core, it actually made the show better. Who even knew such a thing was possible?

Yeah, maybe we should be a little less snarky when we’re trying to pay a compliment. Here’s how it broke down:

*Usual rubbish intro with that pointless checklist – ooh better not turn over before Pickering gets to Dog Anti-Vaxxers.

*A couple of middling Eddie McGuire jokes which were made worse by being back-to-back

*Press conference jokes! These are always gold… FOOLS GOLD that is #zing

*Judith Lucy Wellness Warrior. Nice work as always, only reason we’re still watching.

*Oh great, a bunch of clips from A Current Affair. Remember when The Chaser used to do this stuff and it was funny and had a point?

*Hang on… isn’t that Briggs? Sitting at the desk with Pickering? Did this ever happen last year?

*Briggs on a bike isn’t our favourite segment, but we’ll give The Weekly a thumbs up for it going into an election because having Briggs – a cast member who really only has this occasional segment – conduct the political interviews off the lot makes it almost possible to see the interviews as a separate thing that doesn’t taint the integrity of The Weekly. Not that it has much integrity to taint, but at least having the bits with politicians as an entirely separate thing handled by a solo cast member means they don’t feel quite so much like the show is cozying up to the people it should be making fun of.

*And it’s interview time. Hey, clips from Get Krack!n – oh, now the rest of The Weekly is going to look sad in comparison. Awww.

*Another shit clip joke bit. Ha ha, politicians have to say and do stupid stuff in locations they know little about because if they don’t the media won’t cover their policy announcements.

*Hard Chat. What’s left to be said about this segment that hasn’t been said about being buried alive in a landslide of shit?

*And… that’s it? The show’s over?

It turns out that all you have to do to lift The Weekly from a totally pointless show to an almost tolerable one is get rid of the extended news segment where Pickering “takes down” some tepid weeks-old issue that social media has already passed judgement on. Or get rid of Hard Chat / Tom Gleeson, because halfway through the main interview we started to wonder if he’d been cut and seriously, when you start to think there’s a good chance Tom Gleeson isn’t going to turn up watching The Weekly becomes a lot more pleasurable.

But of course, next week they won’t have a segment with Briggs they have to try and fit in and things will go back to usual. The Weekly clearly has problems that run bone-deep – the bits where they do snarky voice-overs over footage of politicians really need much smarter voice-overs to seem better than the time-fillers they currently come off as – but it’s depressing to realise how little needs to be done to make the show noticeably better.

Especially as, as Charlie Pickering reminds us at the end of every season, it’ll be back next year.