There’s No Time like Fam Time

Finally, a new comedy on Seven that isn’t from Paul Fenech! Wait, did we say “new”? As fans of The Last Year of Television know, Fam Time has been sitting in a drawer for years. A change of management at Seven around the start of the decade saw it fall firmly out of favour, even though the six-episode run was finished and ready to air. So now that it’s been dumped on digital channel 7+, was it worth the wait?

The commercial networks have always loved family sitcoms. Audiences? Well, Hey, Dad..! was a hit for years. Shows like All Together Now and The Bob Morrison Show rated well enough if you didn’t care about quality. Kingswood Country? We could go on.

So Fam Time fits nicely into a long and storied legacy of utterly forgettable sitcoms. Or it would, if not for the nagging feeling that it’s actually trying to be funny. The misadventures of a blended suburban family in the internet age, the joke seems to be “they’re online all the time”. Which in 2024 is like a sitcom based on the idea that people spend a lot of time in their cars and oh shit we just re-invented Squinters.

Remember the bland family comedies of yesteryear? They made sure to have one or more boring viewpoint characters for the audience to focus on. You might laugh* at Betty on Hey, Dad..!, but you were meant to empathise with Mr Kelly’s struggle to be as boring as shit.

Here though, everyone is at least a little bit wacky. Technically, the mum is the normal one. But she’s running around trying to get everyone involved in her blog, which seems to be more like TikTok clips or Instagram stories. Here everyone (oldest daughter makes ASMR clips, teen son is an online sleaze, youngest daughter is a gamer) is on the internet, just not any specific part of the internet – it’s the internet as generic sitcom suburb.

The one who’s not online is the Dad, but he’s a dickhead handyman who is possibly dyslexic considering the multiple times he writes “fellatio” on things. Everyone else is a child, and therefore a figure of fun. So everyone is a comedy character; it might be about a family, but it’s not a family sitcom.

That might sound like nitpicking. But this kind of comedy really needs an anchor character – a straight man, if you like – to hold it together. It doesn’t matter if every other character is doing bizarre random shit so long as there’s one character in the middle of things who’s also thinking “why are they doing this bizarre random shit”. Without that, there’s no reference point to let us know when we’re supposed to find their behaviour wacky. It’s just a show full of poorly written characters.

Being generous, this feels like a show made with a “second screen” mindset. You know, the idea that television shouldn’t be too involved or compelling, because compared to what a phone has to offer it’ll only ever be on as a second screen. Only nobody here realised that comedy doesn’t work as a second screen. You need to pay attention to a comedy if you’re going to laugh at it. If you’re writing jokes aimed at people who aren’t paying attention, you get what passes for comedy on Fam Time.

And what a comedy it is! Constantly humming with the vibe of old folks torn between shaking their fists at the kids and trying to be down with them, and with a cast of characters ranging from “try-hard loser” to “try-hard dork”, it bravely tackles head-on a world the creative team seem to have read about once in a Sunday newspaper article.

So yeah, it’s a mess. Occasionally there’s a half-decent joke or funny moment, but there’s no focus to it. Mostly it’s just a lot of high energy antics from half-baked characters desperate for attention.

Which, to be fair, is a pretty good reflection of the online world.

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*you didn’t