The ABC’s structural change has been bad for scripted comedy

The ABC’s 2025 upfronts announcement last week says a lot about why the ABC makes the scripted comedies it does. And it’s all about where comedy programming sits within the ABC’s corporate structure.

A couple of years ago the ABC restructured and split its operations into two areas: Content and News. Content oversees comedy, drama, documentary, chat, kids, lifestyle and radio shows, while News covers, well, news and current affairs programmes. This was a response to ABC audiences increasingly consuming ABC content through streaming and on-demand rather than broadcast. Chief content officer, Chris Oliver-Taylor, said at the time that this was about “adapting for the digital world and maintaining value for our audiences so that we are here for all Australians – trusted, valued and relevant into the future”.

There’s plenty we could unpack there – and we say this as members of the ABC audience who mostly consume new screen and audio content via streaming or on-demand – but we’re a comedy blog, so let’s look specifically at how this has affected scripted comedy.

Within the Content area are various divisions covering different types of programmes, like Scripted and Entertainment, but there is no department specifically focused on comedy. This means that anyone pitching a scripted comedy has to go to the Scripted team and compete against a bunch of shows which aren’t comedies. The best-known outputs from the Scripted team are shows like The Newsreader and Mystery Road: Origin. Imagine going to pitch your sitcom idea to a bunch of people who’ve been successful with prestige dramas.

We’re not casting shade on either The Newsreader or the various iterations of Mystery Road – they’ve been good shows* – we simply note that there’s been an awful lot of sitcoms green-lit recently which give off distinctly drama vibes.

Amongst the shows that will return in 2025 are the dramedy Austin, a second series of the terrible dramedy reboot of Mother and Son, and three Fresh Blood pilots. Two of the latter were described as a “comedy-drama” in the original press release, with the other described as a show that “combines humour with a surrealist style, depicting the characters’ struggles and comedic escapades in a culturally diverse environment – exploring themes of identity, community and the quest for meaning.” So, a comedy-drama then.

The one scripted comedy that might buck the trend is Optics, with Jenna Owen, Vic Zerbst, and Charles Firth as “the masters of spin” in a show about a crisis management PR firm. It’s described as a “fast-paced, laugh-out-loud workplace comedy”—and we will hold them to that in our review.

But while putting a team who really wants to make dramas in charge of sitcoms is pretty much a rock-solid guarantee that almost nothing really funny will ever get up, that team can simply cite the still currently popular belief that audiences “don’t want traditional sitcoms anymore”. This belief is wrong, of course. Audiences do want traditional, going-for-laughs sitcoms, and when they can actually find one, they’re all over. See Fisk.

The same applies to overseas sales, often cited as another of the reasons for focusing on drama (and, if they must, dramedies and comedy dramas). Except, again, Fisk proves them wrong. It’s sold internationally – to Netflix, no less – despite Fisk being the most traditional sitcom the ABC has done in years. It’s mostly shot in a studio, the characters aren’t drama characters, infusing every line of dialogue with their emotional trauma, and it’s not about anything profound or cutting edge.

What it is, is relatable – everyone’s familiar with weird/annoying people and has to go to a kind of mad workplace. It’s also funny. Very funny. And it’s the kind of show the ABC should be making more of. But, oh no, let’s take a popular sitcom from the 80s and turn it into a shit drama.

But beyond having a corporate structure which fails scripted comedy utterly, there’s also a corporate ethos at the ABC that seems a bit embarrassed to be making comedy at all. Remember the treatment Kath & Kim got? A show that went on to be an international hit that people still talk about, but at the time, ABC tried to ditch?

Infused somewhere amongst those at the ABC is the idea that sitcoms and other scripted comedies are rather grubby and low rent, whereas what they should be making is quality drama. Like they’re their turn-of-the-21st-Century HBO or something.

And yet even despite the ABC’s constant claims in the media about wanting to provide best-value, popular programming for its taxpayer funders, they always seem to forget that many of Australia’s most loved scripted comedies were made by them. This means there are sitcoms that people remember with affection from decades ago, like Mother and Son, which the public is happy for them to reboot (until they actually watch the reboot, of course), but no one’s clamouring for, say, a remake of The Damnation of Harvey McHugh.

So, you might say, ABC has both a structural and an attitude problem when it comes to scripted comedy. And that the one or two decent recent shows that are genuinely valued by audiences seem to have made it onto the slate due to some sort of accident.

But we’re just touching the surface of this problem. Imagine what’s going on in the Entertainment division of Content. What hellscape of poor commissioning decisions and snobbery led to making four series of Question Everything and the green lighting of an 11th series of The Weekly with Charlie Pickering? We may look at that some other time…

* Although we do find the local version of Death in Paradise a bit questionable.