Double the Fresh Blood

In their wisdom, the ABC are now showing this year’s Fresh Blood winners on the free-to-air channel as well as iView. Well, two of them at least. While we’re getting Urvi Went to an All Girls School and Westeners, the third of the pilots – Going Under – is nowhere to be seen. The press release said it was a comedy-drama “about personal growth and the connection between individuals and their communities”. Yeah, we’ll wait.

We’ve expressed our views (basically, “meh“) on both these pilots before. These finished versions don’t change things up all that much. And why would they? They won the competition. But the extended run time does give them more room to breathe. Does that make them worthy additions to the ABC line-up? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Urvi isn’t quite a YA series. But its focus on teenagers at high school (plus some family drama) does give it that vibe. It’s also more of a dramedy than an outright comedy. The jokes are often funny and there’s some silly stuff mixed in, but “I want to do drama at high school” isn’t much of a hook. It’s a funny and well observed look at high school from the students point of view. It just doesn’t go beyond that to become anything universal.

(this definitely feels like something 10 or a streaming service might pick up. Just add a few more diverse characters and make it more of an ensemble show)

Likewise, this version of Westeners has a lot more (and better) jokes, but if you’re not into the arts / media scene in Australia we don’t know what to tell you. A lot of the humor and observations here are very much insider stuff. They’re strong jokes; it’s still a show where the main storyline is that an artist gets lured away from her calling with the promise of making lots of money speaking on panels.

(Westerners has the comedy advantage out of the two shows, but the subject matter is firmly “niche ABC project”)

Both these pilots do a great job of bringing their settings and relationships to life. The personal and cultural elements in both are especially strong. In both cases we would have happily watched a few more scenes focused on that. And to be fair, it’s a fine line between “who cares about this stuff?” and “by being so specific, they’ve managed to make it universal”. Maybe given a six episode run both shows could cross that line. Both these pilots – again, can’t stress this enough, they’re well made and often pretty funny – just aren’t there yet.

A problem is that they’re both about people who want to be in the arts. Urvi wants to star in a drama production; the two leads in Westeners are an artist and a fashion designer. Sure, write what you know and all that. But if Fresh Blood just keeps on serving up pilots that are thinly veiled autobiographies from twenty-somethings working in the arts, it’s going to look even more pointless. The ABC in its current state is never going to give a show like that a series*.

If the ABC still ran local comedy on ABC2 / ABC Comedy / whatever it used to be called? Both of these pilots would definitely have a proper home. It’s a sad state of affairs when we’re shaking our heads at two pretty funny shows and saying “that’s not enough”. But in 2025? When the ABC is maybe only doing three local sitcoms for the year and one is the UK co-production Austin? It’s not enough.

A big part of the problem is that, as we saw earlier this year with Optics, an ABC sitcom really does have to go as broad as possible to try and grab as many viewers as possible. Did the way Optics took a young up-and-coming comedy duo and then paired them with the middle-aged Charles Firth and then stuck them in yet another generic sitcom explaining how the media “really works” make for a funny show? Of course not. But that’s the path that ABC sitcoms, even a winner like Fisk, have to travel.

If the ABC made more than a handful of scripted comedies a year, sure. Then there’d be room for some actual variety. They could seriously develop new talent instead of running yet another program that creates a bunch of one-offs that are never going anywhere. They could run series where being funny was the whole point.

And maybe pigs might fly. They’d probably be funnier than another series of Austin.

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*was the possibly relevant White Fever really a comedy? We still don’t know – and we’ll probably never find out, as a second series seems off the table