Mother and Son: Not Demented Enough

It’s no surprise that the new season of Mother and Son is an improvement over the first. Okay, yes, it is a bit of a surprise, because how often do Australian comedy series improve with time? We’re so used to duds that turn fully half-arsed in their second go-round that it’s easy to forget that with practice humans – usually – get better at things.

The most obvious reason that this second visit with the 21st Century version of Maggie and Arthur is a step up is Denise Scott. She was easily the best thing in the first season: she was also (it’s no secret) unwell at the time. Now on the mend, she’s back in full force and the series is a lot better for it.

The writers also seem to have realised that if you have someone of the caliber of Denise Scott on your show, it’s not a bad idea to write to her strengths. So Maggie is now a bit more of a freewheeling nutbag and slightly less of a sinister nutbag manipulating her son to keep him under her thumb. It makes her funnier to watch, and while technically it damages the central concept of the show a little, at this stage who cares?

Speaking of the central concept, the first season had no idea what to do with it. Scott could handle her side of things, sure. But “re-imaginer” and co-lead Matt Okine didn’t seem interested in playing a character who wasn’t yet another video-game playing man-child looking for a partner he could sponge off. That undercut the psychological underpinnings of the series in a big way. This Arthur wasn’t neurotic and under his mother’s thumb psychologically. He just wanted someone – anyone – to clean up after him.

So this season has, somewhat sensibly, decided that the mother / son relationship here is more akin to a couple of flatmates. He can’t afford to move out, she needs someone to set up her internet, his sister is not a great comedy foil but hey, bring on the gags. It’s a lot more disposable, but given the choice between failing at being great and succeeding at being just okay, this particular team have chosen… wisely.

Mother and Son is much more surface level this time around. Pretty much every episode sounds like there could be some solid characterisation going on – 2/3rds of them seem to involve some new character coming between Maggie and Arthur, while the rest involve some situation that dials up their co-dependent relationship up to 11.

And yet, each time the actual episode is really just another story about rich oldies hogging the houses, the cash and the remote. Which is fine (and accurate), but probably the stuff of a sitcom that, you know, has a well-thought out position on things. At least we get a bunch of okay jokes and a guest performer hamming it up to some (usually excessive) degree. Jean Kittson is back! Yeah, that’s a win.

Going more cartoony was definitely the right choice, even if it’s not going to save this pre-Christmas turkey. Maybe given another five seasons this could eventually lead to a half-dozen classic episodes: who knew that Matt Okine and Denise Scott were a halfway decent comedy team? Nobody who watched the first season that’s for sure, they hardly seemed to share a scene together.

This reboot remains pointless and vaguely annoying. Seeing Kitson and Scott together just makes you wish they’d been given their own sitcom; meanwhile, Okine’s manchild act is increasingly butting up against some hard limits as he goes from “comedy pathetic” to “just regular pathetic” and we go from “laughing at” to “did our phone just ding better look at it for twenty minutes just in case”.

But compared to the first season’s urine-soaked trainwreck, this is passable viewing if you stumble across it by mistake. Not that the ABC has had a new viewer since 2012, but fingers crossed all those people watching Fisk on Netflix will one day figure out what that weird sideways twisted figure 8 in the end credits stands for