The Children Have No Future (in Australian comedy)

A long, long time ago, comedy was for the young. Sketch shows were packed with performers fresh out of uni; everywhere you looked sitcoms were being written by young faces. And now? Uh, yeah.

Hey, let’s start off the holiday season with some good news, shall we?

Optics is not returning to ABC, ending its run at one season.

The series created by and starring Vic Zerbst and Jenna Owen centred around crisis management PR firm Fritz and Randell. It also featured Charles Firth, Belinda Giblin, Claude Jabbour and Bali Padda.

“Optics won’t be returning, but I do think Vic and Jenna are exceptional performers, and I would love to find another project that Vic and Jenna could helm,” ABC Head of Screen Jennifer Collins told TV Tonight

Is anyone surprised? Not just because it didn’t exactly set the world on fire – that’s standard operating procedure for ABC sitcoms – but because it was clearly a “youth” project installed by the previous regime. And when there’s regime change at the ABC, fans of Aunty Donna know all too well that the old guard’s attempt to bring in young viewers is the first to go.

It didn’t help that Optics was neither fish nor fowl. If it was about two young PR professionals, why were the funniest storylines often given to 50-something Charles Firth? And those “funniest storylines”? Not all that funny.

Which wouldn’t have been so big a problem if the ABC was giving sitcoms written by young people a chance to settle in, rather than shoving them out the door ASAP because Austin just won’t fuck off and die and they only have two other spare comedy slots for the year.

In contrast, Stan’s latest yoof dramedy He Had It Coming gets by almost entirely by fully committing to the bit in a way that the ABC can only dream of. Set at a hyper-polarised university setting where oafish mens’ rights activists and kill all men feminists clash, it’s basically a brightly coloured buddy murder mystery: when the local football rapist has his corpse dumped under some feminist graffiti on campus, our mismatched leads (a hustling influencer and an aimless artist) have to solve the crime before they get charged with it (they sprayed the graffiti).

Throwing around silly stereotypes while moving fast enough (love those half hour episodes) to keep things fresh even when they’re not all that interesting, it’s not quite enough of a comedy to deserve a full review but has enough laughs for us to mention it here.

It’s also a stark reminder that streaming services can and will make series like this because this is the kind of thing that people will actually watch and talk about. Does the ABC make series like this? And if not, is it because the last thing they actually want is to create something that attracts attention? Maybe they should have given Optics a second series after all.

And in our increasingly thankless job of keeping track of Stan’s yearly Christmas “comedy” movie output, we should note that this year’s effort is Bump: A Christmas Film. Yes, finally Australian television has revived the tradition of sitcom movies where they take the cast on a tropical holiday, where they do all the usual stuff only in louder outfits.

During her promo tour Claudia Karvan revealed that now Bump is done, it’s the first time she hasn’t been working on a series this century. We’re going to say… yay? Her particular brand of dull good taste has blighted the top end of town since Secret Life of Us and Love My Way, giving us decades of bland yet quirky dramedies instead of, you know, something actually funny.

That said, the otherwise totally forgettable The Time of Our Lives – seriously, once you hear Karvan is in a series you automatically know exactly how much of it was set around upper middle-class dining tables* – did feature Mick Molloy in the first season as a radio host (typecast much).

Hey ABC – it’s not to late to give him a spin-off: he definitely fits into the demographic you’re going for in 2026.

.

*According to Wikipedia, “The show follows the lives of the Tivolli clan, an Australian extended family in inner-city Melbourne. Aged in their thirties and forties, the characters are occupied with career advancement, home ownership, child-rearing and the vagaries of relationships.”