A Few Quick Thoughts on Bad Company

Usually we’re more than happy to go off on a series after nothing more than a brief glimpse at a cast photo. But Bad Company? We’re still mulling the first episode over. So while we wait for out no doubt amazingly insightful full-length review a bit further down the track, here’s a few odds and ends that have come to mind.

Probably our biggest sticking point is the contrast between Kitty Flanagan and Anne Edmonds. Flanagan’s comedy characters are constantly undercutting themselves in ways that bring out the laughs and work well in a group. Edmonds tends towards extremely self-confident characters that dominate the scene in ways that don’t really leave much room for anything else.

Here Flanagan is basically playing a more financially successful Helen Tudor-Fisk, a character that works perfectly well in an ensemble of quirky types. Only here she’s not connected to the ensemble and has no reason to engage with them – possibly a good thing, as the ensemble is a bit sketchy early on.

With Edmonds’ character, the joke is that she crowds out everyone around her; she’s too big a personality for anyone else to get a word in. The trouble is, being a big personality isn’t funny in and of itself, as Chris Lilley taught us multiple times over the years. It seems like the joke is that she’s self-obsessed and also crap – but we haven’t actually seen that she’s crap. Her plays look bad, but not crazy comedy lady bad, just bad art bad.

So when she’s throwing her weight around, we don’t really know how funny it’s meant to be. Flanagan is introduced firing her elderly mentor, so we know what we’re in for. But Edmonds is just being a bossy bitch and refusing to go along with what the corporate bean-counters want; maybe that’s the right thing to do?

That’s a problem because for Edmonds’ character to work, we have to know where we stand. The laughs from this kind of character come from the way the character is inappropriate. Either they have to be so over the top that Blind Freddy can see they need to get back in their box (hello Edmond’s earlier character Helen Bidou), or they need to be surrounded by more normal characters who can model the correct reaction.

There’s a reason why every successful version of The Office* features a couple of young audience stand-ins who constantly look at the camera and roll their eyes. Here, we don’t have that. We just have a creative director who dominates proceedings but… maybe gets results? She certainly seems to be making art of some kind.

The bigger issue is that a big personality that talks over everyone around her is only funny in small doses. Edmonds is playing the kind of character that should be the scary boss that the actual main characters only deal with in a couple of scenes each episode.

She’s got too much main character energy to be a comedy main character. If you’re going to be the boss in a version of The Office, you need to have a strong ensemble around you. Ironically, Bad Company is aptly named: the company she keeps can’t keep up with her.

.

.

*this is basically “what if we did The Office at a theatre company only Helen Tudor-Fisk was also there”