Vale Bad Company, Hello Make That Movie

Creating a hilarious ensemble sitcom isn’t easy, but some approaches work better than others. And as we say goodbye to Bad Company on the ABC and hello to Make That Movie on HBO Max, it’s not hard to identify which approach is funnier.

Bad Company is a show that should have generated a lot more laughs than it actually did. It’s set in a theatre company, a place where strange people get away with the sort of stuff that’d get you sacked in most other workplaces, yet the show felt flat across most of its six-episode run. It was only in the final episode, when things came to a chaotic climax, that there were real laughs to be had.

The main issue was that only two characters were given any decent airtime or dialogue: artistic director Margie (Anne Edmonds, also the writer and creator of the series) and CEO Julia (Fisk‘s Kitty Flanagan). Sure, there were plenty of people in the background who occasionally got to chip in with a line or two, but can you remember who, say, Donna and Kat were? Or indeed, which of those two was the one whose solution to every problem was to turn the internet off?

This lack of fully developed and memorable supporting characters meant that a lot of the time, the action and attempts at laughs came from Margie and Julia fighting with each other while the rest of the cast stood around and watched. At least one more person was getting the spotlight than in your average Chris Lilley comedy, but Bad Company should have gone as hard on the “company” part of the title as it did on the “bad”.

Unlike your average Chris Lilley comedy, though, Bad Company did, at least, have some funny moments. Like Julia’s horrific idea to have a fried chicken company sponsor a major production, and the sequence with the Tesla. There were also some memorable guest appearances from Nicholas Bell (The Games) as dodgy French clown Marcel and Phil Lloyd (Review with Myles Barlow) as Gary, an actor who went full method in the part of Julian Assange. But the show needed a lot more of this.

Make That Movie, on the other hand, created, co-written by and starring Sam Campbell (Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee), has a well-rounded cast of regular and guest characters, who generate a lot of laughs.

In this high-concept mockumentary series, Campbell plays an award-winning film director who travels around the UK with his team of cinematographer Winnie (David Hargreaves), sound recordist Pat (Helen Bauer), fixer Jess (Lara Ricote) and general dogs body Sebastian (Aaron Chen). Together, they make movies based on ideas suggested by members of the public, leading them to cover a weird and wonderful range of subjects and genres. Their efforts include a horror film about a couple who turn into snakes, a science fiction drama about elderly people being scammed online, and a High School prom film where an ancient bog man emerges from the slime and goes on a date with a student.

Aside from the obvious laughs generated from parodying sci-fi, horror, teen dramas, and mockumentaries, the Make That Movie team get plenty of funny lines as we learn about their strange backgrounds. Oddly, the one person who remains a kind of mystery, at least in the first few episodes, is Sam Campbell himself. Although we do learn he’s maybe not the greatest film-maker in the world.

Make That Movie adopts a very different sitcom style from Bad Company’s, of course. The central concept of Make That Movie is hard to believe, whereas Bad Company portrays theatre companies fairly accurately. Yet Make That Movie, with all its strange hyper-realness and oddly naive characters, is not exactly unbelievable. It gets the tone of reality documentaries, where a carload of experts “fix” something for someone, spot on. And every character and subplot in the show is well-crafted, used to drive forward the action and to achieve the maximum number of laughs (shout out to Asim Chaudhry, of Black Mirror fame, as a pervy High School Principal).

Getting a chance to write and star in your own sitcom is a huge achievement for any comedian, and the temptation to make yourself the focus of the attention in your show must be huge. But sitcoms are about groups of people interacting, and the best laughs come when all the characters – including the bit part players – have a reason to be there and something funny to say. Bad Company failed to get laughs a lot of the time because it didn’t make as much use of the supporting and guest cast as it could have, while Make That Movie thrives on throwing a bunch of weirdos and eccentrics together and letting the magic happen.