Alexander Wept, For He Had No More Lands to Conquer

It’s the end of an era:

The ABC’s highly respected head of comedy Rick Kalowski today announced his resignation after more than six years in the post.

After commissioning and overseeing the production of 80 titles, spanning pilots, series, digital content and podcasts, the executive tells IF he is exhausted and needs a break.

The ABC’s loss is clearly comedy’s gain going by the gags in those first two sentences alone. And then there’s this:

Arguably he will step down after one of the ABC’s most distinctive and successful years in comedy

We’d be very keen to have someone expand on that argument. Very keen indeed. We’re guessing the first part of the argument would be to make clear that it was one of the ABC’s most distinctive and successful years in comedy named “2019”, because compared to pretty much every other year, including many of the ones under Kalowski’s reign, this year was crap.

Then again, as we’ve pointed out, next year looks set to be even worse, so getting out now is probably a good move.

We’ll no doubt have more to say on this during this year’s Tumbleweed Awards, but for now it’s hard to know what we’re going to miss more; the way he’d blame creatives for not being able to attract overseas funding to Australian comedy series, or the way just about every story about him including his own Wikipedia page omits the fact he was the creative force behind the excretable Wednesday Night Fever.

One things for sure though: when it comes to this sentence-

Among his earlier commissions were Rosehaven, Please Like Me, Upper Middle Bogan, Wrong Kind of Black, The Moodys and Ronny Chieng: International Student.

– they forgot to mention the fact that in at least three of those cases he was re-commissioning series that had been given the green light by his predecessor.