Having Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation and Have You Been Paying Attention? on back-to-back (there was even time this week to go from one to the other without missing anything out) is both a great way to get two-and-a-bit hours worth of something close to actual entertainment from the commercial networks, and a handy way to... Read More »
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a show that’s just a jumble of unrelated parts, but there is definitely something wrong with The Weekly. No, we’re not talking about the way its listed as a comedy yet features straight news segments asking why isn’t dentistry covered by Medicare (hilarious!), or the fact it was allowed to... Read More »
Well, our worst fears came to pass: despite starting at 7.30, Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation ran just long enough to overlap with the start of Have You Been Paying Attention?. Comedy fan crisis! Fortunately TAYG is being repeated this Wednesday night (weird that HYBPA? is currently one and done screening-wise though), plus there’s all the... Read More »
On the surface, Corey White’s Roadmap to Paradise looks like another of those shows, in the tradition of John Safran, which uses comedy to make a point. Except it isn’t; Corey White takes a different approach. He’s got actual solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing our society – the state of democracy,... Read More »
Making a one-off funny show is relatively easy; making a long-running show is also fairly easy. Combining the two is where it gets a little difficult, and not just because of the generally held belief that a comedy that starts strong is bound to drop off quickly (aka the Fawlty Towers defense). So hats off... Read More »
After almost six months, we’re going to declare Tonightly with Tom Ballard a success. Not in terms of ratings… Tonightly, which aired four days a week on ABC 2, pulled low ratings during its debut run. An average episode got less than 50,000 people watching, which meant it didn’t make it into the top 20... Read More »
So it took maybe ten minutes into 2018’s first episode of Gruen for someone to say “doing no advertising is silly” and fuck, how did that massive foot-shaped hole suddenly get in our television screen? And this was during a segment on the current banking royal commission, which – from our half-arsed reading of the... Read More »
We’ve just sen the back of season eight of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, and seriously: is this show ever going to drop off? Australian television isn’t known for giving comedies long runs, but we’ve had almost ninety episodes of Mad as Hell now and the quality shows no signs of fading. How much longer... Read More »
Well, episode 6 wrapped everything up nicely. Which means we need never watch Sando again. Let the nation rejoice! Sure, it could come back (the resentful daughter’s taken over part of the business with her ex-fiance and current husband as lackeys and plans to take over from Sando one day, and the idiot son’s in... Read More »
Like we predicted, episode 5 of Sando was where the writers laid the groundwork for whatever spectacular finale’s going to happen in episode 6 of Sando, i.e. we’ll find out whether Sando gets her business back (and also her husband?). Super exciting. Meanwhile, there was a sub-plot about how Sando’s resentful daughter was born with... Read More »