Back when the ABC was running promos for Please Like Me and The Ex-PM pretty much back-to-back, we noticed something a little unusual: while the commercials for Micallef’s show focused on people actually saying and doing funny things, the Please Like Me spot only showed one thing, over and over – people laughing. Maybe we’re... Read More »
It’s hard to believe that Andrew Dugdale was ever put in charge of anything, let alone this country, but that’s the premise of The Ex-PM, the new ABC sitcom written by and starring Shaun Micallef. Once upon a time Andrew Dugdale (Micallef) had a popularity rating of 76%, which saw him win four elections and... Read More »
The second season of Utopia saw it evolve from a sitcom which was mainly about how difficult it is to build infrastructure in this country, to a sitcom about an office in which people find it difficult to build infrastructure in this country…hey check out that subplot about the overzealous plant hire guy! This change... Read More »
In our review of episode 1 of Sammy J & Randy in Ricketts Lane we hoped that the rest of the series would ”place more emphasis on getting laughs from dialogue, and writing song and dance sequences which work well on camera”. And in happy ending news, it has. Episodes 2-6 are much stronger than... Read More »
So The Chaser’s Media Circus returned last week, and we had nothing to say about it. Well, actually we did: compared to the stodgy, plodding panel show we recalled from last year it was a snappy, pacy – even, dare we say, funny – slice of political comedy that used the game show angle to... Read More »
Remember Open Slather? The show that was going to revitalise Australian sketch comedy by harking back to the golden age of the late 80s and… well, that was pretty much it. But the late 80s! When comedy was funny! Not all the quasi-racist material mind you, and a lot of the stuff about women looks... Read More »
“Lauren, isn’t that stretching credibility?” That was the moment we gave up on Gruen for 2015 (we made it a whole ten minutes in – gold star for us). Wil Anderson and the panel were talking about a pet food commercial involving warring street gangs that joined forces to save a dog, this issue of... Read More »
If you’ve ever seriously wondered why television critics in this country are respected by no-one – even as television criticism around the English-speaking world enters some kind of magical golden age of relevancy thanks to the irresistible rise of the recap – may we quote Debi Enker on The Weekly: “Through four months on air,... Read More »
It’s easy to forget how charming Mad as Hell is in its refusal to assume it’ll be invited back next year until you hear Charlie Pickering say “Welcome to the final episode of series one of The Weekly“. Series one? Forgive us if we’re wrong, but at the time of writing the ABC hasn’t announced... Read More »
On the surface of things, Sammy J and Randy’s Ricketts Lane looks like the sort of high concept sitcom we get every couple of... Read More »