Coolum Bananas
The Strange Calls (starting Tuesday on ABC2, but already available on iView) is so good it’s already picked up for a US pilot. Well,... Read More »
Comedy TV
You Can’t Handle The Truth
Whadda know? Turns out The Unbelievable Truth isn’t half bad. The jokes are funny and there’s a lot of them, the dodgy panel format is constantly being broken up by cutaways and in studio antics, and… oh wait, maybe we should actually describe the show first: Craig Reucassel from The Chaser is your host, there’s... Read More »
Blah Blah Blah
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Australian comedy is currently not operating at peak efficiency. In fact, it’s coughing its guts up all over the place. Duds to the left, ratings flops to the right, tired old formats hacking out their final breath everywhere else. What does it say about... Read More »
Post #383 – the one where we don’t hate on Sam Simmons
Yesterday TV Tonight ran stories on new funding approvals from Film Victoria and an upcoming sketch comedy series from Sam Simmons, giving us a preview of the ABC comedy line-up for the next year or... Read More »
The Unbelievable Delays
It’s always a bit puzzling when a network goes to the effort of making a brand new comedy show and promotes the fact that they are doing so (i.e. in The Age and the Herald-Sun), and then sticks that show on the shelf for... Read More »
So Let’s Get Back Together and Do It Again
A few months back we ran a post about how, for all its critical praise and fannish worship, The Late Show wasn’t all that influential when it came to actual Australian comedy television. Someone wrote in to take us to task for not mentioning The Chaser’s War On Everything, and rightly so: while it may... Read More »
A Solution to a Problem We Didn’t Know We Had
Why doesn’t Australia have any ensemble comedies? As in, why don’t we make sitcoms where we get together a bunch of actors people have actually heard of? Okay, sure, we don’t make sitcoms full stop these days, but on the rare occasions when we do make them – Lowdown, Laid *shudder*, Outland, The Jesters, Twentysomething,... Read More »
Adam Zwar ate my hamster
Making its debut tonight is the second series of Lowdown, the Adam Zwar sitcom set in the world of celebrity tabloid journalism. Series 1 ended with columnist Alex Burchill (Zwar) and photographer Bob Geraghty (Paul Denny) carting their boxes down the street after their employer, The Sunday Sun, had been shut down. Now The Sunday... Read More »
Three cheers for the beer
The Beer Factor, a rare piece of original comedy for GO!, started up on Saturday night. Hosted by stand-up Tom Gleeson, it’s basically The New Inventors but where all the inventions are solving beer-related... Read More »
Husbanding Your Resources
House Husbands might not be a comedy, but it’s certainly the future of comedy. This wildly uneven, supposedly ‘heartwarming” look at four men who for various reasons are the primary caregivers to the children in their households is, like pretty much every single prime-time drama series that’s premiered on commercial television since the ABC invented... Read More »