Deep within the depths of ABC iView, we stumbled across The Housemate, a short comedy series written by and starring Gemma Bird Matheson and Alex Keddie. The Housemate imagines a world in which a room in a decent and affordable inner-city rental property is so scarce that the only hope some people have of ever... Read More »
Ryan Shelton’s Instagram serial Cliff returned for a third series last month and featured a whole bunch of celebrity guest stars. In previous series, Shelton has played all or most of the roles – the show’s “hero” Cliff Schnitzel and Cliff’s on-again/off-again partner Rebrecca – but in this police-themed series there were appearances from Luke... Read More »
Aunty Donna’s new YouTube series Glennridge Secondary College is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Aunty Donna: a series of high-energy sketches riffing on a theme, in this case, life at a typical suburban secondary school. If the sketches look highly polished, that’s because many of them come from the trio’s live tour from... Read More »
Signing wildly popular YouTube stars Superwog (AKA Theodore and Nathan Saidden) to make a sitcom for ABC Comedy is possibly the smartest move the channel and the ABC have made in years. Last year’s pilot episode has been viewed by almost 4 million people, and episode 1 (released on YouTube last night) has had more... Read More »
It’s possibly just a coincidence that the new web series Sheilas, a comedy look at semi-forgotten female figures of Australian history, has launched a week after Drunk History. Although clearly in the minds of TV producers, pisstakes of the past are considered a comedy goldmine. Or were a couple of years ago… In the case... Read More »
The first time we listened to Tony Martin’s talkback radio parody podcast Sizzletown we didn’t know what to make of it. Having followed Martin’s career for about 30 years, his comic voice was very familiar to us…but this was different. Since Get This (which ended more than 10 years ago now), Tony Martin’s comedy’s been... Read More »
Rather old news, this, but Childproof, which we reviewed last year, won Best Comedy at this year’s Australian Podcast Awards. Why do we bring this up? Because, out of curiosity, we’ve spent the past month listening to the five other comedy podcasts it beat. What was particularly interesting was the range of styles out there.... Read More »
Australia doesn’t have a great history of making sitcoms with gay characters; Please Like Me and Outland are the only ones that immediately spring to mind. As for sitcoms featuring lesbians, bisexuals, or anyone else who could be classified as LGBTQIA+, there are even less or them. So, it was nice to get a media... Read More »
SBS’s much-promoted Homecoming Queens, a seven-episode series about two millennial women living with chronic illnesses, is currently available on SBS OnDemand. Why do we mention it here? Because it’s been described as a comedy. Is it funny? No. Homecoming Queens joins a few other recent millennial “comedies” (Please Like Me being the best known) in... Read More »
You expect good things from the writers of Mad As Hell. Mad As… has been the funniest show on TV for ages and much of that’s down to the writing. So it was with interest that we’ve been watching Good Afternoon Adelaide, a homage to and parody of local television from the 80s and 90s,... Read More »