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 »
Here’s what you feel like on a Monday morning: wine – and lots of it. Failing that, there’s the web series Wine, a bottle shared is a problem halved, created by and starring Jess Harris (Twentysomething) and Emily Taheny (Mad As Hell), in which two friends, Harry and Bridget, meet regularly in inner Melbourne bars to... Read More »
If there’s a genre of comedy that Australia doesn’t make a lot of and probably should do a bit more of, it’s animated comedy. Sure, we had Pacific Heat about a year ago, and Fresh Blood produced Koala Man, which is being made into a series, but that’s kinda it. So, it was nice to... Read More »
While we were noodling around on SBS On Demand the other day, we came across some of the pilot shows from Comedy Runway, a 2014 SBS comedy pilot scheme that we’d completely forgotten about. And because some of the shows are about to disappear from SBS On Demand quite soon, and we’ve never reviewed them,... Read More »