Australian Tumbleweeds
And The Winner Is… Sid-e-knee
As people who run an awards ceremony of our own – well, the general public vote in the Australian Tumbleweed Awards, but you know what we mean – we have a tiny bit of compassion for the AWGIE awards. Clearly The Australian Writers Guild’s hearts are in the right place: considering how low on the pole writing is seen across pretty much all of film and television they’re to be applauded for supporting the people who – despite what everyone else in the industry might tell you – really are the ones who make it all happen.
Then they gave Wednesday Night Fever the award for “Comedy – Sketch or Light Entertainment”. The fuck?
Seriously, we’ve been scratching our heads about this for days. First we thought “oh, maybe it’s just for scripted sketches so a show like Mad as Hell somehow doesn’t qualify?” Nope, it says “Light Entertainment” right there on the lid. “Maybe there’s some rule whereby on-camera talent doesn’t count as a ‘writer’ for these awards?” Nope, Sammy J is listed as one of the writers and he was the show’s host. “Maybe all the other shows submitted were even worse?” Um…
COMEDY – SKETCH OR LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
*This Is Littleton: ‘Talent And A Head for Business’ – Amanda Brotchie with Dave O’Neil, Karl Chandler, Ronny Chieng, Melinda Cklamovska, Tegan Higginbotham, Tony Moclair, Matt Okine, Miles O’Neil, Morgana O’Reilly, Stevo Petkovic, Steen Raskopoulos, Vachel Spirason and Adele Vuko
*How Green Was My Cactus – Doug Edwards and Lindy Wilson with Shane Edwards (Radio)
*Wednesday Night Fever: Series 1 – Mat Blackwell, Rick Kalowski, Steve Lynch, Sammy J, Ian Simmons, Joel Slack-Smith and Stephen Walsh with Anne Edmonds, Heath Franklin and Richard Thorp
*Legally Brown – Joel Slack-Smith and Stephen Walsh with Nazeem Hussain, Morgan Jones and Richard Thorp
Yeah, even against that line-up Wednesday Night Fever should have been lucky to win a kick up the arse. Still, it could have been worse:
COMEDY – SITUATION OR NARRATIVE
*The Moodys: ‘Sean’s Day in Court’ – Patrick Brammall
*The Moodys: ‘Commitments’ – Phil Lloyd and Trent O’Donnell
*The Moodys: ‘Australia Day’ – Phil Lloyd and Trent O’Donnell
What the hell happened there? Actually, what the hell happened with the ABC’s comedy submissions across the board? The ABC is currently well-stocked with “situation or narrative” scripted comedy – why didn’t Upper Middle Bogan make a showing? Or Please Like Me? Or Chris Lilley’s stuff? Answers on a postcard, please.
Knowing literally nothing about how submissions to the AWGIE awards work – the guidelines only say you need to be a member to nominate – we’re going to make two wildly speculative guesses here. The first is that maybe the Australian Writers Guild is largely a Sydney thing, hence the lack of Melbourne-based entries… though you’d think The Chaser would have got a look in then.
The second is that maybe someone at the ABC decides which show they’re going to nominate, and that they only nominate one show in each category to prevent the embarrassing situation where one ABC show defeats another for an award the ABC has to nominate itself for. To us, that seems a little more likely – even in the drama categories it looks like the ABC has tried to avoid competing against itself where possible.
So if that’s the case – and we’re totally just speculating here, so please write in and tell us if we’re wrong – the question is this: who chose what shows to nominate? And did anyone at the ABC think that only nominating a sketch show produced and written by the man who is now the ABC’s head of scripted comedy might not have been a good look? That is, if the person who chose the ABC’s sketch comedy submission and the chief writer / producer of that sketch comedy aren’t the same person.
(hey, didn’t the creator of Wednesday Night Fever work with the Moodys writers on At Home With Julia? Why yes he did. Gosh, if we didn’t know better we’d think there was a theme to the ABC’s comedy nominations)
There’s presumably a lot of back-patting going on at the ABC at the moment; winning an award – at least, winning an award that doesn’t say “Australian Tumbleweeds”- is always a cause for celebration. Unless you’re someone who writes sketch comedy or light entertainment for the ABC: then you may very well have just seen your boss shut you out for an award so he can nominate his own show instead.
But wait – maybe Wednesday Night Fever earned the nomination? Maybe it rose to the top based on sheer unadulterated quality alone?
…
Yeah, the comedy categories are embarrassing enough for the AWGIE Awards as it is; let’s not start speculating that they actually thought Wednesday Night Fever was funny.
Taxicab Confessions
First, an apology: We honestly thought we’d covered Back Seat Drivers (Tuesdays around 10pm, ABC2) back when it first started a few weeks ago. But then we realised we only thought we’d covered it because it was exactly the same as a dozen or more equally forgettable shows we’ve dozed off to over the years. Again, we apologise.
Of course, the real people who should be apologising here are the programmers at ABC2. Why does anyone ever think this kind of show is worth doing? No, seriously, c’mon: the basic idea is “let’s get a bunch of stand-up comedians – you know, that job where they’re constantly going on about how they hate it when the public tries to get involved in their performance – and have them go out and interact with the public! It’ll be hilarious!”
No, it won’t be. It won’t be because it never is. It never is because despite what a lot of tossbags and wankers will try to tell you about “reality” being funnier than anything you could make up, the fact of the matter is that almost all the time reality is boring and packed with dullards. Sure, occasionally reality is the funniest thing around, but you have to spend a massive amount of time getting rid of the boring bits first; there’s a reason why people don’t pay money to go sit in an office watching other people at work.
And yet we keep on getting these high concept shows that turn out on closer examination to have no concept at all. Think about it: what’s the point here? If it’s to get comedians to say funny stuff, there are hundreds of other formats that would do the job better. If it’s to get insights into how regular people feel about the issues of the day during unguarded conversations, why get comedians involved?
Obviously the real point is that it’s a format that does a lot of things while being cheap. Comedians are cheap and reliable on-air talent; using tiny cameras inside a taxi means you don’t need a set; getting regular people to talk means you don’t have to pay writers or cast members. Genius! Until you get to the part where it costs the home viewer exactly the same to watch this no budget effort as it does to watch something that’s actually had some time and money put into it – but it’s on the ABC so presumably that doesn’t really matter. How many people watched Please Like Me this week? Guess they’re not telling.
After all that, Back Seat Drivers isn’t exactly a dead loss. Everyone seems decent enough (host Veronica Milson really needs some better jokes though), they’re all having a chat, they’ve got interesting stuff to say, the comedians occasionally chip in a funny line, and suddenly you realise just how amazingly shithouse almost all of those Agony shows were. Seriously, these regular folk are way more interesting and insightful than the C-list celebrities they trotted out on Agony; if insight and not fame had been the metric used to judge these shows, this would be on prime time ABC and Agony would have gone straight into the bin.
Problem is, Back Seat Drivers is basically just talkback radio with pictures. And the pictures are of the inside of a taxi. And Dan Illic is driving the taxi. It’s the kind of show that worked back in the late 90s when television was pretty much the only home entertainment option going and something quirky and low-key could build an audience: these days, various local content guidelines aside, you really have to wonder why they bothered.
You Wouldn’t Read About It
Comedy, especially in Australia, is a tough business to make a long-term go of. We can count on one hand the number of comedians from the mid-90s who are still creatively vital in 2014, and once you curl back the fingers for Working Dog and Shaun Micallef the rest of the hand can go home early. So really, with Die On Your Feet we should be celebrating the fact that Greg Fleet even has a sitcom on commercial television in 2014. We’re not going to because we’re horrible people, but we at least wanted to acknowledge his achievement here before we started sinking the boots in.
We’re currently four weeks into the series so chances are you already know the set-up: a group of stand up comedians are hanging out during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Um, that’s pretty much it. While the main characters are played by stand up comedians (Adam Hills, Corrine Grant, Alan Brough, Stephen Gates and Greg Fleet), the comedians aren’t exactly playing themselves; for example Hills, one of the great “nice guys” of Australian comedy despite being kind of bland as a television presence, is here playing something of a massive arsehole. All the better to make the kind of thoughtlessly horrible comments you’d pretty much expect any comedian to make when their guard was down.
It’s all very “inside baseball”, as the kids say because internet culture is American culture and “inside cricket” doesn’t make any sense. It’s a show about comedians that references a lot of stuff only comedians would know, but don’t worry: Fleet is just as willing to dig way too deep into the minutiae of, for example, punk rock (episode four starts off with a seemingly endless and pointless discussion of Brisbane post-punk band The Saints (their classic track “(I’m) Stranded” especially). It might be intended to give us insight into the characters and how they view the world but it comes off more as Fleet just wanting to talk about a band he likes. When a hungover Gates groans “stop making lists”, he instantly becomes the most sympathetic character on camera.
In theory there’s no reason why this kind of “drama set in a very specific world” shouldn’t work; it’s certainly worked on plenty of other shows. The episodes here usually have a loose thematic framework – episode four is addiction, which is why we’re focusing on it considering Fleet’s well-publicised dalliances (he punches out a quick spiel early on – “drug abuse has cost me a lot – around $200 grand – but on the upside if I hadn’t been tripping at my Neighbours audition I would have never got a part on Neighbours, and if I’d never got a part on Neighbours I’d still have my self esteem” – which sounds a lot more polished than anything else in the episode), but there’s not really much deep insight into being a comedian on the gear.
Instead, there’s plenty of talking to camera documentary-style as the (backstabbing yet cosy) cast drop superficial bon mots about the ways drugs and comedy interact. Then Brough’s character gets addicted to the computer game Civilisation. Cue lots of screenshots which look pretty.
Unfortunately this episode, like all the others we’ve seen, lacks the kind of well-plotted spine needed to hold it all together – Grant’s character says she’s giving up the drink but does anyone think that’s going to last? In fact, this often feels like a collection of random scenes just thrown together at, well, random, and not just in regards to the writing: There’s a scene where Brough, Gates and Grant are talking in a pub, then we suddenly cut to a different scene where Brough and Fleet are talking in (presumably) a different pub – no transition, nothing. Worse, the cut is between two shots from the same angle – Brough is on the left of screen facing right, then suddenly we’ve gone to a closer shot of Brough on the left facing right only now he’s sitting across from Fleet instead of Grant. Why put these two scenes back to back when the result is this jarring?
And then we cut back and forth between the two and ahhh it’s meant to be non-linear editing (a scene in the past unfolds intercut with a scene later on) except if you have to stop and think about what you’re watching in a comedy you’re not laughing. Hands down up the back, we already thought of the “we weren’t laughing anyway” line. This just feels sloppy, and not in a good way: considering we were big fans of the somewhat similar Peter Moon behind-the-scenes vehicle Whatever Happened To That Guy, clearly we’re not exactly setting the bar high here either.
It’s not that sitcoms need a cast of great actors to work, but you do need people who can at least act a little. It’s become traditional for idiots to say “but what about Jerry Seinfeld?” whenever this question of acting in sitcoms comes up, but unfortunately for them even a brief glance at an episode of Seinfeld reveals that while Seinfeld himself may not have a great range as an actor he’s perfectly convincing playing a smug man-child. Sadly, based on their performances here Adam Hills and Corrine Grant are barely convincing as structures upon which clothes have been hung, let alone living human beings.
Basically, their performances are so poor they would sink this show no matter what else it had to offer. It’s nobody’s fault – well, it’s their fault for not being able to act, but as high profile and generally quite entertaining stand-ups they were logical casting choices for a sitcom looking behind the scenes at the world of stand up comedy. But they’ve been cast as harsh arseholes, which seems at least somewhat at odds with their actual personalities, and they’re just not good enough as actors to bridge the gap.
But really, all this episode – and the series in general to date – has to offer is just a whole bunch of observations about the world of comedy. Which is different from actual comedy in that many of the observations are more along the lines of “hmm, that’s interesting that photographers ask comedians to ‘do something wacky’ in photos and comedians hate that”, rather than the actual laughs you would have got from seeing a real-life wacky photograph. It’s an in-depth look at what happens in the sausage factory when all we want is something tasty to eat.
Not that this kind of thing can’t work: Tony Martin got a lot of laughs from lifting the comedy curtain on Get This. And considering this was filmed after Get This brought Greg Fleet back onto the radar of a lot of comedy fans, it seems reasonable to assume Martin’s work may have been an influence. But there’s a big difference between a few quick observations about working in comedy made on a radio show full of news jokes and silly sketches, and four solid hours of little more than comedians talking about their jobs. Sure, comedians are slightly better at making jokes about their jobs than, say, people who review comedy. But shop talk is shop talk no matter what the shop, and sooner rather than later shop talk gets stale.
Fleet’s been doing narrative comedy since the mid-90s, both in his own live shows and with more traditional theatre, so the thrown together nature of this is probably the biggest surprise. It feels like a show made by someone who woke up one morning and thought “hey, the stuff me and my mates talk about at work should be on TV – it’s just that funny!”
It never is.
Viral Prankster Plays Prank, Australian Media Eats It Up.
One of the things that frustrates us about the current media – in all its forms – is that there’s not enough following up. Politicians make crazy claims about their future plans, newspapers print them, and then ten years later someone looks around and goes “oh, they never did build that billion-dollar scheme, did they?”
We’re not expecting the media to put together a running tally of schemes announced that have mysteriously fallen by the wayside – if they did that what would be the point of Utopia, for one thing – but we do kind of think that when a firm date is attached to something when that firm date rolls around the press should go back to see how things are going. So with that in mind, remember this?
DAVID Thorne is best known for his witty email exchanges that go viral worldwide and pop up in Facebook feeds every so often, but the former Adelaide man can now add TV writer to his list of credentials.
Thorne, who grew up in Modbury and now lives in Virginia, US is working on an eight-part TV series for the American cable and satellite network HBO, alongside Arrested Development’s Jim Vallely.
Named after Thorne’s blog, 27b/6 , the comedy show is set in a small advertising/design agency and is pitched as a cross between The Office and Eastbound & Down.
“I signed a few contracts, sat uncomfortably in on a few meetings, and rewrote scripts written by writers they brought in,” Thorne says.
The 40-something has also been working with Australian comedian Chris Lilley on a mockumentary called Cold Feet; America’s Bunny Slopes, due for release around September.
Around September, you say? And yet zero word has been reported on this since then. Seems odd that when HBO can give you an air date six months in advance for the new season of Game of Thrones, the only person talking up Thorne’s work with them is Thorne himself.
We mentioned this earlier this year. We were pretty sceptical even then; now we’re openly derisive. Thorne is a self described “internet prankster” – why didn’t anyone think to contact Lilley about their “working together”? Doesn’t HBO have a phone number?
At least the Sydney Morning Herald has come around to our way of thinking: they’ve taken down their article we linked to where they praised Thorne and reported as fact his upcoming work with Lilley. Though a google search for it did turn up this variant from June featuring one interesting difference from the SMH version:
Cold Feet will air in the US in August and in Australia and Britain in September, followed by a DVD release in October.
How was anyone out there stupid enough to fall for this? Wait, don’t answer that, we’ll be here all day.
Reality Bites
You may not have noticed what with the all-out media blitz for Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me, but the ABC launched a few other comedy programs in the last few weeks. Press release time!
Reality TV is TV right now. Everything else is just making up the numbers. And yet, for all its cultural force, we barely discuss it. But that’s all about to change.
Join Tom Ballard and a panel of industry experts for a half-hour of sharp, cracking panel discussion where they’ll dissect the week in Reality TV, both home and abroad, share war stories and give us the low down on what really goes into making Reality TV.
Panellists for episode three are:• Ryan “Fitzy” Fitzgerald – Former Big Brother housemate, host of The Recruit and co-host of Nova’s Breakfast show, Fitzy & Wippa;
• Marion Farrelly – Producer of Big Brother, Farmer Wants A Wife, and The Recruit;
• Andrew Shaw – TVNZ Commissioning Editor of everything from New Zealand’s Got Talent to Changing Rooms.During episode three, Tom and the panel will:
• Round up some of the best moments from the past week in Reality TV in This Week In Reality. Shows include The Amazing Race, The Bachelor, The X-Factor and E!’s new cosmetic surgery offering Blotched;
• Take a look at the future of TV singing contests;
• Analyse one of Big Brothers best scenes during The Big Moment; and
• Play another round of Real or Fake.Ending the show on a high note, Tom showcases The Final Three – a countdown of international Reality Gold.
Hey guys – forget all that chat you’ve been having about reality television at work and down the pub and at social gatherings and in the comments threads of recap posts and television forums and on social media; here comes the ABC to show you how it’s done.
Do we even need to tell you this is The Gruen Transfer does Reality TV? No “kinda” or ‘basically” qualifiers here either: this is exactly The Gruen Transfer on reality television right down to pointless audience cutaways, Tom Ballard’s hair and shitty jokes. Hey, everyone who ever thought any of the Gruen programs were intelligent, insightful looks at the media landscape: WRONG.
What Reality Check does do is make it extremely clear that the Gruen formula is nothing more than bundling a collection of wacky clips together then getting a bunch of “experts” to drain all the fun out of them. So on that level, Reality Bites is actually better than Gruen: because they’re still shopping around for “experts” and haven’t yet settled on a reliable yet Margaret-and-David level painful “opposites attract” duo, the guests aren’t yet grand masters when it comes to making sure all eyes remain firmly fixed on them. Which means for much of the show you can block them out and just enjoy the wacky clips.
Sure, this stuff is roughly on par with a time-filling segment on Hey Hey It’s Saturday – the glory days when Clive James would host this sort of thing are well behind us, thus proving the irreversible decline of Western Civilisation – but in theory crazy clips from stupid television shows are fine with us. Just ditch the panel, get someone actually off-the-cuff funny to host, and make sure at least 25 of the show’s 28 minutes is clips and you might have something watchable.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
Yet Another Theory About Please Like Me
Okay, so despite Please Like Me tanking in the ratings- yes, despite wall-to-wall media attention in this country it rates less than, oh, every other show you’ve ever heard of – local critics continue to go nuts over it. Here’s a quick cross-section that’s been brought to our attention:
American and Australian critics compete in their love for the show. James Poniewozik, TV critic for Time magazine called it one of his favourites for 2013 and, more recently, the magazine gave it prime real estate in a story titled How an American Network Saved One of TV’s Best Twentysomethings.
The Top Ten Australian Characters on TV
Phryne Fisher
1 Billie Proudman (Kat Stewart in Offspring, Ten)
2 Alice Ross-King (Georgia Flood in Anzac Girls, ABC)
3 The Micallef persona (Shaun Micallef in Mad As Hell, ABC).
Elizabeth Bligh
4 Elizabeth Bligh (Noni Hazlehurst in A Place To Call Home, Seven).
5 Ja’mie King (Chris Lilley in Ja’mie: Private School Girl, ABC).
6 The Politician (John Clarke in Clarke and Dawe, ABC)
Josh Photo: Supplied
7 Josh (Josh Thomas in Please Like Me, ABC2)
8 Gemma Crabb (Julia Morris in House Husbands, Nine).
9 Caroline Tivoli (Claudia Karvan in The Time of Our Lives, ABC)
Gemma Crabb Photo: Natalie Boog
10 Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, ABC)
When the actual plot is explained, it’s clear that everything happening is fairly dramatic, but when you’re watching the show, somehow the Big Things that are so often Dramatic are treated with a comedic touch that manages to be light without making light of anything. They’re going for realism, Thomas told BuzzFeed, but it’s also narrative, and “stuff has to happen.” When you reflect on the show, he said, you realize, though, “Wow, he’s had a really rough fortnight.”
Plus glowing reviews in TV Week and The Green Guide.
Previously we asked why – why all this love for a little watched show on a minor channel starring a guy from Celebrity Splash and a bunch of Optus commercials? We concluded it was because Thomas was the kind of quirky inner-city goofball a certain segment of the Australian media could happily get behind – but it’s gone far beyond that now.
So now we reckon this: Please Like Me is one of the few – actually, it’s pretty much the only – Australian made television show being shown in the US. And because no-one in Australia is actually watching it, critics here can happily praise it to the high heavens safe in the knowledge they’re not going to be contradicted… which wasn’t a freedom they had with the last Australian show to air overseas, Chris Lilley’s Jonah from Tonga.
That makes pretty much all these articles and reviews talking up Please Like Me nothing but clickbait. For once Australian TV writers can talk about a local show – which they kind of have to, because no-one on the internet gives a shit about what they think about overseas shows (we can read much better overseas writers’ thoughts about them) – while also, in theory at least, taping into a much larger overseas audience of readers. More readers = less chance of being sacked and replaced with a slideshow titled Top Twelve Times Beyonce Yawned In Public.
Obviously, actually saying concrete things about Please Like Me isn’t part of the plan. Pointing out the show’s flaws would only turn off the fans, and people who aren’t fans aren’t going to read your article anyway – it’s only when something becomes so popular it’s impossible to ignore that it becomes possible to attract an audience of haters. So everyone writes the same crowd-pleasing article about how good Please Like Me is in the hope of attracting the same mass audience of mildly interested chumps.
Man, we’re totally doing this internet thing all wrong.
The Right Kind of Chap
We’ve been pretty hard on Fairfax’s television reviewers these last few years, what with their blatant nepotism and incessant championing of complete shit. But of late we’ve been wondering: have we gotten them all wrong?
Back when Marieke Hardy’s Laid was more than just a punchline to a joke about wasting taxpayer funds, Fairfax’s writers repeatedly praised it in tones that… well, “sickening” doesn’t really come close. At the time we figured it was largely due to Hardy being a both a Fairfax employee and friends with at least some of the writers, mostly because the writers often made sure to mention their friendship with Hardy. But what if we were mistaken?
There’s been a fair bit of talk around here about this recent column by Fairfax Green Guide editor Debi Enker praising Josh Thomas and his show Please Like Me:
What’s the matter with you people? Why aren’t you watching one of the best comedies on TV? It’s not as though we’re over-loaded with great home-grown offerings. Yet one turns up, into its second season and still ticking along nicely, and no one’s watching.
Yeah, that’d be because it’s kinda shithouse.
Now, usually we’d take time out to point out that a lot of what Enker – one of Australia’s top television critics, don’t you know – says doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
This is a low-key but incisive comedy about awkwardness and it’s more interested in how the characters interact than what happens to them.
You can’t really make a comedy “about” awkwardness, any more than you can make a comedy “about” laughter. You make a show about situations or events that cause awkwardness, which – we’d argue – means you’re not actually making a comedy. But even if you are, surely “how the characters interact” IS “what happens to them” – character-based dramas such as love stories and the like are all stories about “how the characters interact”.
As for “incisive”, pretty much the only insight provided to date is “awkwardness is really awkward” – it certainly hasn’t been “awkwardness is funny”. With his endless series of scenes where characters stand around making chit-chat that goes nowhere – yes, Thomas has made a sitcom that’s not as funny as commercial radio – Please Like Me is basically an aimless soap opera where every scene is designed to make someone feel embarrassed. Usually the home viewer.
But then we read today‘s “Couch Life” column by Ruth Ritchie in the Fairfax press, which contained this gem:
Closer to home Josh Thomas’ second series of Please Like Me (ABC2, Tuesday, 9.30pm) is a world away from Louie and yet there are similarities. Josh Thomas, like Louis C.K. has shaped a sit-com around the personae he has allowed us to come to know in variety and panel TV. He plants his gay awkward hipster character in a share house and throws in some dysfunctional family. The result is a very original, moving, hilarious show that is impossible to pigeonhole. As authentic and unusual talent as Josh Thomas is, the chance of one so young and so … un-Rove McManus achieving a show of this quality is slim and a tribute to all involved. He must get sick of the comparison with Lena Dunham and Girls. Both are young and unlikely looking stars. They embrace their outsider status and make it work in their favour. Josh Thomas probably has more heart, his humour springing from a less brittle and facile well than that of self-absorbed young folks in Brooklyn.
The fuck? Why is everyone over at Fairfax suddenly pushing the same “Josh Thomas is Your New God” angle?
(comparing Thomas to various cult comedy figures from the US? Check. Expressing surprise that something this “good” could be coming out of Australia? Check. Use of the word “awkward” like it’s a compliment? Check.)
Normally we would have simply assumed the usual rampant nepotism and been on our way. But as far as we can tell, there’s no direct link between Thomas and Fairfax (if anyone knows different, please let us know). So then why are they doing this? Kinne was a better show (and also on a non-core channel), but Fairfax all but ignored it. They can’t seem to say a nice word about Mad As Hell without making some snide comment about how Micallef is “too smart” for the masses. Hamish & Andy? They don’t even rate a mention.
Our best guess is that these writers honestly and deeply believe that whatever its flaws, Please Like Me is a Fairfax show. It reflects the core values of Fairfax readers: it’s an insipid, bland white guy (who likes guys sexually but isn’t in any way threatening) drifting through a variety of inner-city locales pondering slightly quirky questions in between dealing with his mentally ill mother. It is “ironic” and “edgy” and “not for everyone”. It is a show Fairfax can Get Behind.
We’re not saying some sinister figure in editorial has sent down an edict ordering public displays of support for Thomas: in much the same way that political writers don’t rise in News Corp unless they share the core beliefs of Rupert Murdoch, clearly television writers don’t get regular work at Fairfax unless they value bland, “quirky” upper middle-class Australian comedies over, well, pretty much anything else we make here.
And to some extent, we’re fine with that. Newspapers, like all forms of media, reflect a set of values that (they hope) are attractive to their readers. If you’re somehow able to reconcile your personal poverty with supporting a political party that wants to make you even poorer, you read the Daily Telegraph; if you think replacing every single shop within a fifteen mile radius of the CBD with a cafe or boutique homeware store is a great idea, you read the Sydney Morning Herald. If you don’t agree with either there’s no real point complaining: they’re simply not for you.
The problem is, even if you’re 100% on board with Fairfax’s values Please Like Me is still not very good. Comedy might be subjective, but seriously guys: there’s just not all that much to laugh at here. And so what pisses us off about all this hollow praise is that it’s a sign that Fairfax’s television writers have decided that they’d much rather support a show based on cultural values than on actual quality. Which means we have all this space devoted to talking it up, only it reads more like the writers are trying to praise a show that they don’t really have that much praise for.
For fuck’s sake, Ritchie calls it “very original”, and then two lines later we get “[Thomas] must get sick of the comparison with Lena Dunham and Girls.” Which one is it? And if you’re going to call a show “hilarious”, it helps if you can quote one single solitary joke from that show. If you found it funny, explain why – without simply assuming that awkward = funny (you do realise we have different words for those two things because THEY’RE NOT THE SAME THING).
Put another way, why is it in praising Louie Ritchie was able to quote an actual funny line to support her opinion of that show (“What are you afraid is going to happen if you hold hands with a fat girl? Are you afraid your dick is going to fall off?”), yet the best she could do for Please Like Me was to let us know that the “best material in the show belongs to the bipolar mother played with special deftness by Debra Lawrance”?
Could it be that she found one show actually funny while the other was, well, you know… just the type of show that Fairfax supports?
Big Swinging Dicks
“I’m not the problem today mum, you’re the problem”
Well, no Josh, you’re always the problem in Please Like Me. But for a brief shining moment early on in episode two of series two, it looked like maybe that problem had been solved. Josh was the put-upon son, his crazy mum was crazy, and as comedy set-ups go hey – isn’t it about time someone ripped off Mother & Son?
But that would be a situation, and Please Like Me is the standard bearer for an era where having a situation in your sitcom is death. Life doesn’t have situations, right guys? Life is random and awkward and so the best comedies should reflect that. Even if that isn’t funny. Which it isn’t, especially if you’re not all that good at writing comedy. Presumably being so badly written it’s like the events on-screen just randomly happened is what passes for good writing these days.
Ok, serious question: does anyone know if episodes of Please Like Me run at different lengths in the US? Because this one had a really weird structure that kind of felt like either it ended too soon or went on too long. First Josh drops his mum off at the private hospital, then he goes to a party and so far so good – but then about five minutes before the end he suddenly leaves the party (plots resolved: zero), goes back to the private hospital where he meets a couple of big name actors playing patients, has maybe three minutes with them THE END. Nothing’s resolved, but then again pretty much nothing was built up to either: it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.
Something else that’s a sign of bad writing is repeating phrases over and over in the hope that they’ll magically become funny. Sam Simmons used to do this a lot; it never worked. So when Josh says “Elder Flower Gin Spritzer” three times in ten seconds (some random guy also says it during those ten seconds), that’s ten seconds when we’re not laughing. Plus it’s another awkward semi-flirtation scene between Josh and a cute boy: remember how Seinfeld used to just cut to “hey, it’s Jerry’s new girlfriend” every episode? That’s because actual relationships are funny in a lot of different ways; the first tentative steps in a relationship are funny – if they actually are funny – in pretty much the same “awww, it’s so cuuuute” way.
As this second episode wears on, one difference between it and Mother & Son – ok, there’s literally dozens of differences, but here’s one – comes to mind: in Mother & Son, at least some of the laughs came from never quite knowing whether the mother was senile or just really cunning. A lot of comedy is about the balance of power between the characters, and having the Mother possibly be just really sneaky made it possible to laugh at her ditzy antics in a way we couldn’t if she really was mentally ill. Josh’s mum, on the other hand, is just mentally ill. Not really that funny.
As for why we were thinking so much about Mother & Son during an episode of fresh new youth comedy Please Like Me, that’s because when we did pay attention it was either Josh being a stud or Tom revealing the “fact” that he has a really large penis. Oh, and Josh’s penis is “aesthetically pleasing”. See, this could, in theory, be funny if it didn’t feel like it was actually an advertisement for Josh Thomas’s real penis. Basically, the scene felt like the comedy equivalent of this column:
Today, some statistics report a third of women still never experience orgasm, which suggests to me I’ve been very lucky with partners or I’m dating great actresses.
There’s certainly been the odd one unable to reach the stars but, being of sunny disposition, I’ve tried not to wallow in culpability. A good tradesman never blames his tools, and all that.
Overall, however, this wholly unsatisfactory experience has been dwarfed by the numbers of women I’ve met who go off like a frog in a sock. There’s even been a few notable occasions when I’ve put in such embarrassingly little effort I’ve asked “Do I need to be here?”
The moral being, talking about how great you are in bed – or how big or “aesthetically pleasing” your penis is – almost always makes you look like a jerk.
Maybe we’re idiots [pause for Josh Thomas fans to nod violently], but we kind of thought the idea of having Josh flee the mental home where he’d offloaded his mum for a party at his share house was going to be to show how the guilt from offloading his mum was going to prevent Josh from having any fun. Yeah, we know “Josh” is meant to be a bit of a dick in the series – by which we mean, Josh is kind of erratically written, what with being a dick to his friends (fine in a comedy) then some kind of sad puppy in love (also fine – just not in the same character) – but usually even shitty comedies realise that bad people still feel guilt, and seeing a horrible person struggle against an emotion that forces them to act decently can be a good source of laughs.
But instead Josh sits around talking about penises and mocking Tom when he goes to hit on a girl and staring at his latest cute boy victim and complaining that his body may not be attractive to look at and trying to get his frog costume back and obsessing about a ham he’s cooking. Lucky his mum walks out of the private hospital to make his life hell, right guys? And the cute boy also has mental health issues! This is clearly a serious show tackling serious issues with laughter. Only without the laughter.
“I’m not the monster here,” Josh says, after mocking an orphan for not having a mother. So wait, he… really is a dick? This kind of awkward comedy requires you to be a consistent jerk if it’s really going to work – there’s a good reason why Larry David didn’t spend a third of every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm pining after a girl. But don’t worry, Josh soon finds his way back to the private hospital where the nutty patients are sure to supply plenty of laughs. Well, Denise Drysdale is one of the patients and they’re telling first time sex stories (worst one wins the last chocolate). And then Hannah Gadsby’s character says “then I was raped”.
It’s technically not a rape joke because it’s not a joke – well, not until Drysdale’s character then says “I was raped too” in a desperate attempt to get the last chocolate. What are we going to say here? Honestly, we weren’t even disappointed; Please Like Me is such a sloppy, haphazard production once you pay more than the most superficial attention to what’s going on that any old hack idea just slides right in there. This is, after all, a show that can’t actually manage to give an individual episode a beginning, middle and end – not in that order at least.
Maybe if you find Josh Thomas hilarious all this shoddy writing just passes you by. Maybe if you’re impressed by US sales it doesn’t matter if plotlines are just forgotten and situations go nowhere. Maybe if you think having young people in a show is all you need to do to appeal to young people you can enjoy an episode of Please Like Me without constantly thinking “what the fuck is this shit that I am watching?”
Us? We’re just waiting for Thomas to tell us more about his fucking dick.
The title is ironic
To make a high school debating start to this post, the word “utopia” is defined as…
an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.
…and, obviously, in the case of new ABC/Working Dog sitcom Utopia that’s not quite how things are for the main protagonists.
Tony (Rob Sitch) oversees the Nation Building Authority (NBA), a government department which manages major infrastructure projects. In the first episode we see him deal with the fallout from a logo redesign, while second-in-command Nat (Celia Pacquola) has to find room for a community garden in a major residential development. Subsequent episodes follow in a similar vein as the team – which includes Kitty Flanagan as PR woman Rhonda, Luke McGregor as Project Manager Hugh, and Toby Truslove as Marketing Guru Karsten – deal with crisis upon nation building crisis, all under the watchful eyes of the nation’s media.
Some of the themes of a previous Working Dog sitcom, the weirdly unfunny The Hollowmen, are explored again in Utopia, except it has the good sense to adopt the comedic stylings of the even older Working Dog sitcom Frontline. This means we get a sharp satire on the world of politics and PR but also a re-hash of some characters types. The ditzy receptionist, the unhelpful PA, the over-enthusiastic PR lady and the wanky marketing guy…these are very familiar from Frontline, albeit instantly recognisable and well played by the cast.
Utopia is one of those shows that will amuse its intended audience from the get-go and has the potential to run for several series or more. And if you image a state of sitcoms in which everything is perfect, those are just some of the characteristics of a new comedy series.