Australian Tumbleweeds
Truly the Sweetest Plum
Anyone’s who’s been observing Triple M since the axing of Get This knows that comedy hasn’t really been their focus lately – and by comedy we’re talking real comedy, like sketches and funny chat from comedians, rather than a small group of boofheads punctuating their sports chat with vaguely shocking comments followed by “Ha ha ha, steady on mate!”. So it was a pleasant surprise towards the end of last year to see Triple M hire Nick Maxwell and Declan Fay to bring their excellent podcast The Sweetest Plum to radio. Now Maxwell and Fay are doing the drive time shift in Sydney every Monday to Thursday (with Roy & HG on Fridays), and in Melbourne on Fridays (although this appears to be a best-of of the Sydney shows). There’s also a best-of podcast of the Sydney shows with a special podcast-only show each Friday, and based purely on that podcast The Sweetest Plum is excellent programme.
Maxwell and Fay take all the standard components of a commercial radio show – the topical chat, the personal anecdotes, the call-ins, the celebrity interviews – and not only do them extremely well, but in a genuinely funny way. And part of the reason they’re funny is because what they’re saying is real. Theirs isn’t the censored talk of seasoned media types, who can’t say what they really think about, say, a fellow well-known person because they “don’t want to burn bridges” or are worried about a possible libel action, this is the talk of people who say what they think, and are amused by the mere idea that they’re working in radio and are meeting famous people. It’s also the talk of people who don’t seem bothered by the prospect of burning the odd bridge, or have any desire to whip-up media coverage about their show, or wish to do anything other than have fun and make each other laugh. In a landscape where anyone in the public eye seems scared to do anything that isn’t 100% safe these attitudes are refreshing, possibly dangerous.
Comparisons to Get This and Martin/Molloy are somewhat inevitable here. Maxwell and Fay certainly seem to have been influenced by those two shows, but more importantly to have brought a lot of themselves to their show too. So you get spoof-ads for a range of “Plum” products (as you did on Martin/Molloy with products like The Martin/Molloy Comedy Channel) and there are multiple plays of clips from the media to hilarious effect (extracts from John Michael Howson’s on-air breakdown and Charlie Sheen’s recent interviews have been played repeatedly on the show), but you also have a programme hosted by two people who are quite different to either Tony Martin, Mick Molloy, Ed Kavalee or Richard Marsland.
Whether the The Sweetest Plum will rate well enough for Triple M is another matter. “Pure comedies” like this don’t seem to be to everyone’s tastes, even on a radio network which has historically served comedy better than many others1. So let’s hope this does well, because if there’s a radio show which deserves a national audience it’s The Sweetest Plum.
1 Hardcore Get This fans may disagree with this, but apart from The Sweetest Plum there’s not been a show like Get This on any commercial network since.
Executive Decision
Now that the chorus of voices calling for Live From Planet Earth have faded, their unholy bloodlust sated, a new round of voices can be heard. “They pulled it too soon”, these voices say, “They didn’t give it a chance to find its feet”. And who’s to say they don’t have a point? Well, us for one.
To be fair, it’s true that television shows do need time to settle in. Talent should be nurtured, formats need to have their rough edges smoothed off, and audiences require time to get used to things that might be a little new or strange. But does anyone seriously think that given an extra few weeks Live From Planet Earth was suddenly going to blossom into a show that was worth watching?
This wasn’t a pre-recorded show, and it wasn’t like the producers didn’t know they had a turkey on their hands – for all the on-air swipes at both Twitter users and the general press, when you’re getting that much negative feedback you’ve got to know something ain’t right. So obviously after week one there were massive changes made to try and improve the show, and more changes were made yet again after the ratings continued to slip in week two. Right?
Of course not. Changes were made – week two was a better show, thanks largely to more Ben Elton stand-up – but by week three it seemed pretty clear that we’d seen all the alterations we were going to get. Having Elton increasingly interact with the sketches was a change, but it wasn’t going to save the show: sacking most of the cast after week one would have been more like it.
It’s easy to forget that television isn’t one big organisation from top to bottom. In this case, Nine was buying Live From Planet Earth from production company Freemantle. Presumably Nine was expressing serious doubts – and perhaps asking for changes to be made – after the first night. When those changes weren’t forthcoming, what else could the executives do but axe it? Put another way, what subtle depths did Let Loose Live – sorry, Live From Planet Earth – contain that audiences wouldn’t pick up on until week six?
That’s the other side of the argument: the show itself was basically fine, and that eventually the audience would have discovered it. Problem there is, unlike the usual midnight burial that passes for an Australian comedy launch, Live From Planet Earth was given a solid promotional push – ads, billboards, the lot. People knew it was on, they tuned in, they weren’t that impressed with what they saw. Without serious changes, those viewers wouldn’t be back, so where would these new viewers be coming from?
Hang on a second: why are we making this case for it being axed? It’s not like it was a long-running proven stinker like Hey Hey it’s Saturday – surely the benefits of having it on air training up new talents and getting viewers used to Australian sketch comedy outweighed the drawbacks? Well… no.
Some Australian sketch comedy shows have improved over time. The Ronnie Johns Half Hour went from being barely watchable in its first series to moderately funny in its second. But more often than not any improvement is accidental, the jokes remain as painful and unfunny at week twenty as they did at week one, and all we’re left with is a constant re-enforcement of the idea that Australian sketch comedy is, well, either The Wedge or Comedy Inc.
It’s not like the secret to making halfway decent sketch comedy is an actual secret: find a team that have built up some kind of chemistry together, maybe bring in a more experienced mentor (preferably not, but someone’s got to have some experience), and then let them do pretty much what they want. If it has to be live, try to throw in some pre-recorded stuff in there for variety; if it’s pre-recorded try to have a mix of studio and outside settings to vary things up. It’s not a sure-fire recipe for success, but it’s a damn sight closer than trying to pretend it’s 1972 and people will watch a badly-written sketch that’s just two people talking for five minutes.
Basically, the line’s got to be drawn somewhere. Live From Planet Earth seems like it probably should have been given another week, but why? It wasn’t getting any better and after three dud weeks a fourth wouldn’t have made any difference. Following on the heels of the slow but steady ratings decline of Hey Hey it’s Saturday last year, the real question here has to be: who’s running things at Nine, and why can’t they force changes on their live shows once they start to go down the toilet?
Laid: I Like It Both Ways
One of the many fun ways to pass the time while waiting to laugh watching Laid is to spot the various lines and scenes lifted from other shows. Sometimes they’re too generic to seriously attribute to a single source: for example, no-one actually invented the term “ass-clown”, but it’s not exactly in common usage in Australia either. So when writer Marieke Hardy uses it she’s not stealing it from anyone, she’s merely bringing it to the attention of a wider audience. I guess.
Sometimes they’re more of a homage: the sudden brutal car-crash death of a character in episode one echoed a recent, similarly sudden car crash death in an episode of the most recent – but still from well over a year ago – episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. One of this blog’s readers pointed out that some of the dialogue at the start of episode two of Laid recalls a scene from the HBO comedy series Bored to Death. Another has pointed out that the entire concept of Laid – a young woman has to deal with the fact that all her lovers die – happened to Maggie in quirky US drama Northern Exposure well over a decade ago.
Of course, there’s no such thing as an original idea, it all depends on the execution, using the same concepts is hardly stealing, maybe it’s a tribute, and so on. Nothing we’ve spotted (to date) is even up there with that episode of the Hardy-penned Last Man Standing that had a somewhat similar storyline (a lead character goes out with a hot racist chick then tries to make up for not dumping her by doing good deeds) to an episode of US sitcom Andy Richter Controls the Universe that had shown on Nine around 2am the previous year. No-one seemed to care too much about that one at the time, so we’re hardly kicking up a fuss here.
One thing that is worth pointing out tho, is Hardy’s use of unattributed quotes – that is, using lines from other shows or comedians without saying where they came from. Whether it’s the Anchorman quote in episode 2 (“I’m in a glass case of emotion”), or the Bill Hicks line in an upcoming episode (we won’t spoil it for you here), they’re pretty much the only case where you can firmly say “that came from somewhere else”. And it doesn’t even matter.
No-one seriously expects a character to chime in after the “glass case” line and say “nice Anchorman quote, dude”. It’d ruin the joke, such as it was. Either you recognise the quote and think “ahh, Anchorman, what a funny film” (perhaps swiftly followed by “I wish I was watching it right now instead of this guff”), or you don’t and you laugh at the line itself because it’s a funny line. Or maybe you wonder why a guy sitting on a lawn is talking about being trapped in a glass case.
In a better show than Laid, there’d be subtle, funny ways to make the fact that this is a quote clear. The character might quote movies a lot, so that after a while you’d realise any odd thing he said was probably a quote even if you didn’t know where it came from. The scene itself might recognisably come from another source – shows like Spaced and Community (the paintball episode) or even Seinfeld’s JFK riff make this stuff work all the time. Maybe the show itself would exist in a kind of heightened pop culture-referencing world, maybe the person the quote was said to would make a joke or sneering comment about the quoter’s ability to make up his own dialogue. And so on.
But not Laid. Laid just throws the line out there. If you get the reference, maybe you’ll laugh. If you don’t, maybe you’ll laugh anyway at the strangeness of it. It’s not like it adds anything to our understanding of the character past maybe that he’s a lazy, unoriginal dick. He doesn’t drop more movie quotes and his having watched Anchorman doesn’t come into play again. It’s just a lazy way to get across in a moderately funny fashion that he’s in a bad emotional place.
Whether that laziness is on the part of the character, or on the part of the person who wrote the dialogue for the character, well… it doesn’t really matter, does it? Like everything else in Laid that feels like it’s come from somewhere else, it works just as well either way. Maybe it’s a reference to being lazy; maybe it’s just being lazy. Maybe it’s a reference to a funny scene from somewhere else; maybe it’s just that scene done again. Damn you postmodern deadpan irony, you’ve won this round…
Vale Live From Planet Earth
It was probably inevitable that we’d never find out how Girl Flat ended, nor indeed did many want to, but to axe a show that was improving (if not in ratings then certainly in quality) because it didn’t bring huge audiences after it was bumped at the last minute into a late-night slot to allow Nine to cover the Christchurch Earthquake seems a little unfair. What happened to all that “give it a chance” stuff Nine were pushing after that disastrous first episode?
Having said that, it’s hard to feel sorry for a show put together by experienced people which had as many flaws as Live From Planet Earth. Elton’s stand-up was good, there were some good guests, the Elaine Front character was promising, but the sketches…were they really by the guy who wrote Blackadder, The Young Ones and “Double seat, double seat, gotta get a double seat”? Elton’s failure to see their terribleness is surprising, even when you consider that he’s been responsible for a string of high-profile failures in his homeland over the past decade (the 2000 film Maybe Baby, the 2005 sitcom Blessed and the 2007 sketch show Get A Grip).
Even weirder was that while Elton was writing joke-free sketches about female bodybuilders, his topical stand-up was actually pretty good. While Live From Planet Earth was on air, Elton was one of the best local satirists on TV (second only to John Clarke), doing material a million times more cutting and incisive than the panellists on Good News Week were coming up with.
Perhaps if Live From Planet Earth had been more about Ben Elton and less about his supporting company of proven duds and wide-eyed newcomers then it would have been better, but a format change that big would have required a lot of guts…easier to give up and get out before ratings plummet below 100,000, perhaps? After all, that Hamish & Andy deal wasn’t cheap.
Speaking of which, remember how during their negotiations with Nine Hamish & Andy let it be known that they wanted to sign with a network which gave comedy a chance and didn’t axe things hastily? Could it be that Nine kept Live From Planet Earth going to make sure Hamish & Andy signed, then axed it once the deal was done? We can’t be the only ones wondering that today.
King of the Hill
It’s no real shock that we like The Jesters a lot. This behind-the-scenes sitcom about a group of Chaser-style comedians and their grumpy producer stars Mick Molloy and is packed with references to and plots based on Australian television comedy; the only way to make a sitcom more to our liking would be to announce that Tony Martin was going to be a regular on the upcoming series of The Games.
Even with that in mind, the second series of The Jesters is something special. Comedies often improve over time (unlike dramas, which usually start out as strong as they’re ever going to get), and this year The Jesters has taken a real leap forward. The characters are more sharply defined, the scripts are tighter, the performances… well, they’re still good (more on them later) and as a whole the show simply works better. If there wasn’t that new series of The Games due later this year, it’d be a cert for Aussie sitcom of the year… not that that’s traditionally much of an accolade.
So, our blind love for Mick Molloy aside, what makes The Jesters work when so many Australian sitcoms don’t? Well, for starters, maybe we were a bit hasty in putting our Mick love aside: We’ve said it before, but Mick Molloy is one of the finest comedy actors in this country. Before you swig down a cup of coffee for your spit-take at this news, that’s not the same as saying he’s a great actor (though he’s pretty good there too, as the three people who saw that all-Aussie version of Macbeth with Mick in it knows); a comedy actor has to project a certain warmth and likability above and beyond whatever the character requires, otherwise people aren’t going to warm to them and they ain’t gonna laugh.
[for example, take Natalie Portman in her current big screen rom-com No Strings Attached. No-one would seriously claim she’s not a good actress, but in a comedy she’s just not funny. You can admire her, you can sympathise with her character, you can think she’s a good person, but she just doesn’t give off the warmth required to make a comedy work.]
Like a lot of comedians, Mick has this quality; unlike a lot of comedians, Mick can also act. So while his character Dave Davies has a bit in common with the real-life Mick (the term “washed-up show-biz arsehole” is used a fair bit in Mick’s interviews for the show), he’s also believable as a character on television: it’s not like trying to get, say, Peter Helliar (who also has the likeability thing going for him) to play a character.
This kind of performance – being funny yet believable, being likable even when playing a tool – is the kind of thing a lot of critics dismiss or ignore, even though it’s clearly a lot harder to make happen than “straight” acting. So having Mick in the lead (and unlike the first series, which would occasionally push him to second or third banana, this time he’s firmly in the lead, with his own subplots and everything) is a good idea. As is teaming him with Deborah Kennedy as his agent Di. There’s real chemistry between them, and their scenes together lift the show as a whole; it’s safe to say that without this double act there’d be a lot less to like about The Jesters.
It’s not just their show though; The Jesters is an actual ensemble, which is increasingly rare for an Australian sitcom. One of the ways sitcoms get laughs is by the interactions between people, so logically a sitcom should have a fairly large cast of regular characters and those characters should be fairly well defined. Put the angry guy in a scene with the chilled-out girl and their differing responses to a situation should get a laugh or two.
The Jesters has eight (nine, if you count the old-school show-biz director chap) regular cast members, and at least half of them can be boiled down to a one-line description: the creepy musician, the conspiracy nut, the grumpy boss, the feisty smart-arse sidekick. It’s easy to dismiss simplistic characters as a bad thing, but in a comedy they get the job done. They’re not even that unrealistic (so long as they’re largely kept in the background): we all have acquaintances we only know loosely but still can have a laugh with. And having a large cast of well-defined characters means the writers can mix things up a little by putting different characters together, as happens a few times later on in this second series. It’s not a big thing – boosting Mick’s role plays a much bigger role in improving this series – but every little bit helps.
We could go on, and on, but there’s only so much to say about, say, the generally sparse set design (who knew that a sitcom didn’t need to have hyper-realistic sets to get laughs? Not anyone working on Laid) or the way that even the most stale cliché in 21st century Aussie comedy – the bitchy, sarcastic office manager – works here simply by making her half of a riff-heavy comedy double act with Mick’s character. And yes, there are still problems here too – not all the cameos work, and sometimes the plots can be a little too “inside-comedy” – but for the most part they’re minor ones.
Look, there are people out there who seem to think that the mark of a good sitcom is quality set-design and capital-A actors looking embarrassed after yet another social gaffe. They’re not going to like The Jesters, and it’s their loss. And to be honest, if you know Mick Molloy is not your cup of tea there’s not a whole lot else going on here to keep you watching. But if you happen to think that a good sitcom is one that values being funny over pretty much everything else – and works towards that goal on a regular basis – the chances are pretty high that you’re going to find that the second series of The Jesters is about as good as this particular kind of Australian-made comedy gets.
(and yes, we did spot in a later episode a reference or two to an Australian comedy website called the ‘Mumbleweeds”. Thanks guys… we think)
FYI: series one of The Jesters is out on DVD in early March. Series two starts on pay TV channel Movie Extra on Tuesday Feb 22nd at 8.30pm
You Have Been Remaking
The Comedy Channel’s first local production for the year premiered on Thursday, a remake of the British panel show You Have Been Watching. Like TV Burp before it, it was a disappointing view if you like the original.
The original is hosted by Charlie Brooker, a former TV critic for The Guardian who’s made a number of fairly sharp series about TV for the BBC. Developed by Brooker through his production company, You Have Been Watching is very much tailored towards his interests and his style. Somewhat inevitably, parachuting Peter Berner into the host’s role and barely changing the format doesn’t quite work.
Berner may share with Charlie Brooker a dryness of tone and an intelligentish wit, but he’s not a TV critic (or, as those who remember his satire series BackBerner know, a particularly good critic of anything else), and in this series he largely seems to be going through the hosting motions as he would on The Einstein Factor.
As for the rest of the show, it feels rushed. The panel (who in episode one were Meshel Laurie, John Wood and Aamer Rahman of Fear of a Brown Planet) were shown the briefest possible clips of a series of cop shows, including the ludicrous US series Poochinski, and asked to comment on them. They got in a few good lines, but there wasn’t much for them to work with. Where the British series got this right was by showing more clips from each series being discussed and allowing Brooker to comment on them before opening the discussion out to the panel. The fact that our version of the series has a much shorter running time than the original didn’t help here.
To be fair to You Have Been Watching, we’re judging this on the one episode that’s made it to air so far and it could improve over time as those involved get used to making it. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that the makers haven’t put much effort into changing the format to suit the shorter timeslot or the talents of the host they’ve hired (he presumably has some), and worse, there’s been no attempt to adapt the show for this country, other than to take a look at shows like Prisoner and Underbelly.
Imported formats can work, but after the failure of TV Burp it’s surprising that no one in Australian television has worked out that when you’re buying a show designed by a comedian to suit their personal style, it may need some adapting to suit a new host.
Ben Elton vs The Twitterverse
So Live From Planet Earth returned last night, and while the changes made were for the best it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of them. More Elton stand-up and less shoddy sketches was a good move, but it still felt like tinkering around the edges of a now-proven dud. What, they thought last week’s show was a success?
[It does make you wonder what it takes to change a show over at Nine, considering the equally live Hey Hey it’s Saturday went an entire year sinking in the ratings without any real changes (apart from the timeslot) being made. Is there no-one over there who can say “this isn’t working – change it?” after all, isn’t the ability to rapidly change things pretty much the only benefit in the 21st century of going out live?]
Anyway, forget all that crock from the haterz about there being “no decent Australian sketch comedy since 1989”. There’s been loads of good stuff – The Late Show, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) to name two excellent local examples – it’s just that networks seem trapped in a world where The Comedy Company is as good as we can ever hope for. Which wasn’t even true back in 1989.
That said, it’s a shame that LFPE is now headed directly for the scrapheap, if not immediately then in a few weeks when it finishes up its allotted run (of either four or six episodes, depending on what you’ve heard). There’s still potential for it to become at least watchable – maybe if it was only a half-hour, maybe if there was some actual variety going on, maybe if it was more obviously based around Elton’s stand-up – and maybe if Elton’s stand-up was fresher, though to be fair much of the used material he’s been doing isn’t exactly common knowledge out here.
But let’s be honest: it doesn’t really matter about potential when there’s no will (or ability, or time) to change. And having Elton take a swipe at the show’s Twitter-based critics made that pretty clear.
It might have seemed a little odd that Elton would, on the one hand, say that Twitter was basically “giving a moron a megaphone” and on the other wrap things up with a request to send out positive tweets if you liked the show. Good or bad, which one is it? But dipping his toe in the Twitter waters after the drubbing the show took there last week was a smart damage-control move whatever the result.
Now that he’s interacted directly with the Twitterverse, Elton can say (with some justification) that it’s impossible to take what happens there seriously. The hate posts can be written off as coming from people angry at what he said rather than real haters of the show (and hey, at least they were still watching, right?); the positive ones (and there were some) are only going to make him look good even if he had to ask for them directly.
It’s not going to save the show – only good ratings* or apathy at Nine can do that now – but after a week where Twitter comments were used to paint the show as a massive, stomach-churning failure, being able to dismiss at least one source of negative feedback has to be seen as a plus. For Elton, if not for audiences hoping for some half-decent comedy on our screens.
*last night’s figures: 384,000 viewers nash. Not good.
New comedy? Yes indeed.
Yesterday TV Tonight published an exclusive interview with Ben Elton, in which Elton defended the first episode of Live From Planet Earth:
Apparently the principal criticism is that it was too smutty, and to be honest I actually put my hand up to that. I do think we got the mix wrong.
Sadly, Elton had nothing to say about the quality of the material, which was the show’s real downfall – plenty of people will laugh at smutty material if it’s funny, it’s unfunny smutty material that gets their backs up – but if there’s a man used to defending his patch it’s Ben Elton, so that wasn’t much of a surprise.
Perhaps of more interest was this section of the interview:
If the show is given time to find an audience Elton says it could uncover new talent that will benefit all of the industry.
“If I find some good new people they’ll be on TEN and Seven next year, so that will be good for everybody. But apparently TEN and Seven program against Nine and Nine programs against Seven and TEN trying to kill new stuff. I think that’s incredible. This is such a small industry, so the idea that it’s not a good thing for anyone to have a success…they’ll be on the other channels next year and it will promote local writing and local acting. Otherwise it will just mean they get more American stuff,” he says.
And while the whole “we’re promoting local talent” thing is pretty much the standard defence for any lacklustre local comedy, there’s a grain of truth here: commercial radio and television networks in Australia almost never provide opportunities for new comic talent. Even providing opportunities for established comic talent is something networks haven’t been terribly good at over the years. If you’re wondering why Australian comedy’s default level of quality is “average”, lack of opportunities to gain experience or try out new ideas is a big part of it. Still, at least there’s the ABC.
Say what you will about the ABC’s recent history of comedy – one of increased ratings-chasing and making programmes that wouldn’t be out of place on a commercial network – but at least once in a while they do something a bit different. On Saturday night Radio National broadcast the first episode of The Lonely Hearts Club, a new improvised comedy staring Angus Sampson, Sam Pang, Tony Martin and Stephen Curry. If you haven’t heard about it that’s not surprising (we ourselves are indebted to reader Daniel G for pointing it out to us), because despite the relative fame of the cast the show doesn’t appear to have gotten any publicity, apart from a couple of tweets from Tony Martin. And that’s a shame because of this week’s comedy debuts it’s the one most worth your time (you can download episode 1 from the show’s website).
Sampson, Pang, Martin and Curry play a group of middle-aged men who have “tasted the highs and lows of life and love”, and are now hosting a radio chat show for men. Not surprisingly, Martin as Duncan Jardine (“one of Australia’s most frequently used second unit directors”) is the stand-out, but the rest of the cast do a good job too. And as the show and the characters develop, they’ll probably get better and better.
The Lonely Hearts Club is also a pretty good send-up of the kinds of programmes that litter Radio National and ABC Local, with their whispering hosts and their over-long and slightly dull discussions of “issues”. The show’s segment on coeliac disease didn’t quite work (because the guest expert seemed to be quite genuine) but the other “discussions” in the show were pretty funny.
So, kudos to whoever it was who got the show on air – as we’ve long argued on this blog there should be opportunities to make comedy on radio, whether it’s four mates improvising for a couple of hours, or something scripted like The Blow Parade. The ABC should be doing more of this and it’s time to establish a regular slot for it.
Right on Adam and Hannah
Daryl’s been Facebooking again…
There is a chance of something happening in the second half of the year but sadly nothing definitive. And if we did return it would probably not be on a Saturday as according to Nine the “economics” don’t stack up: not enough people watching TV generally on a weekend compared to mid week viewing, therefore revenue verses the cost of mounting a two hour variety show like ours does not work. They can make more profit with a cheaper program.
…and none of it’s exactly news. Clearly if Live From Planet Earth keeps sucking Nine will need a replacement, but as Daryl should be only too aware, that replacement may not be Hey Hey It’s Saturday (or any of those shows he’s got “in development”). Nor should it be. His Facebook fans might have been watching but everyone else turned-off in droves.
Meanwhile, a show not so dissimilar to Hey Hey made its debut a few nights ago and did pretty well. In Gordon Street Tonight combined all those magic ingredients that Daryl Somers said we all wanted to see on our screens: live music, international and local guests, comedy, stunts, audience interaction, and social media as part of the show. The main difference between IGST and Hey Hey is that the newcomer did it a million times better.
Adam Hills is a likeable, funny guy and a solid host. His sidekick, Hannah Gadsby, was allowed to be funny, not just cut to whenever they needed some live tweets read out (although she did a good job there too). The show’s use of social media was clever and worthwhile, and those who joined in, whether they were Ross Noble mucking around on Skype or Adam Hill’s Twitter followers sending-in TwitPics, came up with some funny stuff.
The In Gordon Street Tonight team also realised the fatal flaw with a lot of variety shows – that if the show’s too reliant on the mix of guests people won’t tune in if the guests don’t interest them – so they created a format and an atmosphere where the guests weren’t the focus of the show, they just had to join in the fun. And that idea of researching the studio audience and involving them in some lo-fi Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush-esque stuff was quite fun too.
What was most exciting about the show, though, was that it reworked a grab-bag of tried and tested TV and online elements and gave them a genuinely fresh spin. You also get the sense that there’s plenty more to come – the show’s so open that anything could happen (although hopefully they won’t introduce a serial about pop stars living together any time soon). This is the complete opposite to Daryl Somer’s approach to television, where everything follows a predictable formula and looks about a billion years old. Somers should keep that in mind as his production company slaves away on those ideas in development.
At Last, the Laid Review
Laid would probably work if it was a movie. You wouldn’t pay to go see it, of course, but when it works it works in roughly the same way as a reasonably competent Australian independent film does – think The Rage in Placid Lake or The Illustrated Family Doctor (not that anyone paid to see them either). Even the plot would work better as a movie: 29 year-old market researcher Roo (Allison Bell) discovers that all her ex-lovers are dying… and that’s pretty much it for episode one.
[obviously, SPOILERS FROM HERE ON]
In a movie, a quirky concept like that is good enough: once you’ve got the audience’s money, you can take your sweet time getting around to having something happen. On television though, you need to give the viewer a reason to come back: for a comedy that’s as plot-driven as this one (it’s not like anyone seriously watched Kath & Kim or The Librarians wanting to see how things turned out), the plot’s pretty thin. Episode two: more ex’s die, Roo thinks about a guy she likes. Episode three: even more ex’s die, Roo goes on a half-arsed date with that guy she likes. Oooo-kay.
The crawling plot wouldn’t matter in the slightest if there was anything funny going on in the meantime. But Laid is too cool to want to make you laugh. The trouble with this whole “realistic’ shit in comedy is that in the real world people actually know when they’re trying to be funny and they sell the joke in all manner of ways: when your cast just says everything in a deadpan fashion, it doesn’t make already weak dialogue “more realistic” – it just makes it less funny. And trust us, less funny is not what this show needs.
Part of the trouble is that the show is built around a concept that really needs serious work to make funny. Let’s say it again: our average gal lead discovers that her ex-lovers are dying one by one. In a crazy, over-the-top cartoony sitcom this could work. Laid though, is deadpan realism. So when one ex gets hit by a car in episode one, his body lands on a windshield with a sickening thud and a spray of blood. A similar accident in the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm was hilarious, because that show is basically a cartoon about a grumpy old man. Laid is an underplayed story about a seemingly decent young woman; this shit isn’t funny at all.
But let’s get down to specifics here: for those looking for a definition of “ham-fisted” when it comes to comedy, look no further than the first episode’s funeral scene, where Roo – who’s been cracking wise about what a dud root the first dead ex was – turns up only to discover he was obsessed with her as “the one who got away”.
Presumably all this is meant to be one of those Curb Your Enthusiasm-style awkward moments – she’s been making fun of him, he really cared about her, ooh, you’d really feel out of place there, right? No. No, you’d feel awesome. You’re at the funeral of someone you barely remembered and everyone there is telling you how amazing you were and what a massive impact you had on the dead guy. Isn’t that what you’d go to a funeral like that to hear? More importantly, how is being told you’re great funny?
It’s not like they’re telling her “after you dumped him he went insane / became a nazi / turned into a hippie – so we hate you”. That would actually be awkward – instead it’s “you were so amazing, he never stopped talking about you, you’re the one who got away” awkward, which is basically a bunch of flattery. Flattery can be funny, when it’s a douchebag character being flattered. Whatever her many, many flaws tho, Roo ain’t a douchebag.
And then we meet the dead guy’s most recent ex. And a character actually has to say “you two really look alike”, because the joke – that the dead guy only dated girls who looked like Roo – doesn’t work because a): Roo just looks average and b): they cast someone who doesn’t really look much like Alison Bell anyway.
See, this is why we’ve been taking a swing at all the positive reviews Laid’s been getting. Sure, the show has some good points – it’s well directed and looks polished, not that any of that makes a comedy funny – but when it’s praised for somehow being above cheap humour what they really mean is that it tries for cheap humour and fails. This is a show that features both the clumsy answering machine message (a staple of comedy since answering machines were invented) and then plays mournful tinkling piano music over the news of another death. That’s not a show taking comedy to the next level: that’s a show that only vaguely knows what comedy is.
Even the character of Roo doesn’t work. Despite the Ricky Gervais vocal stylings, she’s meant to be this decent, slightly befuddled character (which does mean that if you based a drinking game on every time Bell pulls her ‘rear back / blink rapidly’ face you’ll be unconscious at the 20 minute mark), but her actual actions are kind of harsh. Pretty much all she does in episode one is make fun of a dead guy and try to pick up his mate at the funeral, which in most people’s eyes would kind of make you a douchebag.
So the show then has two scenes where people call her out on her shitty actions: her workmates aren’t impressed by her jokes about the dead guy, and the mate she’s trying to pick up tells her to back off. But wait – her workmates are unfunny tools, and the mate ends up calling her a “fucking slut”. So clearly only nasty idiots think that she’s been acting badly, right? And you don’t want to be one of those, do you?
Let’s spell it out for those thinking this is some kind of “next level” comedy: Roo’s meant to be a quiet, slightly awkward, smart hipster chick. Then she tries to pick up a guy at a funeral. You know who does that? The Charlie Sheen character on Two & A Half Men. Guess what she does in episode two? Gets drunk and sleeps with her best friend’s boyfriend – who’s camped out the front trying to win the best friend back. You know who does that? The Charlie Sheen character on Two & A Half Men.
Having her act like Charlie Sheen would actually make this into a better show if it would just own it and make her someone who consciously casually uses men for sex. Imagine, if you will, a gender-reversed version – let’s call it “Dead Root”, about a guy who discovers all his old girlfriends were dying. You wouldn’t make the guy a sweet, nerdy type because that’d be kind of lame and creepy in a comedy– you’d make him at least a little bit of a sexist jerk. That’s because then the story would have a point – at the end he’d have learnt to value his sexual relationships a little bit more. You’d even maybe say the whole thing was a metaphor for how, after he slept with a woman and got what he wanted, she was “dead to him”. It’d actually be a bit of a feminist tale really, showing a guy waking up to the fact that women are people too. And he could even try to get a root at a funeral.
So why not do it here? It’s not like women don’t like casual sex, or that they don’t hump’n dump people on occasion. And this is meant to be a comedy – the one genre in Australia where you can have an unlikable female lead (look at Kath & Kim and The Librarians). But we don’t get that. We get a woman who we’re supposed to like and identify with whose big dramatic problem only affects her ability to get a boyfriend – every other aspect of her life is completely unaffected (or even improved – a job as an untraceable hit-woman awaits!) .
You know the Bechdel test, where the gauge of an artistic works’ level of objectification of women is whether it features two women having a conversation with each other that isn’t about men? Every single scene in this show fails that test. The entire show is entirely about her ability to get a man. Sure, she says and does other things. But they’re secondary to the point of the show, which is about a woman who’s exes are dying one by one – and if she doesn’t figure out why, she’ll never be able to have a safe relationship again. Oh dear God no.
No doubt Laid will be praised by many – oh hang on, it already has been – largely on the basis that it’s not in your face about trying to be funny. Those people presumably think that random pop culture references, realistic art direction and a surreal central concept make a lightweight drama series “comedy”. For those who think a comedy should make you laugh, however, may we suggest… well, pretty much anything else.