Well, we’re assuming We Interrupt This Broadcast is done – it’s not in the schedules for next week. And yeah, ten episodes seems as good a point as any to pull the pin. A bit of confusion over its departure seems fitting, considering it began with a blaze (well, flicker) of glory before fizzling out well before its run was over.
So what went wrong? Did anything, in fact, go wrong? As the latest installment in Seven’s attempt to make Australian comedy firmly a thing of the past – or at least, solely the focus of nostalgia-based specials – it was always a bit of an odd duck.
At a guess, someone high up kept asking why they couldn’t do a Fast Forward special a la the ones for Hey Hey it’s Saturday and Kath & Kim, only to be told by someone who’d actually watched Fast Forward this century that the material didn’t hold up – not that that’s stopped any of the Hey Hey specials. Eventually someone came up with the genius idea of making an all-new Fast Forward, and hey presto, Full Frontal… uh, We Interrupt This Broadcast was born.
As commercial television ideas go, reviving a successful old format is far from the worst. We’ll be honest: we didn’t mind the first episode of We Interrupt This Broadcast, and the second didn’t fall off a cliff like we expected. Making fun of television is (still) a decent idea for a television show, and the initial focus on quantity as far as jokes go was a nice change from the usual sketch show focus on turning it into the director’s audition reel or a showcase for just how many semi-famous mates they can lure on set for half an hour.
But as expected, eventually the rot set in. Coming up with material for a sketch show is hard work, and We Interrupt This Broadcast was burning through a lot right from the start. Which is as it should be: the alternative is to just repeat the same jokes and situations over and over in a doomed attempt to create the kind of “catchphrase comedy” that doesn’t require work – just throwing the catchphrase out there for the audience to devour like lions given a hunk of raw meat.
To be extremely generous, at least some of the fault lies in the lack of variety on Australian television today. Back in the days of Fast Forward, you could parody ads – an area strangely left untouched here – and local dramas and news programs and arts programs and kids shows and religious shows and whatever you call those shows Russell Coight is parodying and so on. These days, it’s pretty much just reality shows, which in no way excuses them still making Lip Island sketches after ten weeks.
It wasn’t like the bottom fell out of the show. The sketches in episode 10 weren’t always noticeably worse than the sketches in week one, and the show was still powering through the parodies. Hell, we almost nearly laughed at Hot Mess – Australia’s Most Baffling Game Show, even if the joke was basically “Numberwang” done over.
(with two out of three of Aunty Donna making regular appearances, We Interrupt This Broadcast deserves some minor credit for keeping the lights on there long enough for Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe to get made)
But the show never developed any material strong enough to carry it over the weak patches, and after a while it became clear that the weak patches were getting bigger as the jokes became more familiar. Again, being stuck with a limited amount of shows to parody didn’t help. Half a hour’s worth of Gardening Australia parodies will struggle to get laughs, even spread over ten weeks.
That’s 36 satirical targets per 42 minute show – nice work team
Still, if they’d actually gone and watched any of the sketch shows from the good old days – or just, you know, Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell – they would have noticed that successful sketch shows usually mix it up a little. If they had performers who were good at one kind of thing, they let them do that. Some people did character comedy, some did parodies, some did (shudder) restaurant sketches, some did mockumentaries.
The whole point of making fun of television was that you could copy every single format that was on television to make each sketch the funniest it could be. A full hour composed of ninety second sketches where the first ten seconds was the logo and the “performance” was just reading the lines and maybe pulling a face? Not the best option.
It’s not a matter of simply saying “it should have been better”. Hang on, yes it is: it should have been better. It was just the same thing, over and over again for an hour a week for ten weeks. Even if it had been brilliant, the novelty was going to wear off sooner rather than later.
And “brilliant” isn’t how we’d describe a lot of the material. Seriously, is this a joke anyone actually laughs at, or the kind of joke you think “yeah, I reckon someone else watching this will probably find this kind of funny”.
Because when you’re writing the second kind of joke, nobody’s laughing.
Internet Sensations The Inspired Unemployed To Host Hilarious Australian Original Series.
Coming Soon To Paramount Australia And New Zealand.
Aussie larrikins, The Inspired Unemployed, have taken over the internet with their awkwardly hilarious videos and in 2023, we will see them take over our screens for the very first time.
Jack Steele and Matt Ford, the duo behind The Inspired Unemployed are renowned content creators, having amassed 3.8 million followers on social media. Now, Jack and Matt will host a hilarious eight-part Australian original series, produced by Warner Bros. International Television Production Australia.
Bursting with excitement, Jack and Matt jointly said: “We are so stoked to be working with Paramount ANZ on this TV show, from the first video we ever made our goal was to always have a TV show and for it to actually be happening is a dream come true. We’ve always believed that laughter is the best medicine, and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to spread joy and positivity to even more people through this platform.”
Daniel Monaghan, SVP Content and Programming, Paramount Australia and New Zealand said: “The Inspired Unemployed have a huge following with a unique knack for making people sit up, take notice and laugh. Paramount ANZ is delighted to be their very first ‘TV home’ when Jack and Matt, alongside their mates will have audiences in stitches with this surprising series. We can’t wait for audiences to watch the show later this year.”
Michael Brooks, Managing Director of Warner Bros. International Television Production Australia and Head of Studios Australia and New Zealand said: “Jack and Matt from The Inspired Unemployed are internet sensations with a natural chemistry that can only come from years of working together. We have the perfect format for their first foray into television and look forward to sharing more hilarious moments with fans across the country later this year.”
Yesterday we lost the greatest Australian comedian of the 20th Century and a pioneer of comedy on Australian television. Some argue that Barry Humphries invented Australian comedy. It’s not true – there’s been comedy in Australia for as long as there have been Australians – but it’s true enough.
When Humphries was starting out in the 1950s, urban-dwelling Australians didn’t have much to laugh about that they could really relate to. Comedy in Australia until this point often focused on rural Australia or was imported from the UK or the USA. Then along came Humphries’ character Edna Everage, who turned her nose up at the neighbours’ burgundy Axminster carpets, and, suddenly, modern Australian comedy was born.
Humphries both revealed and revelled in the dullness, the materialism, and the small-mindedness of the Australian suburbs. Edna was a housewife who thought she was better than others, while another Humphries character, First World War veteran Sandy Stone was a bore and a bigot, forever doomed to haunt his former home. Many comedians who came along later, from the Australia You’re Standing In It team to The D-Generation to Gina Riley and Jane Turner, covered similar ground, but it was Barry Humphries who did it first. Literally. He appeared as Edna on Channel Seven Melbourne’s opening night show in 1957!
Dame Edna in the 1950s
But Melbourne wasn’t big enough for Barry Humphries and in the late 1950s he moved to London, gradually building a reputation as an actor, and for his comedy characters. Initially, the British didn’t understand Edna, but several decades later, her live shows were hot tickets on the West End and she redefined the celebrity chat show with The Dame Edna Experience.
In this top-rating show made for London Weekend Television, celebrity guests deemed too pretentious or dull found themselves flung down a staircase, or removed from the show via other, comically violent, means. It was a gimmick later copied in Graham Norton’s chat show, but it was Barry Humphries who did it first.
Barry Humphries was also a pioneer of what was later called “gross-out comedy”, with his characters Barry McKenzie, an Australian in London who spent his time drinking, chasing women and sticking it up the Poms, and Sir Les Patterson, an older type of lecherous boozer who, slightly unbelievably, held the position of Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James.
Sir Les Patterson
Both characters enabled Humphries to critique sexist, loutish behaviour and to push the audience’s tolerance by engaging in it. At the end of The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Bazza and his mates (one of whom was played by the late John Clarke) put out a fire with cans of Fosters and their own urine. While at Humphries’ live shows, Sir Les spat on the audience and revealed his “trouser snake,” a plastic phallus which emitted white liquid, to gales of laughter.
In 2023, this isn’t the kind of comedy that many younger comedians are doing, and Humphries has been criticised in recent years for it. Comedians now don’t do ambiguity, where sexism (or racism, or homophobia) is both satirised and indulged in. This is the right thing to do, of course, but it’s worth remembering that Barry McKenzie and Sir Les were controversial back in their day too. Controversial with the sort of bigots and prudes who would be just as horrified by today’s comedians with their ethos of equality and justice for all.
Humphries, who was both a ground-breaking pioneer in an often left-leaning profession, and a conservative (he was on the board of Quadrant and wrote for The Spectator), was ultimately a contrarian, who, as cultural history Tony Moore put it “retained a bohemian delight in transgression that makes him a radical”.
It was this spirit of radicalism, perhaps, which has attracted such a wide and diverse audience to Humphries’ shows over the last 65+ years. He had the ability to make everyone laugh, whether they were young or old, a conservative or a die-hard leftist.
Barry Humphries was a pioneer, an original and endlessly inventive. Australian comedy would be nothing without him.
After 47 years and thirty five thousand episodes, there’s not a lot left to be said about The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. And even less to be said that’s positive. But in recent weeks we’ve noticed a trend that we can’t help but applaud: more and more often, the guests are treating Pickering like shit.
It’s the stink lines that really make it work
No doubt it began a while back and we just didn’t notice, what with being asleep on the couch and all that. We’re pretty sure Judith Lucy used to at least talk over Pickering back when she was a regular. No doubt many of the other comedy guests treated the host with something less than fawning respect during their appearances.
But it’s been Rhys Nicholson who’s really kicked it into overdrive this year with some thinly concealed (comedy) contempt for the man sitting across from him. He’s been talking over Pickering and telling him to shut it on a regular basis. Is it funny? You bet.
This week saw Nath Valvo get in on the act. Better yet, he called Pickering “a homeowner”, which is about as perfect a summing up of everything that’s wrong with having Pickering hosting a comedy series in 2023 as you’ll find.
But we can’t go too hard on Pickering here (for once), because having the guests treat him as a lightweight stuffed shirt is (for once) a workable comedy dynamic. It actually gets laughs out of Pickering’s on air persona, which is… not something The Weekly has been good at in the past.
To be blunt, Pickering has no authority or credibility – even just as a host, let alone as someone who’s funny. The only way to get laughs out of what he’s doing is to have funnier people treat him like some irrelevant obstacle barely worth the effort to tell to sit down and shut up.
Ironically, admitting he’s crap and using that to get laughs somehow makes him less crap. Who knows, maybe in another fifteen years they’ll figure out another way to get laughs and The Weekly might start to get close to being funny. Or not.
A new series from Aunty Donna is always something to look forward to, particularly after the recent TV comedy drought, and Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café does not disappoint.
In this series, Zach Ruane, Broden Kelly and Mark Bonanno have opened a trendy Melbourne laneway café in which…funny things occur. And unlike everything else the ABC’s made recently, none of the characters are falling in love, no one’s getting over a traumatic event, and there’s no big moment in episode five which will happily resolve itself in episode six.
Right out of the blocks, Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café is the kind of show where plot, character and logic aren’t really a thing. The café’s fully of wasps? Call in the Pied Piper (Black Comedy’s Steven Oliver) to eliminate them. A bloke’s stealing blueberries out of the muffins? Put him on trial, with Zach as the judge, Broden as the prosecutor and Richard Roxborough as Rake from Rake appearing for the defence.
But wait, wouldn’t it be a bit much to make the whole episode a courtroom drama? Possibly, so we find Mark, due to a complicated series of events, being interrogated by a series of Primary School teachers who suspect he’s a sex pest. Meanwhile, back at the trial, isn’t that Matt Doran reprising his role of Mouse from The Matrix in the background? Why, yes, it is!
And while Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café could be dismissed as a bunch of in-jokes and surreal nonsense, there are other types of comedy going on too. Parodies, for example, with episode three featuring the best buck’s party pisstake we’ve ever seen, featuring blokes who can’t hold down conversations with each other, dumb activities preceded by tedious health and safety briefings, and a montage of the wild fun the partygoers should, in theory, be having. Also in that episode, look out for a pastiche of You Can’t Ask That featuring Tony Martin and Melanie Bracewell, and a pointed dig at ABC iView.
The beauty of Coffee Café‘s “anything can happen and probably will” approach, and the sitcom/sketch show hybrid concept, is that Aunty Donna can go anywhere and do any type of comedy. A scene with a training montage accompanied by what seems like generic background music suddenly becomes a scene with a training montage accompanied by a song glorifying hit-and-run driving. While a sub-plot which sees the café hosting an awards ceremony for real estate agents is an opportunity for some satire about how real estate agents push up prices and rip people off.
The sheer variety of types of comedy in Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café and the mostly excellent quality of it is staggering when you consider what the rest of Australian comedy is like now. But do not be deceived, Australian comedy is capable of excellence, and this is the proof. Put together an excellent, much-loved comedy team, add quality additional writers (Michelle Brasier, Greg Larsen, Sam Lingham, Tony Martin, Vidya Rajan, and Steven Oliver) and let them do their thing.
The only criticism we have of Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café is that six episodes are nowhere near enough.
It wasn’t all that long ago that series like Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe were part of the ABC’s regular comedy output. Today? Not so much. After decades of budget cuts and an increasingly tight focus on an audience that’s presumably excited for series like the upcoming Mother & Son reboot, something as relentlessly inventive and subversive as Aunty Donna’s latest project doesn’t stand out so much as, well, stand out a lot.
Just to make things clear, this is definitely the kind of series the ABC should be showing. Our full review is on its way: the short version is that it’s good, we liked it, you should watch it. But it’s also very different from what people have come to expect from ABC Comedy in recent years. Which is to say that if you’re a big fan of Hard Quiz and The Weekly then a musical number titled “One Of Us Has a Vibrator In Our Bottoms” is going to come as a bit of a shock (much like the vibrator itself).
In an ideal world, or even a world identical to this one only the ABC is properly funded, there’d be three times the current number of local sitcoms on the national broadcaster. Variety would simply be par for the course: the idea that this series – made by extremely popular comedy professionals with over a decade’s experience (shit, they even had their own series on Netflix) – was in any way “risky” would be as laughable as their jokes. Which is to say, very laughable indeed.
But in this world, where the ABC can’t risk alienating even a handful of their decaying Boomer audience, this kind of thing is… well, it’s not Rosehaven. Though let’s be honest: this rapid-fire, throw everything at the wall style of unhinged comedy is at least as old as The Goodies, which was also a show featuring a wacky comedy trio. So it’s not like everybody under 60 doesn’t know what they’re watching here.
Again, not so long ago the ABC was airing this kind of content on a regular basis. But a decade or so back it decided to shift the more youth-friendly comedy to the streaming side of things, later supported by turning then comedy-heavy digital channel ABC2 into ABC Comedy. The old and the old-at-heart would get the free-to-air channel. The ABC’s more youthful viewers would have the more technologically advanced methods of broadcasting that they were familiar with. Everybody wins.
Then the bottom continued to drop out of the budget and all the youth-friendly stuff was axed.
Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe is airing in the ABC’s prime time comedy slot because in 2023 there is literally nowhere else for them to put it where anyone will see it. All the other options are gone; if the ABC is going to continue to make comedy series that are anything more than safe suburban salutes to keeping it cozy, they’re going to have to air in a timeslot where people are going to see them no matter how risky that is.
The ABC archives are so full of comedy series that pushed the boundaries it’s hard to seriously argue there are many boundaries left. The only real difference between them and Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe is that Aunty Donna are generally speaking pretty darn funny. Is it a sharp break from what we’ve come to expect from the ABC’s recent comedy output? Yep. But that’s the fault of the ABC: maybe if they focused more on giving funny people a chance, this kind of thing wouldn’t be such a pleasant surprise.
These last few months have been hard for the Australian comedy fan looking for a decent laugh. And Would I Lie To You?, a well-established format, featuring well-established talent who occasionally have something funny to say, doesn’t quite cut it.
In the final episode, which aired last night, the stand-out was Welsh stand-up Lloyd Langford. Watching the cogs turn in Langford’s head as he tried to flesh out a lie or embellish a truth was every bit as entertaining as his dead-pan zingers. If there was someone as good as him each episode this show would be a lot more entertaining to watch.
On the other hand, Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly seemed rather muted compared to the sort of larger-than-life performance style he’s become known for in shows like Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun and We Interrupt This Broadcast. Not the right vehicle for him, perhaps? Still, not long to go until we can see Kelly do his usual thing in Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café.
The female panellists on Would I Lie To You? have never particularly sparkled, partly because there are fewer of them than male panellists on this show. What’s with the show’s policy of booking multiple male comedians but only one female comedian per episode? Sure, there’s usually another woman besides the female comedian. But she’s an actor or presenter or whatever Jacqui Lambie is?
Of the few female comedians who’ve made it onto Would I Lie To You?, there have been some decent ones. Georgie Carroll, who was on the show last week was a stand-out. Tanya Hennessy, who appeared this week, was less so. Although to be fair to her, she was barely in it.
When many of Australia’s top comedians are women, this is outrageous. As for panellists from ethnic minorities, leaving aside Nina Oyama, Alex Lee and Dilruk Jayasinha, er, does someone with an Italian-sounding surname count?
There’s a theory that in today’s difficult television environment, producers and executives aren’t inclined to challenge an audience’s prejudices by, say, putting someone on a show that some of the audience might dislike. Better to have someone known and bland (Charlie Pickering) than turn off a regular viewer because, shock, horror, a woman or someone non-white came on and told a joke.
So, farewell for 2023, Would I Lie To You?, a show which remains on air not because it’s entertaining, or showcasing new talent, or doing anything interesting or innovative, but because it’s cheap to make and just enough people are prepared to tolerate it.
It’s been a long time since local comedy had a future on Australian free-to-air television.
Watching comedy – well, the trends in comedy – is a great way to figure out where television is going in general: it’s a niche product on the sharp edge of production, so whatever’s happening there will eventually happen everywhere. Based on what’s been happening in comedy, you’d be looking to sell those commercial TV shares sooner rather than later.
What does this have to do with Taskmaster Australia? Taskmaster – a popular UK series, which already has a NZ version – is a show where a snarky host (here it’s Tom Gleeson) and his sniveling-slash-hard done by sidekick (Tom Cashman) boss around a bunch of comedians and Julia Morris, getting them to perform various vaguely comedy-adjacent tasks.
(Like running Channel Ten? – ed)
If you’re a fan of such things, it was pretty good; the more cynical among us might note that to date pretty much all the versions of Taskmaster have been “pretty good”, and that the format itself might be the real winner here.
But to be fair, for once Gleeson’s snark was put to good use, while the contestants pretty much all got laughs at one point or another – even Julia Morris, who we grudgingly have to admit seems to have lifted her laugh-getting game in recent years.
So on the comedy side of things, it achieved its goals. It even did okay in the ratings, though it’s no Gogglebox. Maybe Ten’s fairly consistent support of local comedy is starting to pay off? Hahaha yeah nah. Nope.
Ten recently announced the return in 2023 of Thank God You’re Here, the improv show with guide rails which usually managed to be entertaining and somehow faintly disappointing at the same time. It presented a great collection of comedy legends and Rebel Wilson at a time when comedy was hard to find on free-to-air TV – so some things never change – but it dropped them into pre-scripted situations with other cast members to keep things running so the default result was usually “ok, I guess”. Some people managed to make the format work for them (Shaun Micallef, Bob Franklin); a lot did not.
More relevant to today’s argument is that TGYH‘s return is a revival of an old format. Taskmaster: overseas format. Would I Lie to You Australia: overseas format. The Cheap Seats: look, we love it to bits, but it’s a format as old as the hills. At least Have You Been Paying Attention? is a new format… or it was when it made its debut a decade ago.
You can’t get people excited – or more accurately, excited enough – about things they’ve seen before. These are all safe bets that are relying on familiarity and nostalgia to get them over the line wait did someone mention We Interrupt This Broadcast?
A show like Taskmaster is the kind of show people should be talking about. The whole point of the tasks is to create scenes that’ll have people saying “did you see that?”; pretty much every episode had a couple of moments that should have got people talking, if only to say “geez, they took that a bit far”.
But this isn’t happening; nobody is writing Taskmaster recaps, no Taskmaster hashtags are trending, nobody is feeling left out by not watching it. It’s not building an audience, it’s not getting any buzz, it’s not creating any stars, it’s not providing a launch pad for new faces.
Free-to-air television is a declining market. If you’re just treading water, you’re going backwards. Australian television comedy isn’t generating any breakout hits because all the choices being made are safe ones. That means Australian television comedy is going backwards, and there’s not a lot of room left before it backs right off a cliff.
Taskmaster Australia was a perfectly good show. That’s not good enough.
The new Netflix dramedy Wellmania is a glossy, fast-paced dramedy about screwing up, thwarted ambitions and having to make changes to get what you want. To be honest, it’s not the kind of thing we usually get excited about. And having seen four episodes, we’re definitely not excited about it. But alongside We Interrupt This Broadcast, it’s the only Australian comedy-ish program currently on TV which isn’t an imported concept (Taskmaster, Would I Lie To You), a show which should have been axed years ago (The Weekly) or a revival of an old favourite (Rockwiz)*. So, yay?!
As food and lifestyle journalist Liv Healy, who’s on the verge of making it big in New York but finds herself trapped in her hometown of Sydney due to health problems, Celeste Barber is perfect casting. You can absolutely buy her as a hard-drinking, hard-drugging party girl, schmoozing her way around the Big Apple’s hottest dining establishments. And when Liv finds that she has no choice but to stay in Sydney, go to the gym and eat right, Barber simply uses the physical comedy skills she perfected in her mocking impressions of models and influencers on Instagram to get a laugh.
Sadly, though, a laugh, or, more accurately, several decent laughs per episode, is about all we get, as Wellmania is largely a drama about a woman, her best friend, her close family, the guy she fancies, and all of their issues.
Liv’s best friend Amy (JJ Fong) and her husband Doug (Johnny Carr) can’t get sex right anymore, leading to Amy going on a journey to get the spark back. Liv’s brother Gaz (Lachlan Buchannan) is planning his wedding to Dalbert (Remy Hii), and seems like the sensible, together one of the Healy siblings. But is Dalbert really the right man for him? Then there’s Liv’s Mum Lorraine (Genevieve Mooy, who older readers will remember as PR woman Jan in Frontline). She’s just retired and doesn’t know what to do with herself. Is the Boomer retirement dream she’s been sold all it’s cracked up to be? And finally, there’s Isaac (Alexander Hodge), a former addict who’s now teetotal and celibate that Liv falls for at the gym? Can she get him into bed?
All this allows for a wider range of explorations of self-help, self-improvement and just generally dealing with stuff, just don’t expect them to be deep ones. And definitely don’t expect there to be much in the way of comedy. Wellmania gets laughs from the odd sharp line or isolated moment of slapstick. If you want something where the focus is on the funny, you need to make your peace with Wellmania and move on. Namaste.
No-one cared who Jason Gann was until he put on the mangy dog suit.
For 10 years, Jason played the misanthropic, bong-smoking dog, Wilfred, first in a hit comedy series in Australia on SBS, and then in a US version starring opposite Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood, with guest appearances by Jason’s comedy hero, Robin Williams.
The US series premiere became the highest-ranking debut sitcom ever for FX Networks. It was praised by the Chicago Tribune as “the strangest new show on TV. And the funniest.”
In the show, the rest of the world sees Wilfred as a dog, while his owner sees him as a man dressed in a dog suit – described as part Australian Shepherd, part Russell Crowe on a bender.
The gig required Jason to put on a grey, fluffy dog suit that would define his adult life. By the time filming started for the first US season, he’d been wearing the suit for a decade, and it had become like a kind of psychic prison.
There’s definitely a lot to unpack there (“like a kind of psychic prison”?). Obviously the main takeaway if you read through to the end is that Wilfred, the rough-as-guts bong-smoking dog, was so popular as a concept that the context around him doesn’t matter. His fans don’t give a shit if he’s in a relationship sitcom or a commercial selling dope – they just can’t get enough of him. And dope!
For everyone else who watched Wilfred, the idea that a bong-smoking dog is 99% of the joke is pretty much just confirming some long held suspicions. The US version was fine in that “we’re not quite sure what people want to watch on these new prestige TV services so let’s just throw everything at the wall and hope people still like Elijah Wood” way of fifteen years ago. Ride that gravy train Gann!
The Australian version, which was the one we largely focused on here, was kind of… well, not creepy exactly, but definitely had some offbeat ideas about comedy relationships. Which co-writer Adam Zwar explored in his later local sitcoms up to and including Mr Black.
(looking back at the careers of Wilfred’s creators, it seems there’s a fairly clear divide between the guy in the dog suit – the kind of “one good idea” that careers are made on – and the guy who actually turned that idea into a show that was more than just a commercial for dope)
It’s a little odd that this story completely ignores the fact that Gann (together with Zwar) was pretty much an established figure on the comedy scene before Wilfred – more than established really, after two seasons of The Wedge and his own spin-off Mark Loves Sharon. But presumably the idea that it was the dog costume that made his career, and not years of hard work, is an easier sell. Especially now that it’s clear he’ll basically be buried in that dog suit.
It’s also surprising how Zwar – co-creator and co-star of Wilfred – just vanishes from this version of events. You’d think when the “offers rolled in from the US”, Gann’s co-writer and co-star would be just as entitled to put his hand out. Instead, he just… didn’t bother?
Still, even if there was backroom strife back then, it’s over now. Zwar and Gann are friendly enough for Gann to recently appear on Zwar’s podcast, and Zwar himself made it to Hollywood a few years later:
Thanks to their impressive body of work, Zwar and Brotchie were lured to Los Angeles about four years ago. Although his career has seemed like a smooth transition from local to national and international success, Zwar said he had suffered his share of rejections and setbacks.
“There’s so much heartache along the way,” he said. “You can spend months and years on a project – unpaid – and then it doesn’t get made. You can even have all the finance locked in and the show cast and then a network might have a change of heart.”
Turns out the moral of this story can be summed up in one line: “Drugs: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”. After all, a court case over a brutal drunken assault on a bus driver that dragged on for over a decade is now summed up with “But the story of the incident and trial followed him for years to come”.
Possibly that’s because “Gann, however, refused to pay the damages or Mr Hosny’s legal fees after relocating to America to film a US version of Wilfred for cable television.” It wasn’t until 2018 that a US court ordered him to pay up, which presumably he’s since done.
But hey, at least he’ll always have the glory days of Wilfred to look back on:
One review said the show was the rare sitcom to achieve “two series of perfection”, and that Wilfred was comparable to UK comedies Fawlty Towers and The Office.
