Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale Mad as Hell series VII
Comedy isn’t a competition, but there’s only so many hours in a day so why settle for second best? Hackneyed writers spouting cliches we may very well be, but even we can recognise that Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell is the best Australian comedy of the year.
Again.
Do we even need to write a new one of these posts?
Seven seasons in it remains remarkably consistent, in a way usually only seen in the kind of shouty panel shows that really can’t get any worse. Of course, there are changes if you go looking (especially if you consider Micallef’s previous fake news series Newstopia to be a close relation). Micallef himself has loosened up, while the show has settled down; if it turns out that the first ten minutes or so are just Micallef delivering news jokes to camera, these days he can pull it off – usually by throwing in a few wacky expressions to vary the tone.
It felt like there were slightly less comedy grotesques being interviewed this year, but slightly less slick media players as well. Characters that had been built up to near-regulars last year only made the occasional appearance; at a guess the Kraken was released just the once, and after a few cameos in recent years Micallef’s classic (or is that “classic”) character Milo Kerrigan failed to show at all. There was only the occasional mention of Bill Shorten’s zingers. Nobody had a piano dropped on them.
But there were sketches, often so traditionally cornball their old-fashioned nature was part of the joke. There was Cross-Promotion Corner, which gave younger comedians the chance to tell Micallef to fuck off. And unlike The Weekly, a show we’re constantly amazed has the guts to show its face on the same network as Mad as Hell, there were plenty of actual jokes about the news.
When Micallef gave some long-winded spiel about the state of some topical issue, it wasn’t some fingers-crossed-this-goes-viral-nailing-it presentation of opinions everyone at home already had; it was more often than not a joke about how slippery opinions can be, and how most of the time following our views to their logical conclusion takes us a long way from where we want to be. Or it was just funny. Either one will do.
It seems strange to remember it was only a few years ago that it looked like Mad as Hell was being eased out by the ABC bigwigs. There’s been seven seasons over seven years, but after three seasons in little over a year (seasons 3-5 ran from Feb 2014 to April 2015) it was a full year until season six of Mad as Hell – with 34 episodes of The Weekly in between. If you thought it looked like the ABC was grooming a replacement, you weren’t alone.
At the time it seemed almost reasonable. A blunter, less jokey form of news satire was on the rise, and the form rising fastest was the “nailed it” brand of internet-friendly lightweight news with aggro opinions that former newsreader Charlie Pickering claimed to be a specialist in. Mad as Hell‘s more traditional, less overtly opinionated form of comedy – you know, the type that focused on being funny rather than being right-on – was seemingly out of step with the strident times.
Yet The Weekly was shithouse, failing on even the most basic level to meet the pathetically low standards it set for itself. It’s little more now than a time-filling flop, a show unable to gain traction on any level, full of forgettable bits that fail to go viral as the the funny cast members seem increasingly side-lined. Now-ousted cast member Briggs has a running cameo on Get Krack!n, one of the few new ABC comedies with any excitement about it, while Weekly fixture Tom Gleeson hosts a minor game show even the contestants forget is going to air.
And Mad as Hell? It’s more relevant than ever. Where The Weekly increasingly feels out of touch with anything going on outside a shrinking segment of social media, Micallef’s surrealism nails the off-kilter zeitgeist of 2017 in a way that few news comedies – from any corner of the globe – can currently manage. It’s brilliant television that all involved, including the ABC itself, can be rightly proud of: unlike just about everything else looming on the horizon, its (presumed) return in 2018 can’t come quickly enough.
Vale Utopia series 3
If you’re making a sitcom that’s of a consistently high standard each week, that means you’re doing a good job, right? And Utopia is doing a good job; every episode it makes valid points about how government works (or doesn’t work) and it usually raises a few laughs along the way. So why, after three series, is Utopia leaving us cold?
Problem 1: Utopia is the same every week.
Tony’s got some big project he needs to move on but Jim and Rhonda turn up to make it impossible to do so. Which means major compromises on the project deliverables or a spin campaign about how well it’s going when in fact it’s not even happening, or everyone just sighing and kinda giving up.
Problem 2: All the characters in Utopia are stock characters.
Tony’s the guy in charge who wants to do things. Nat’s his second in command and she also wants to do things. Whereas Jim and Rhonda just turn up and tell them why they can’t do things, like they’re a pair of stuck records. And all the others are either annoying idiots, incompetent, or trying not to appear incompetent by nodding along. If they didn’t have different hair and skin colour it might be hard to tell them apart. Which leads us to…
Problem 3: None of the characters in Utopia have any depth.
What we’re watching every week is a slightly different plot and how some paper-thin characters deal with it. Utopia isn’t one of those shows where each week you get a different plot and because of how things are going in the character’s lives we might see them behave differently according to things they’ve experienced in previous episodes, like, say, in Mad Men or Orange Is the New Black.
This is a show where the reset button has been pressed between episodes, and while that’s worked for lots of comedies from the Warner Brothers cartoons to The Goodies to Get Krackin’, it seems pretty odd, tonally, in the context of a sitcom which in most other respects is in the realistic, single-camera style. Also, it means there’s no chance that any of the plots in the show can be character driven. So, there’s 50% of the show’s opportunities to funny out the window!
Problem 4: Those “modern life is rubbish” subplots.
What’s with how you can’t buy a simple ham sandwich on sliced white bread anymore? And why is coffee so complicated these days? Er, well, last time we had lunch in the CDB, where Utopia is set, you could and it isn’t. So, we didn’t really understand the subplot in episode 6 about how Tony couldn’t get a ham sandwich. We understood the bit in that same episode about how infrastructure was done better in the old days, before privatisation took over and turned everything into rort for property developers, but then, that’s actually true. The idea that office workers are forced to eat a pide or a ban mi baguette or some sushi, instead of a good old simple ham sandwich, for lunch, isn’t. So, they probably shouldn’t have tried to draw parallels there.
Problem 5: Satire on infrastructure isn’t funny in and of itself.
Or to be slightly more accurate, Working Dog haven’t found a way to make a weekly satire on infrastructure funny in and of itself. Plenty of shows have found the funny in infrastructure – Yes Minister, The Games – but then they weren’t always dealing with infrastructure. Sure, Working Dog have got around this flaw with their office obsession of the week sub-plot – a CEO sleepout, a recycling scheme, the new door locks don’t open – something so utterly ridiculous that it prevents everyone at the NBA from doing their jobs – and provides the audience laughs where the infrastructure plots can’t. But it’s still a major flaw in your comedy series if the main point of the show is something that’s never, ever going to be funny. Especially when the B plots start falling flat too. And after three series, they are feeling a bit samey.
So, as much as we hate to kick one of the better Australian sitcoms of recent years into the grass, guys, you might as well leave it there. Don’t worry about giving us a Series 4.
C’mon Girls, You Can Change the World
The verdict is in, and unsurprisingly everyone really loves Get Krack!n. Sure, some of these people doing the loving clearly weren’t watching Kate McLennan on Let Loose Live:
Not long ago, most of us had never heard of Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney; now we can barely imagine Australian comedy without them.
Australian comedy without McLennan saying “I knew a boy once who had a rash on the back of his head and now he’s a raper!”? Inconceivable!
We largely covered our initial impressions of the show here, but after a second viewing… it’s still good! Watch it everyone! Enjoy the one whole week coming up where the ABC has three decent scripted Australian comedies on a Wednesday night!
…
Okay, having done our bit to blindly support quality Australian comedy, we can admit that while Get Krack!n is an excellent show with an extremely high hit/miss ratio jokes-wise and a firm point of view that we don’t see anywhere near often enough on our screens, it is a little uneven in a way that suggests that perhaps the Katering Show style of comedy isn’t ideal when taken to half-hour length.
Obviously, being uneven is baked into the breakfast show format – it’s made up of segments with often whiplash-inducing tonal shifts – and for the most part the show does a good job of making the segments work as individual comedy bits. But not all the segments are equally funny, and when The Katering Show was such a tightly consistent show this seems a little wobbly by comparison. They’ve stretched a ten minute web series into a 25 minute television show and done an excellent job of it, but there are still moments where the gaps show.
What makes this far less of a problem than it otherwise might be is the solid gold interaction between the Kates, playing the same characters as The Katering Show (McLennan is excitable and anxious, McCartney is somewhat less so) here and while McCartney’s “I couldn’t give a fuck” attitude is slightly more puzzling on a proper television show (on The Katering Show it made sense that she was frustrated and bored, because a friend was roping her into a weird web series; an actual television show seems like it would be so much effort to do you’d just say no from the start) it’s funny so just shut up and go with it, okay?
It’s also notable for its attitude towards society, which is a lot more up-to-the-minute than most Australian comedies – Utopia seems to have dissolved into “aren’t these modern foodstuffs crazy?” half the time, and when it wraps up it’ll be replaced with “Hurray for advertising” circa 1999 with Gruen. These are two angry morning television hosts, and you’re never going to die wondering about their opinions about the patriarchy, consumerism, and the way society infantilises and sexualises women.
(on The Katering Show this material often felt like the characters blurting out their real feelings under pressure; here, initially at least, it feels a bit more scripted. It’ll be interesting to see as the series progresses whether things gradually get more frenetic and shambolic on the show resulting in the Kates getting more manic, or whether it all resets at the start of each new episode)
Plus there’s two women of colour in the first episode, which certainly feels like a first in the 21st Century for an Australian comedy that isn’t Black Comedy (or just *a* black comedy).
Considering Australian television used to be built on a rock-solid foundation of taking the piss out of other television shows Get Krack!n‘s swipes at breakfast television, and the language of television itself, are well overdue. Flubbed lines, speaking to the wrong camera, disinterested floor crew, the dangers of boom mikes and tottering around on high heels on a set built on levels are all realistic, but thankfully not the boringly literal realism we’ve seen in a lot of recent comedies. They’re making fun of real life, not trying to recreate it and then slap some jokes on top.
And we really should have put this first: Get Krack!n features some of the most creepily catchy earworm jingles we’ve heard in a long time. We’d happily buy the soundtrack… if we didn’t already have the entire thing stuck in our heads on a permanent loop.
Vale True Story
The final episode of True Story – well, the first series at least; it’s done well enough in the ratings to be the rare Australian commercial comedy hit – was a bit unusual. For a series that’s largely featured all-star Australian comedy casts (the week before had Stephen Curry, Bob Franklin and Rob Sitch), it had no big names and no wide-ranging story. Instead, it featured a pair of New Zealand university students forcing each other to do dares until one of them was standing over a toilet holding a human poo.
The reason why True Story has been one of the comedy highlights of the year is that, unlike a lot of current Australian comedy (The Other Guy comes to mind), the joke wasn’t simply that he had to hold a poo. No, True Story dug deeper: we were told how perfect the poo looked, how the poo made it onto a plate was discussed, the difficulty of forcing yourself to pick up excrement was revealed, and then once the poo was picked up, well… let’s just say squeezing came into the picture. And it turns out getting rid of that poo smell is harder than you might think.
Sure, it was disgusting. But if you’re going to make jokes about bodily waste, then make jokes about it: don’t just leave it sitting there like the simple mention of it is comedy in and of itself. And that’s why True Story has been so much fun each week, even when the story being told doesn’t really build to a big finish or just kind of wanders around; it’s never content to just present a scenario and leave it at that.
Partly that’s a result of the format. Hamish & Andy sit there while regular folks tell their wacky story, so of course Hamish & Andy are going to ask questions and point out angles they think are funny. That’s what happens when people tell stories – and yet, going by the kind of stories we too-often see on our television screens, it’s not something that actually happens when people sit down to write comedy scripts.
It definitely didn’t hurt that the stories were told using a heck of a lot of very funny performers. In a way it was kind of depressing seeing so many big names week in week out; why aren’t they on our screens more often? Mick Molloy might have a successful career doing other stuff, but he’s still a very funny actor – and yet this was the only show that’s actually had him acting since… what, the first season of The Time of Our Lives?
Even the parts with the regular folk telling their stories worked well, in large part because Hamish & Andy are extremely relaxed and confident when it comes to dealing with the general public. It’s easy – a little too easy – to imagine another host slapping down the guy in the final episode who clearly thought he was a bit of a joker (“we do the funny stuff here, mate”), but instead Hamish & Andy were happy to laugh at his lines without letting him run away with the show. Having nothing left to prove plays a part (they’ve got to be the biggest non-stand up comedy stars in the country), but it’s also another way that True Story was a show where being funny was the end goal; it didn’t really matter who got them over the line so long as they made it in the end – then everyone’s a winner.
The true stories in True Story were rarely classically hilarious. Even the best of them (probably the one where Ryan Shelton was a primary school teacher dealing with a grade-A scam artist) didn’t build to great endings or have brilliantly over-the-top situations. But they worked because each episode went into every nook and cranny looking for laughs. There was a cutaway joke in the final episode that was simply “these guy’s mums think they’re off learning stuff at university” – it was a five second laugh, but that’s five more seconds than a lot of recent Australian comedies have served up.
What it boils down to is that this was a series that really just wanted to be funny. It didn’t have to try to seem realistic because the stories actually were real; with that out of the way, they could do all the dumb jokes they wanted to. The stories weren’t great comedy-wise, because well-crafted comedy is almost always going to be funnier than simply retelling something that really happened. But because the focus was on making these funny stories even funnier, then end result really was funny. Wait, what?
Look, the point is that True Story worked because it was trying to be funny. It wasn’t trying to be cool, or realistic, or intelligent, or anything else. And it turns out that when you make “funny” your main goal, sometimes things just work out. Well, for the audience at least. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt Hamish & Andy’s careers any either. Why do we keep making inner city dramedies again?
Extreme re-working: How The Chaser’s Extreme Vetting went from bad idea to good idea in just four episodes
Remember those suggestions that The Chaser would stay with Triple M after Radio Chaser finished up? Well, if by “Triple M” they meant “Austereo’s new podcasting platform Podcast One”, then yes, The Chaser now have a podcast there called Extreme Vetting.
What’s it about? Well, it takes Peter Dutton’s new super ministry and the general theme of surveillance as its premise, and sees The Chaser subjecting potential subversives to interrogations on behalf of the government. Or, to put it another way, it’s The Chaser interviewing some comedians and other media types with a topical high concept slapped on it for…marketing reasons?
Look, fair enough, “The Chaser interviews some people” isn’t a great sales line in a competitive market, but shouldn’t a high concept add value to a show? And we’re not sure this one does…
Episode 1 sees Charles Firth and Dom Knight interview ex-pat stand-up Sarah Kendall, a good comedian with an interesting background, but the interview’s just awful. Kendall either isn’t aware of the secret agent scenario she’s involved in, or can’t be bothered with it, or can’t think of a way to make her participation in it funny. And neither can Firth and Knight. Not that it stops them.
Every couple of minutes the pair stop the interview so they can leave the room and plan tactics for the next stage, like actual cops or ASIO agents would do…except it’s not funny, it just breaks the flow of what could have been an interesting, amusing conversation.
By Episode 2, with John Safran, Firth and Knight have clearly had a re-think and are dialling back a lot on the whole interrogation thing. They interrupt the interview a few times to do their whispering in the corridor bit, but the show’s mostly an amusing chat with Safran. If you haven’t heard about Safran’s book Depends What You Mean by Extremist or want to hear his contemporary take on his infamous stunts with Shane Warne and Ray Martin, or how he put a fatwa on Rove, then it’s worth a listen.
Rob Sitch is the guest in Episode 3, which again is a good interview in which Sitch has lots of interesting things to say about The Late Show, The D-Generation, The Castle and various other projects he’s worked on, with minimal interruptions from The Chaser. It’s a similar story in Episode 4 with Peter Chudd creator James Colley, and if anything, there’s even less of the interrogation stuff.
So, lesson learnt: if you’re going to take an established format and give it a high concept twist, make it worthwhile or ditch it quickly. And after years of The Chaser running less-than-promising concepts into the ground, who knew they could do that?
Vale Growing Up Gracefully, or It Takes Money to Make Money
Here’s a blast from the past: while watching the final episode of Growing Up Gracefully, the ABC’s latest not-quite-comedy to combine interviews with relationship experts with somewhat pointless sketches demonstrating not very sexy sex stuff, we noticed Marieke Hardy listed in the end credits as script supervisor.
Script supervisor is a job that, as far as we can tell, basically means “make sure the people actually making the show don’t screw it up”, which led to a bit of head scratching at Tumblies HQ. This is Marieke Hardy we’re talking about, right? The creator of the extremely unfunny and somewhat creepy Laid? Making sure a comedy series doesn’t go off the rails? Huh?
At first we figured her qualification for the gig was that she, like Growing Up Gracefully hosts Hannah & Eliza Reilly, comes from an Australian television background: while the Reillys are the daughters of Hey, Dad…! creator Gary Reilly, Hardy’s parents were both television producers with credits including The Sullivans and All The Rivers Run. No doubt they could sit around and talk about all the ways that they clawed their way up the media ladder and through hard work and effort managed to be given their own television shows on national broadcasters by the time they were in their mid-twenties. It’s a hard knock life.
But hang on a second. The Reilly’s have extensive media experience (Hannah was a long-time Chaser contributor and currently hosts a radio show on Triple J, for example): exactly how much supervising would their production need? Would this have been a full-time, hands-on job for Hardy – in which case our eyebrow over hiring her would have remained raised – or could this have been more of a casual, check-collecting affair, in which case her recent resume of co-writing Hoges and appearing somewhere down the credits of series like Packed to the Rafters and Wonderland might have qualified her for the gig?
Based on her recent TV credits, she certainly had time to devote herself fully to Growing Up Gracefully, as her only work this year has been an episode of Seven Types of Ambiguity – though she’s reportedly also on the writing staff for the upcoming third series of Cleverman as well. But it turns out she’s been busy elsewhere these last few years:
Hardy, a television writer, and regular panellist on ABC TV’s The Book Club, has spent much of the past two years working anonymously in “immersive theatre, live art and experiential theatre” at Dark Mofo, Brisbane and Melbourne festivals and the Melbourne and Adelaide fringe festivals. Two years ago she received the $160,000 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship.
It’s fair to say we were, um, somewhat surprised to read that Hardy was given a $160,000 grant, considering her creativity was fairly well plumbed over two series of Laid and it’s not like anyone was clamouring for more after that wrapped up. There’s also the small matter of her being gainfully employed as a television writer, a job that last time we checked paid more than the fuck-all most artists in the country are trying to live off. Oh, and she’s a television panellist: since when do those guys get “creative fellowships”?
But then we remembered this post we wrote a few years back detailing the numerous grants she’d been given over a number of years for various film and television projects that never materialised and in at least one case seemed certain never to materialise even before the money was handed over.
So why are government funding bodies throwing good money after bad?
At a guess, it’s because Hardy knows how to fill out the right forms and – thanks to her previous two shots at the big time – she technically qualifies as the kind of experienced television producer they want to encourage. As people who have seen pretty much all of her television output to date, may we respectfully suggest they reconsider.
(if you follow that link, you’ll see we were left wondering if Film Victoria would cough up more development cash for Hardy for the fifth straight year in a row. Turns out they did – $10,000 for something called Family Man which, like the previous three years’ projects, never materialised)
Hey, let’s go check out the requirements for the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, shall we?
The Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships provide grants to individual artists, arts managers, and thought leaders in the humanities.
The two criteria used to select Fellows are: outstanding talent and exceptional courage. Specifically, this talent and courage relates to the professional practice of the Fellows and not to cases of personal hardship.
“Outstanding talent”. That’s maybe not the two words we’d direct towards the creator of Laid. But they did stress that these criteria have nothing to do with “personal hardship”, which are also not two words we’d direct towards the creator of Laid.
Let’s continue:
The Fellowships are intended for artists in their ‘early mid-career’ – to be eligible, nominees must be in the first seven to fifteen years of their creative practice. They are also intended for artists who will primarily be resident in Australia for the two years of their Fellowship.
Hardy was awarded this grant in 2015 at the age of 39. It’s fairly safe to say by any objective standard her “creative practice” (that is, the creative endeavor in which she’s best known for and most successful at) is television writing* – her one book, a collection of personal essays notable largely for her getting the co-subjects of said essays to write afterwords praising her, was published in 2011, with a follow-up novel never appearing.
As a television writer, her first credit as a “series writer” was for Short Cuts in 2002. Though her first television writing credit was for Thunderstone in 1998 and she wrote for a range of series in 2001, so while she made it under the 15-year wire she was definitely cutting it pretty fine.
That’s only if you ignore the whole “early mid-career” thing, of course – having two seasons of your own sitcom is pretty much as good as it gets for a television writer in Australia, and by any reasonable standard Hardy’s television “creative practice” in 2015 was well and truly past any kind of “early mid-career”.
But of course, she wasn’t given this cash for her television writing: she got it because she’s Marieke Hardy, television panellist, newspaper columnist, radio host, event organiser, former topless blogger and high profile public figure-
working anonymously
-at various festivals.
(not Meredith music festival, obviously)
Anyway, while exactly how the money was spent remains a mystery – it seems the details of her festival work from the above article actually comes from a 2015 article announcing her win:
She couldn’t detail exactly how she would use the two-year fellowship, but said: “I want to be able to keep collaborating and keep working in new mediums.”
It does seem somewhat fortunate timing that just as the two year grant ran out she scored a gig as the new co-head of the Melbourne Writers Festival. All we really need to say about that is that the article praising her “strong literary lineage” that we quoted above is written by her co-panellist on The Book Show, who also happens to be The Age‘s books editor. It’s not what you know it’s who you know – unless what you know is how to fill out a grant form.
We could go on – “Working without my name attached has been the most beautiful thing I’ve done.” says a person who clearly craves anonymity – but let’s (finally) cut to the chase: unlike other areas of the Australian arts, comedy is an area where success is (somewhat) measured in laughter, not rampant self-promotion and empty hype. People’s careers tend to take them where their particular skills are best suited. And if there’s a second series of Growing Up Gracefully, they probably won’t need a script supervisor.
*it’s most definitely not her online writing.
The one where we finally get around to reviewing Lost in Pronunciation
It’s unfortunate that iView comedy Lost in Pronunciation came along at roughly the same time as Ronny Chieng International Student. Both are autobiographical sitcoms centring on immigrant stand-ups trying to comprehend Australian life and culture but one is better than the other. And it’s not this one.
Lost in Pronunciation starts with stand-up comedian Ivan Aristeguieta, fresh off the plane from Venezuela, wandering into an Adelaide coffee shop and chancing upon housemates Scott and Tia, who confuse him their Australian idioms (i.e. “Bob’s your Uncle!”). Eventually getting away from these baffling foreigners, Ivan arrives at the house of a friend who’s offered to put him up…except his friend’s already put up every South American in South Australia and there’s no room for Ivan, so it’s back to the coffee shop he goes, where Scott and Tia take pity on him and offer him their sofa.
And give or take a few attempts by Ivan to move out of Scott and Tia’s place, that’s the series: a newly-arrived South American is indoctrinated into Australian ways by a vegan guy and a bogan chick. Cue the culture clash hilarity.
Compared to Ronny Chieng: International Student the humour in Lost in Pronunciation is more of the slapstick/over-the-top comedy variety, which is sometimes but not always funny. An episode about how some magpies swoop out of gum trees and attack people becomes a bizarre farce where everyone in the neighbourhood has to carry large sticks and wear ice cream tubs on their heads whenever they go outside. Look, we get what they were trying to do here – and Australia is full of fauna that can be fairly lethal – but this was just too over-the-top to work. Although we did laugh a lot when the trio packed for a weekend camping trip and Ivan spent ages preparing delicious South American campfire food while Tia just filled her ute with nothing but slabs of West End Draught. Because that is a thing that happens here. Sometimes, we are Aussies are that stupid (and thirsty).
More successful are the cutaways to Ivan’s stand-up act, where Seinfeld-like, he does his observational material about his adopted country. Problem is, when the show switches back to the sitcom, a lot of the material is based on exaggerated stereotypes and easy gags. But if you’re the one person who still laughs at how vegans never shut up about being vegan, or at how vegans are so weak from the lack of protein that they can’t move, you’ll love this.
You Made A Show About A Piss-Stained Mattress
There’s a certain school of thought that says reality is the highest form of art. The closer your novel or drama or whatever gets to reality, the better it is. Everything about The Other Guy suggests creator / star Matt Okine and his team wanted to make a show that first and foremost felt real. And they’ve succeeded: everything about this series feels like an incident or character plucked from real life. Because no-one would be stupid enough to make this shit up.
First things first: The Other Guy isn’t funny. It’s not really even trying to be funny. Trying to be funny involves more than just thinking up a situation that could conceivably be funny and then just writing it down and moving on. To wit: the first episode is largely about a piss-stained mattress. The mattress contributes nothing to the story, aside from Okine’s character AJ constantly saying to everyone “I didn’t piss on it”, which –
– oh yeah, this is the level we’re operating on here: AJ spends the entire episode denying that it’s his piss soaking into the mattress until the very last scene of the episode, where he finally admits that yeah, it was him. He admits this to his ex (Valene Kane), who he dumped because she cheated on him. They still have a connection, see? She’s the only one he can tell the truth to, right? About his drunken piss antics. Awww.
But here’s what matters: nothing funny happens with the piss mattress. They don’t trick a germaphobe into sleeping on it, they don’t have to get it outside because it’s stinking up the place but it’s too big to remove, they don’t really do anything with it. The entire first episode revolves around a pissy mattress that’s just there until they throw it out.
Anyone who would like to suggest the mattress is a metaphor for this show, feel free.
What The Other Guy really is, is a pissweak – ohohoho – lightweight romantic drama. Ignore anyone silly enough to compare it to either Atlanta or Master of None: Atlanta was a funny yet deeply thoughtful look at a part of American culture rarely examined on television, while this is about 20-something cool dudes wandering around Sydney saying stuff like “why did I sleep with my dealer?”. Master of None was a look at romance from a guy willing to mix things up to get at emotional truths: this features a one night stand that ends awkwardly because neither partner will admit they pissed the bed.
In fact, the only thing this has to do with those US series is that their success opened the door for an Australian knock-off. Hey, local critics: if you’re comparing an Australian comedy series to an American one simply because the local version also features a comedian of colour, maybe you’re being just a little bit more racist than you think.
Still, like every serious Australian drama, it’s well shot in a “no cheap laughs here” fashion. Okine himself – and just him, no-one else – has an easy charm that makes him – just him, no-one else – a moderately engaging lead you can’t help but wish was in a show where he was doing dumb stuff with funny mates. But instead his best mate is Stevie (Harriet Dyer), who as written is so astoundingly unfunny it’s like she traveled here from an anti-matter universe where the highest form of comedy is dragging fingernails down a blackboard.
Considering how ham-fisted the writing is in general – oh look, a scene with AJ’s dad, why do these shit dramadies always bring the parents in like anyone under the age of thirty wants to hang out with the olds fuck you Please Like Me – it’s almost a good sign that they never figured out how to fit in the obligatory “aww, she really cares” moment with Stevie, who spends the entire first episode taking drugs, slipping drugs to AJ, complaining about how it was a bad idea to sleep with her dealer, laughing at her dealer’s range of “slampieces”, inviting herself to move in with AJ, and so on and on and on.
It seems slightly possible that the comedic idea behind having her be astoundingly unpleasant in a completely unfunny way is to occasionally have her taken down a peg (her dealer gets to point out that sleeping with him doesn’t mean she gets free drugs), but it’s hard to tell for sure. Really, really hard to tell.
That’s where this whole “dramedy” approach totally falls down if you want to make a comedy: if you think being realistic is your main goal in a show like this, then you have to undersell things (well, you don’t really – reality is full of crazy shit. But if you want your television show to be seen as “realistic” then you have to downplay things), and that means you can’t do a big abrasive character who gets their comedy comeuppance each episode. It’s too broad.
Trouble is, this also wants to be a comedy, because Matt Okine doing a serious drama based on his own breakup would just be sad and creepy. He’s mining his life for laughs, people! And obviously that whole scene where the off-putting mattress salesman told a pair of complete strangers he was totally up for an orgy is something that happens every day. But to be fair, on a better show that would have worked as a moment of random creepiness against a realistic backdrop. Here it comes in a scene where AJ and Stevie are rolling around on mattresses being annoying pricks as per usual.
The tone is all over the place: if you want laughs from them being jerks in a mattress store, then go for that. Don’t then suddenly have the physically unappealing salesman reveal that sex with multiple partners is on his menu (AWKWARD) because quite frankly even if he is average-looking why would he want to fuck a couple of drunk jerks who’ve just been lying on his mattresses with their shoes on?
Just to return to Stevie for a moment, there’s a lot of comedy around at the moment based on women behaving badly. Almost all of it works because the people behind it understand that on some level the joke has to be on someone – either the person who’s behaving badly, or the stuffy types around her that she shakes up.
Here though, Stevie is annoyingly self-centered without the show giving any context for her behaviour to be out of place – the joke isn’t that she’s inappropriate, or that she’s oblivious to what’s around her, or that she’s messing up AJ’s life, or anything like that. The joke is that “wow, she’s really full on and crazy, right guys?” In real life this kind of character is the kind of character people say should be in a comedy show. But this isn’t real life.
Dramedies are almost always awful because they want all of the results without putting in any of the hard work. They want to be seen to be telling it like it is in such a way that nothing needs to make sense in a dramatic way because real life doesn’t make sense, and they want you to laugh without writing jokes because real life doesn’t have jokes. Having AJ argue with his barmaid-slash-one night stand over who pissed the bed then cut to them back in his bedroom about to have sex again only works with the audience doing all the hard work of rationalising the characters’ insane behaviour in their heads: we’ve all known people who’ve done crazy stuff like that in real life, so why not cut these fictional television characters the same slack?
Here’s why not: they’re not real. This is a fictional narrative. As such, we’re entitled to expect the writers to shape their material to create certain effects. If they want to get laughs, have the characters say and do funny things. If they want to be realistic, have the characters behave in a realistic fashion. But this garbage? Where the characters just do whatever at random because supposedly a total lack of logic or motivation feels real and where the comedy is meant to come from us thinking “yeah, that’s funny” rather than actually having anything funny happen?
It’s as weak as piss.
Biting the Hand that Feeds
One of the things Australian sketch comedy used to be known for is taking a swipe at other television shows. Whether it was Fast Forward mocking Derryn Hinch or however many times Paul McCarthy wasted our time with his sub-par Kochie impression, mocking other shows was part and parcel of the sketch comedy scene here. Until it wasn’t.
Mostly that’s due to the traditional sketch comedy scene dying a slow, painful death. Nobody in 2017 wants to be following in the footsteps of Wednesday Night Live and Totally Full Frontal. But there’s an element of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here too – after all, for close to two decades one of the main reasons people tuned into sketch comedy here was to see people rip the shit out of television. And thankfully, Mad as Hell is back on the job.
This isn’t exactly new ground for the series, of course. In previous years Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries was always good for a laugh or two, and that’s just off the top of our head. But – and we’re going out on a limb here, so feel free to correct us in the comments – usually the sharpest send-ups were reserved for the final episode of the year. Or at least, we seemed to think so back in season four:
Surprisingly – or not, depending on how closely you’ve been paying attention – for a news satire the final episode of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell contained a lot of swipes at other comedy shows. And well deserved swipes at that, whether the targets were lazy ABC “comedy” panel shows (the ‘Blather’ sketch even contained a reference to the number of episodes pre-recorded by our old nemesis, Randling), the random chatty nature of shows like Media Circus, or Dave Hughes – though the impersonation there was more affectionate than the rest.
But this year it feels like the satire is both a little bit sharper and a little closer to the core of the show. The Cleverman parody has turned up twice now (presumably because they filmed a bunch of it at once), and for a series that’s supposedly world-class television (which generally makes it critic-proof in Australia) it’s a delight to see someone pointing out that Cleverman just might not be the most amazing program ever made.
There’s also been a pretty decent kicking given to Anh Do’s Painting Party or whatever that show was called, and – perhaps more interestingly – there was the segment where Micallef explained that the interviews on The Weekly are time-fillers they get on for free because it’s basically a promotional opportunity. Which we all kind of knew, but it was still surprising to hear it said on national television – much like it was those times a few years back when Mad as Hell pointed out that Chris Lilley wasn’t perhaps quite as amazing as we’d been led to believe.
Admittedly these are all fairly soft targets and mocking television programs isn’t exactly ground-breaking. What makes this stuff work as comedy in 2017 is that after close to a decade where Australian comedy has had nothing to say on the subject of television – let alone television that’s airing on the same network (our fondness for Have You Been Paying Attention is well known, but if they were ever to really let rip on some of Ten’s dodgier offerings it’d be a very funny night indeed) – having Micallef say that other ABC programs just might be a bit crap seems a bit edgier than it might have been back in 1997.
Plus he has a point: much as we love and support the ABC, they do have a habit of coming up with shows more miss than hit. Cleverman really does think it’s cleverer than it is, Anh Do’s Brush with Fame is a bizarre idea for a chat show (unless you remember the UK painting-related chat show Rolf Harris hosted which, ew?), and the middle third of each episode of The Weekly really is just a thinly disguised advertisement for whatever the guest is flogging on the interview circuit. If our TV critics* aren’t willing to point that out, looks like it’s up to the comedians to do their job for them.
*we have TV critics?
The Chaser and a network of fake news
Here’s something interesting we saw the other day:
The Chaser working to launch Fake News Network
August 8, 2017
DeciderTV has learned that the team behind The Chaser are currently shopping around a TV project to Australian broadcasters with the working title “Fake News Network”.
Fresh off the back of delivering Radio Chaser on Triple M Sydney, featuring both Chaser and non-Chaser talent, it is understood Charles Firth is the driving force behind this project. Radio Chaser featured Firth, Dom Knight, Chris Taylor & Andrew Hansen, with frequent inclusions Rhys Muldoon and The Feed’s Mark Humphries.
It is unclear if any of the team involved in Radio Chaser will be involved in the new project, though given the available pool they draw from it’s highly likely. Other Chaser members Craig Reucassel & Julian Morrow have just wrapped another season of The Checkout for the ABC, & Chas Licciardello continues to deliver weekly episodes of Planet America with John Barron for ABC News.
DeciderTV understands there has been some interest from a couple of networks. Those that have seen the pitch episode report it’s “Not just about news satire”, and say it’s “Much broader than they were expecting from The Chaser”.
The Chaser have been responsible for a number of satirical shows featured on ABC television, including CNNNN and The Chaser’s War on Everything. Firth also was executive producer on ABC2’s The Roast, where he formed the connection with writer/performer Humphries.
Firth was also reportedly working on an untitled project with Channel Ten earlier this year before the network went into receivership.
When approached for comment Firth declined, noting “It sounds like Fake News”.
Of course, what with all this fake news about it’s often worth waiting to see if any other websites pick up a story before you know it’s the real deal…
Fake News Network: The Chaser pitching new TV project after hit radio show
August 10, 2017
The team behind The Chaser are currently shopping around a TV project to Australian broadcasters with the working title “Fake News Network”.
News of the new TV project comes after the successful Radio Chaser on Southern Cross Austereo’s Triple M Sydney, a show that featured both Chaser and non-Chaser talent.
Radio Chaser featured Charles Firth, Dom Knight, Chris Taylor and Andrew Hansen, with guests Rhys Muldoon and The Feed’s Mark Humphries.
Other Chaser members Craig Reucassel and Julian Morrow have just wrapped another season of The Checkout for the ABC, while Chas Licciardello continues to deliver weekly episodes of Planet America with John Barron for ABC News.
Reucassel also hosted one of ABC TV’s biggest hits of the year so far – War On Waste.
Firth also was executive producer on ABC2’s The Roast, where he formed the connection with writer/performer Humphries.
There is believed to have been interest from a couple of networks. Those that have seen the pitch episode have commented it’s not just about news satire and is much broader than they were expecting from The Chaser.
With their previous TV shows attracting more than a million viewers in TV’s glory days, an episode of The Chaser could be attractive to any TV Network.
Firth was also reportedly working on an untitled project with Channel Ten earlier this year before the network went into receivership.
When approached for comment Firth declined, telling Mediaweek: “It sounds like fake news.”
So maybe this is real news. Oh, wait, the original link to the second story doesn’t work anymore and if you want to see it you have to look at the cached version. What the hell is going on here? And why haven’t any other sites picked this up? Normally a story about a new Chaser project would appear on sites like TV Tonight and Mumbrella too.
Sounds to us like if it is real – and it does sound like the kind of show The Chaser would be pitching in August 2017 – someone doesn’t want us to know about it quite yet.
More worryingly, it also sounds like a re-hash of The Roast (the largely awful news satire show from 2012-2014 that we slagged off endlessly because it really was a massive pile of crap) re-tooled for the Trump era. Joy.