As you no doubt know by now, this year’s Tropfest short film festival has been cancelled:
Popular short film festival Tropfest has been cancelled after 23 years with founder John Polson saying it may be due to a “terrible and irresponsible mismanagement” of funds.
Billed as the world’s largest festival of its kind, Tropfest attracts hundreds of entries and is watched by thousands every year and was due to take place on December 6.
“It is devastating for me to announce today that Tropfest will not be taking place as scheduled in [Sydney’s] Centennial Park this year,” Mr Polson said in a statement.
Usually we wouldn’t care in the slightest – and not just because, thanks to loads of people wailing and gnashing their teeth, it looks like the massively successful international festival will probably be bailed out – as short film is not really our thing. Or anyone else’s outside of Tropfest, going by the number of “without Tropfest, Australian short film is doomed” messages swirling around social media and those portions of the press that benefit financially from Tropfest.
But c’mon guys, Tropfest is where a lot of Australian television’s biggest comedy types got their big break. Paul Fenech! Adam Zwar and Jason Gann! Austen Tayshus! Matilda Brown! Abe Forsythe! Okay, most of them were already working hard before Tropfest gave them a boost – or in the case of Brown, she was Bryan Brown’s daughter – but, you know… Tropfest!
And there’s all the big name comedy cameos! Last year’s winner Granny Smith starred Steve Vizard! And we were too depressed to do any further research there.
Then there’s the way that, more often than not, the winner is basically just a firmly average comedy sketch that just happens to have cost tens of thousands of dollars to film. Which does tend to reinforce the biggest problem with Australian film and television comedy these days: the idea that the script comes last. Coming up with a twist ending isn’t good writing; spending eight minutes telling one shitty joke is worse.
Despite Tropfest having an outsized impact on the shape of Australian comedy over the last decade or so, we’re pretty confident that the impact has been all bad. The people it made into successes were either going to make it anyway or didn’t deserve the attention; that whole “every film must feature one item” gimmick and the way it demanded all rights to the entrants’ films made it seem just a little like the whole event was more about promoting the Tropfest brand rather than the film-makers themselves.
So our quick two words on Tropfest? You can probably guess.
Recent episodes of The Ex-PM have seen a shift away from plots which rely on the audience believing that Andrew Dugdale was once Prime Minister (as we pointed out in our first review of the series, this is difficult), to plots which rely on the audience believing that Andrew Dugdale is some guy who’s very well known (much easier to buy). It’s a subtle shift, but a good one.
Gone are the heavy-handed political references that didn’t work as…um…satire? Was that the intention behind the scene where Dugdale’s at a primary school reading My Pet Goat while back at home toy planes were crashing in to his chimney? We don’t know. Anyway, now The Ex-PM is more about plots that any rich and/or famous person could be in, which makes it a lot easier to file Dugdale as an unlikeable idiot with lots of money, and enjoy the laughs generated from him getting in to a variety of absurd and/or sticky situations.
There’s a lesson here for anyone writing a sitcom – you can make a change mid-series and still write the series you intended. Or, to posit another theory about this subtle shift: playing to your strengths in comedy is always a good idea. And if you’re Micallef this means weird/absurd characters and plenty of them, and an over-the-top performance from him…which should be pretty funny in the final episode where he’s held hostage by the Russian mafia.
Best Aussie sitcom of the year? Yeah, probably.
What’s that you say? We’re experiencing a golden age of Australian cinematic comedy? This we had to see for ourselves – and so we spent our Saturday watching not one but two Australian feature-length comedy films currently screening in cinemas. Shouldn’t the non-awaited third film in Paul Fenech’s Housos trilogy be out by now as well? Guess you can have too much of a good thing.
To be fair, The Dressmaker probably doesn’t exactly count as a “comedy” – we sure didn’t laugh much – but it is a prime example of the kind of broad-strokes comedy material that used to dominate Australian cinema right up until The Castle was actually funny. If you’re lucky you got Muriel’s Wedding; if you weren’t, you got Welcome to Woop Woop. Either way the general feeling was of watching a comedy made by people who were the kind of loud dickheads you ran away from at dinner parties.
The Dressmaker (which stars Kate Winslet as a French-trained Aussie dressmaker who returns to her 50s-era shithole small town to wreak revenge on the local freaks by… making dresses) is actually not half bad as a movie – that’d be largely thanks to a bunch of good performances and a story that, in a rarity for Australian film, actually keeps moving forward – but as a comedy we’re back to the collection of grotesques that our film-makers (as opposed to comedians) think are sure-fire laugh getters.
For fuck’s sake, this movie actually features an evil hunchback who gets his komedy kumuppance because once he starts running he can’t stop. Plus Shane Bourne plays a drug-rapist. And Hugo Weaving plays the local cop who also wears a full matador outfit because he’s flamboyant. Tonally it’s all over the shop which kind of works dramatically but as a comedy it’s a big old mess. It’ll probably be the biggest locally made hit of the year: no-one ever seems to go broke making comedy for people who need to be told when and where to laugh.
Now Add Honey, on the other hand, is made by people who actually have a decent recent track record in comedy: Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope, aka Gristmill, the team behind The Librarians and Upper Middle Bogan. The premise here is kind of involved; the short version is that a surprise family reunion goes wrong when L.A. glam stage mother Beth (Portia de Rossi) is arrested for drug possession, leaving her sister, down-to-earth but high-strung lawyer Caroline (Butler), stuck with Beth’s daughter, teenage international superstar Honey (Lucy Fry). Much fish-out-of-water hijinks ensue.
It’s a fairly straightforward premise but the film stumbles around for a while putting everything in place. There’s a third sister (Lucy Durack) and her engagement subplot that goes nowhere but does provide an excuse to have Hamish Blake (who plays her fiancée) in the film; Caroline’s husband is sleeping in the spare room and spending nights “at the office” but she’s too busy to notice; her older daughter has both teen problems and teen sass while her younger one is obsessed with the “Monkey Girl” character that’s made Honey a star. Plus Angus Sampson is a sleazy paparazzi lurking in the bushes outside. If that sounds kind of crowded, that’s because it is.
Gristmill’s sitcoms have all tended to have strong premises which were largely ignored in favour of character-based work. But in a sitcom you have the time to explore your characters; here with such a large cast pretty much everyone ends up having some big motivation that’s kind of glossed over. Caroline is yet another of Butler’s trademark stressed-out characters, if not as hyper-ventilating as the one she played in The Librarians. Yet despite her stressed-out nature being exactly the kind of issue we expect to be solved in a movie, here the cause is touched on once (she brought up her sisters after their mother’s death) and never dealt with. In another kind of movie this matter-of-fact approach would be praise-worthy – what’s done is done and we have to move forward in our lives – but in a comedy it feels like a thread left dangling.
Culture-clash stories are a comedy staple because no-one needs to think much about what’s happening and so all the effort can be put into the jokes. She’s from L.A., they’re from Melbourne, in the end she makes their lives a bit more glamorous and they bring her a bit more down to earth. But here we get a third act that’s all about the dangers of sexualising children (Beth wants Honey to transition out of kid’s entertainment via a sleazy music video and sexy photo shoot while Caroline does not approve) and why society says some kinds of bodies are fine to look at while others are seen as gross. It’s slightly funnier than it sounds, promise.
Teenagers acting sexy when they’re not prepared for the consequences – which here would be “Angus Sampson” – is a real issue, but it’s not an issue that is unique to glammed-up L.A. TV stars. So there’s really two stories here that only kind of overlap: how do you deal with a movie star in your suburban home, and how do you deal with a teen who’s under pressure to be overtly sexual before she’s ready for it. You could make a decent comedy out of either one; cramming them both into 100 minutes results in a bit of a mess.
Presumably the idea was meant to be that a): things would start out as a family dealing with this alien creature dropped into their midst, b): eventually they’d realise she was just like them then c): discover she had her own big problem she was dealing with and they’d band together to help her out. But there’s so much crammed into the first and second acts – we didn’t even mention the drug rehab stuff, or the failed marriage stuff, or the “you kissed the boy I liked” stuff, or Honey’s US agent, or Angus Sampson in the bushes, or the TV celebrity chef – that it all gets a little muddled. And a muddled story is the enemy of comedy – or at least, a guy that owes comedy money.
That said, unlike The Dressmaker this does contain a number of actually funny scenes. Butler can do “exasperated” in her sleep and get laughs, Blake is a constant scene-stealer (to be fair to everyone else, all he has to do in every scene he’s in is get laughs) and everyone else is extremely good at both the drama and the comedy. Well, maybe not Sampson, but he’s stuck playing a cartoon character. And Fry is playing a character that has to go from a broadly drawn caricature to a a real-life scared girl, which would be a big ask for anyone so it’s no big surprise that her scenes can be a bit all over the place.
Taken alongside The Dressmaker, we have here the two extremes of Australian movie comedy: one is a movie that works as a movie but isn’t all that funny, the other is funnier but doesn’t really hold together as a movie. Being funny is the hard part, but Australian comedians who stumble out the gate never get a second chance to make a film so we never get to see if they have a really good film in them.
Sadly, despite having some decent laughs, Now Add Honey just isn’t that good a film.
Press release time!
Planet America Special
Airs Friday, November 6 at 9pm (AEDT) on ABC News 24
Wednesday, November 4, 2015 — As Barack Obama’s time in the White House comes to an end, a billionaire businessman and a doctor who separated conjoined twins are the frontrunners to become the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee.
Clearly it’s time for the team from Planet America to explain what on earth is going on!
With one year until Americans elect their next president, join The Chaser’s Chas Licciardello and the ABC’s John Barron for a recap of the race so far, and the election ahead.
Top Democrat and Republican campaign strategists and local experts join Chas and John to preview the battle for the White House in 2016.
Join the conversation: #PlanetAmerica
The Planet America special airs on Friday, November 6 at 9pm (AEDT) on ABC News 24 and a new weekly series of the show kicks off in early 2016.
Okay, it’s hardly hilarious news – Planet America was a little too dry for our tastes last US election cycle – but Chas is regularly the funniest and sharpest member of The Chaser and having him basically be an internet-capable Dickie Knee on Media Circus is a bit of a waste.
And who knows? With Donald Trump firming as a legit candidate and the rest of the pack trying to out-nutzo him, they should have plenty of material to work with.
Recently one of our personal acquaintances took us aside to have a quiet word. “Listen, Team Tumbleweeds,” he said, “I’m fine with you having a go at Josh Thomas and Chris Lilley and those guys – but when you start taking swings at Annabel Crabb, you’ve stepped over the line.”
It took us a minute to realise what he was talking about:
If a show is dragging your whole schedule down, you don’t wait until the last episode to replace it, especially if the replacement is the staggeringly ineffectual sop to our politicians’ collective ego Kitchen Cabinet.
Which, let’s be honest, is pretty mild all things considered.
But as the conversation continued, it turned out that our chum’s actual problem with our comment was that – in their view – we’d wandered outside of our remit. In this guy’s opinion it’s fine for us to kick the beejesus out of any show we like, just so long as our target is at least trying to be a comedy. And Kitchen Cabinet, for all its immeasurable faults, has never claimed it was trying to be funny.
Fair enough, we said – well, actually, what we said was more along the lines of “if Australian television criticism was anything more than, to coin a phrase, a conga-line of suckholes, then we wouldn’t have to say anything because everyone else would have kicked the head off this disgusting and disgraceful sack of politician-pandering puke years ago”.
But after we finished shouting, we also had a counter argument: Kitchen Cabinet might not be comedy per se, but it is a prime example of one of the less tasteful aspects of Australian “satire”: sucking up to the people they’re meant to be taking down.
This has been one of our pet peeves for a while now:
If The Chaser were doing their jobs properly, no politician would want to go within a hundred miles of their studios – and they wouldn’t let them in even if they did. Because when they have politicians on the show, they’re showing them as being in on the joke. The politicians then are simply making fun of themselves, telling us that “hey, we’re just like you” – and then they go back to telling us how we should live our lives and we’re supposed to go back to letting them.
An oft-repeated story about the old Martin / Molloy radio show says that at one stage, when Tony Martin and Mick Molloy were riding the Liberal party hard over their attempts to de-unionise the docks, they were asked to have prime mover behind the anti-worker push Peter Reith on “for balance”. Supposedly, Mick said fine, but that he’d have only one question for Reith: “why are you such a cunt?”. And he was going to keep asking it until he got an answer.
That’s pretty funny: it’s also the level of respect our politicians all too often deserve.
Fortunately, as The Chaser have increasingly abandoned politics for media commentary, getting politicians involved in comedy “for balance” has largely died out. The idea of presenting audiences with an actual real-life politician on Mad as Hell is crazy; for all its flaws, The Weekly has largely stuck to interviewing non-political figures.
But who are we kidding? It’s more than likely that the reason why we’re not having politicians jammed into every remotely topical comedy show on the ABC is because they now have an entire show* where they can demonstrate that, despite spending every waking moment looking for a way to fuck over the general public, they’re really just average knockabout blokes who like a barbie like the rest of us. So selling off government services to their mates for bargain prices then quitting to take a job with those self same mates is Aussie as, right?
Meanwhile out in the real world, what our politicians are like as people is so amazingly irrelevant to anything related to the actual concerns of ABC viewers that the existence of Kitchen Cabinet can only be considered to be a direct insult to every man, woman and child in the land. These are people voted in to do a job, and that job is not “enjoy smashed avocado in their salad”. The policies they advocate and their ability to execute those policies are the only things of relevance when it comes to these power-mad bastards: if you’re going to do a television show about their private lives, it had better be Real Housewives of Melbourne-level debauched or stop wasting our time.
Of course, everyone already knows this. That’s why Kitchen Cabinet is hosted by the Marieke Hardy of political coverage: someone with nice hair and a fetching line in flowery dresses (cardies an optional extra) who is really quite good at pointing out that our politicians are really kind of cuddly once you take the time to get to know them. Unless you’re the people who don’t get to be on television but do get to be fucked over – then politics can be very harsh indeed. But why take our word for it?
This insidious spread of propaganda, soft interviews with hard-line politicians who wield enormous power over the lives of the most vulnerable, is sold as a fun, light-hearted look into the lives of the people we elect. But this taxpayer-funded sycophantic date with power will end up making us all sick. It completely dumbs down debate and again re-ingrains the perception that politicians are just like us, while the people their policies hurt, aren’t. They are the others who don’t dine with famous journalists on television.
So yeah, Kitchen Cabinet: we’re letting it off lightly when you think about it.
*you really don’t want us to get started on Q&A
The nominees for the 2016 AACTA Awards were announced yesterday, and the comedy and light entertainment nominees aren’t bad at all…
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST CHILDREN’S TELEVISION SERIES
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST TELEVISION COMEDY SERIES
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION SERIES
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST PERFORMANCE IN A TELEVISION COMEDY
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTION IN A TELEVISION LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT OR REALITY SERIES
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST SCREENPLAY IN TELEVISION
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST EDITING IN TELEVISION
AACTA AWARD FOR BEST LEAD ACTRESS
Not a nomination for Please Like Me in sight! (Although given it won an award last year, its absence here may simply be because the current series missed the eligibility period.)
The results for Best TV Comedy and Best Light Entertainment Series should be interesting as the nominees for both include what are (in our opinion) the best shows for the past year or so. A number of those nominated in these categories have a realistic chance of winning, but we’re pretty interested in how The Weekly fares. It may have “nailed it” according to many online commentators, but will AACTA agree?
Other interesting nominees include Rickett’s Lane’s Randy for Best Performance in a TV Comedy. Anyone else glad they didn’t have the AACTA Awards when Hey! Hey! It’s Saturday and its hilarious puppet characters was on air?
And finally, good luck to Robyn Butler who’s up against two Hollywood stars and one of the country’s most acclaimed actresses. Maybe she’ll pull it off Jackie Weaver style? It could happen…
So it seems How Not to Behave has been bumped for its final episode:
What appears to be the final episode of How Not to Behave will air at 10pm on ABC this week.
The show has made way for the return of Kitchen Cabinet this Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the final five episodes of Open Slather have been reduced to half an hour:
A Foxtel spokesperson recently confirmed to TV Tonight, “We’re finishing this season of Open Slather with five new half hour specials 7.30pm Sundays on The Comedy Channel.”
What do these two things have in common? On the surface, bugger-all: How Not to Behave getting the boot is most likely a victim of the ABC’s programming departments inability to figure out how a calendar works – or just the wash-up from that mysterious period earlier in the year when the ABC ran out of new Agony episodes and ran repeats in prime time for a couple of weeks. If a show is dragging your whole schedule down, you don’t wait until the last episode to replace it, especially if the replacement is the staggeringly ineffectual sop to our politicians’ collective ego Kitchen Cabinet.
Meanwhile, Open Slather‘s bad case of shrinkage is, we’re reliably if anonymously told, due to the producers having blown their budget rather than someone at Foxtel trying to yank them off-air Kerry Packer style. And while the show has had zero impact ratings-wise, it seems pretty much all involved see it as a form of loss leader, with Foxtel planning more comedy – perhaps aimed more at the people who actually subscribe to pay TV, rather than mainstream viewers who might like the idea of old Full Frontal cast members doing sketch comedy but sure aren’t going to pay for it – in 2016.
But given the kind of closer examination only bored comedy bloggers are inclined to give, there does seem to be a common thread linking these two shows. No, not the fact that nobody’s still watching them, though that’s a side effect of what we’re talking about: the fact that from the first episode on, these shows never changed.
For a few years now – since the nightmare that was all twenty-seven pre-recorded episodes of Randling, at least – we’ve been griping that one of the bigger problems with Australian comedy has been the lack of long-running shows: when everything on the ABC is in six- or eight-week pre-recorded chunks, the only chance the creators get to figure out what’s working and what’s not is when it’s all over. Yes, this is probably why the ABC gives pretty much everything two series (or looked at another way, one twelve-part series spread over a year or so); that’s still a lot different from making a show week in week out and reacting to what the audience is responding to.
Both of these shows promised to be a response to that, as a return to week-in, week-out program making where – in theory at least – things could be tweaked as the creatives saw what worked and what didn’t. Open Slather would run for 20 weeks, How Not to Behave 15: after they both started with firmly below-par episodes, surely that was more than enough time to improve?
Yeah, nah.
To be fair, Open Slather did sack around 70% of their writing staff a few episodes in, but did you notice much of a difference? Us neither. Presumably because the guys they sacked weren’t getting anything on the air anyway. But for a show that basically staked its whole reason for existing on breakout comedy characters – you know, the characters that start small, are embraced by viewers and end up becoming icons – they never really seemed to try that hard to figure out what their audience was responding to. Here’s a tip: 60 Minutes parodies don’t really work when no-one under 60 watches 60 Minutes.
As for How Not to Behave, no-one on the production side seemed to care enough about that show to even watch it as it went to air, because if they did they might have noticed some core problems – such as, what was the point of the show in the first place? Why did it have a guest speakers on? Why did those speakers always seem to have wandered in from a dull ABC radio segment? Was the show meant to be a serious guide to living life, or a parody of one? And either way, why wasn’t it a lot funnier?
It’s not like we were totally surprised by this turn of events. Producers being given the kind of opportunities many comedians would kill for and doing fuck-all with them has been a part of the Australian landscape since the days when Comedy Inc was given twenty hour-long episodes a year to play with and gave us a stuttering Thomas the Tank Engine. But just because you’re following a long-standing Australian comedy tradition doesn’t make it right.
And yeah, we know the argument that you get one shot with your audience and if they don’t like you, that’s it. No doubt that’s true. And yet every year we see reality shows that somehow manage to build an audience week after week; if people keep coming back and telling their friends to watch fucking reality television, imagine how many more people you could attract that way if your show was actually funny?
Both of these shows have rightly been dismissed before they finished – that “As some viewers have noticed…” line in the TV Tonight coverage of Open Slather‘s shrinkage is as close to a sick burn as David Knox gets – because for all the effort they put in both these shows might as well have gone into repeats from week two. They started off badly and they showed no desire to improve; no-one who wasn’t pulling a pay check from the producers is going to spend a single solitary second missing them.
Press release time!
Okay, it’s not quite press release time because we didn’t get the press release, but thanks to the diligence of TV Tonight we can let you know about this:
Local sketch comedy welcomes a new contender this week with the premiere of Australia, Get It Up Ya! on C31 Melbourne.
The production, partly by a grant from the Community Broadcasting Foundation, is also the end result of a successful crowdfunding campaign on Pozible campaign.
It is described as “A ground-breaking show in the comedy / travel / lifestyle/ current affairs / political / news / wildlife / bush-tucker genre with twice your maximum daily intake of great Aussie characters.”
The absurdist-style sketch has filmed around the country from Tasmania to Western Australia.
Narrated by Claire Hooper it is written and performed by Andy Matthews, Bec Petraitis, Matt Stewart and Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall.
Based on the trailer over at TV Tonight, this could – like pretty much every sketch comedy ever – go either way. “Australian characters” usually sets alarm bells ringing, but it’s not like there haven’t been decent laughs mined out of Aussie stereotypes within living memory. Considering the bush-tucker genre currently sits on 100% success – Wallaby Jack and Russel Coight having both, as they say, “nailed it” – fingers crossed that they maintain that strike rate.
But why take our wishy-washy and unformed opinion on it – it starts tonight at 9pm on C31 for those in the Melbourne broadcast area, and for those outside of it (or watching Have You Been Paying Attention?) it’ll also be turning up on the C31’s Stupid Old Channel on YouTube.
It’s been a fairly quiet week in comedy – well, Greg Fleet is back in trouble for drug-related hijinks, but that’s not really news as such – so we figured hey, what better time to get caught up on something we missed first time around. Which would be the second series of Plonk, as recently seen on streaming service Stan.
Unfortunately for the profitability of Australia’s streaming services, we continue to be too stingy to actually pay to watch them. Fortunately for our tight-arse approach, the makers of Plonk are currently putting series two up on YouTube here. Watching television for free? Who would have thunk it?
And “free” is pretty much the price you’ll be wanting to pay for Plonk, because while it’s a step up from the first series it’s still the kind of show that gets smirks rather than laughs. It looks good, and being filmed at actual wineries – oh right, it’s a behind-the-scenes look at a shoddy wine infotainment show (fronted by The Chaser’s Chris Taylor as “Chris Taylor”, a presumably slightly more wanky version of himself) where they travel to various wineries and promptly make dicks of themselves – makes a nice change from the limited locations of most Australian comedies. But when you’re talking about how the locations are a strength it’s a pretty big sign it’s not classic comedy.
(also, those South Australian “filmed with the assistance of” logos? Yeah, there’s tourism money involved)
Interestingly, as we noted in our review of series one, being cut into shorter segments does mean it’s pacey enough to avoid a lot of the endless pauses that drag a lot of local comedy (is Please Like Me still airing before midnight?) into the mire. It seems they bolted three segments together to form tv-length episodes for Stan, but online the 7-10 minute segment length seems about right as far as viewer tolerance goes.
Still, it does have jokes, the wine stuff is mildly informative, and the central trio have – again, let us stress, for an Australian comedy – an actual comedy dynamic that works in a generic sitcom fashion: for online content we can safely commit to saying that it’s worth a look. Also in episode one, a Greg Fleet cameo! Nice how that all tied in together.
Welcome to a post in which we do two things we know you love:
From TV Tonight…
ABC’s mixed messages on Please Like Me
ABC has bumped Please Like Me to a later timeslot after just one episode of its third season.
To be fair, it did debut with ratings of 129,000. But wait, it’s not Please Like Me’s fault…
ABC is replacing UK series The Musketeers at 8:30pm with a Sherlock replay, which pushes the local comedy to 10pm.
Last week The Musketeers drew 320,000 viewers, while Please Like Me averaged just 129,000 viewers. Despite being a critical hit, the Josh Thomas comedy is yet to attract a popular audience.
But then how can it, when ABC has never given it a decent timeslot across its three seasons?
TV Tonight goes on to talk about how Please Like Me started on ABC2 where it rated badly, but then how after it got lots of awards it got a run on ABC, albeit not in an established comedy slot…
ABC finally moved it to the primary channel ….in a week where it was over-crowded with new comedies The Ex-PM and Sammy J and Randy in Rickett’s Lane. That left Please Like Me to run Thursdays, but not in the 8:30 slot that had previously been allocated to Upper Middle Bogan.
Upper Middle Bogan? That ended, what, almost year ago?
As for this new comedy glut we’re experiencing right now, maybe audiences voted with their feet and didn’t watch Please Like Me? Kinda like how they did watch when comedies they liked moved timeslot (The Chaser’s War on Everything, Mad As Hell)…except the opposite of that.
Put it this way, in TV history there have been plenty of examples of shows getting a boost from airing directly after very popular shows (The D-Generation airing after The Young Ones, for example), but there are also examples where the reverse is true. And when it comes to Please Like Me, Australian audiences just don’t like it, despite everything the critics and the people who decide who to give awards to keep telling them.
But back to TV Tonight…
Why didn’t ABC wait until it had a Wednesday night slot for the show? The answer may lie in producer deals with US cable network Pivot, with ABC necessarily hitched to its US playout whether it liked it or not.
Oh yeah, that. This is a show being made with American cash, so it kinda doesn’t matter that no one in this country likes it, as long as US cable viewers do.
But let’s end this blog with a laugh. You remember laughs, they’re not a feature of Please Like Me…
An ABC spokesperson said, “We hope the broad appeal of Sherlock will provide a strong lead in, and that the new time slot appeals to the target audience. We remain immensely and steadfastly proud of Please Like Me, a truly wonderful series.”
Oh ABC spokesperson, you crack us up!