Australian Tumbleweeds
Another stroll down Ricketts Lane
In our review of episode 1 of Sammy J & Randy in Ricketts Lane we hoped that the rest of the series would ”place more emphasis on getting laughs from dialogue, and writing song and dance sequences which work well on camera”. And in happy ending news, it has. Episodes 2-6 are much stronger than 1, with smarter dialogue, some well-realised musical sequences, and an ending which anticipates a second series…something we’d be happy to see. One of the better sitcoms this country’ produced for a while? Probably.
Partly this is down to the classic “odd couple” premise at the centre of the show – two people in a love/hate relationship = laughs – but it also helps enormously that one of them’s a puppet. As Team America: World Police and The Muppets proved, you can get away with a hell of a lot more with puppets.
Audiences will let puppets do just about anything (we can’t think of any other sitcom character who’s been able to dangle their cock and balls on screen). Oh, and the slapstick’s heaps funnier. Randy can be chucked about, over and in to anything – his legs and arms flailing and dangling amusingly as he flies through the air – and he’ll still survive. Humans, less so.
We also enjoyed the plots involving the various combinations of the love/hate/weird hexagon that was Sammy, Randy, Victoria, Borkman and Wednesday. Ricketts Lane did a good job of setting up that one, and in creating Boss from Hell Borkman, Super TV Bitch Victoria and Lovely/Slightly Creepy Wednesday. None of it was subtle characterisation, but it was funny.
As for the songs, they were pretty good too. You didn’t have to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of recent pop music to get them (hello Flight of the Conchords!) and they (mostly) weren’t what Andrew Lloyd Webber once described as the sort of musical song where you pause the action to sing about it for four minutes (and he should know!). Even shot without the kind of budget that made great screen comedy songs like Python’s Every Sperm Is Sacred hilarious, the Ricketts Lane songs were funny. That was nice to see after previous Australian comedy musical fails such as Bogan Pride.
Good dialogue, characters, plots and maybe some music – that’s all you need to make a good sitcom. Maybe more people should try it?
Kevin Perry Goes Large
And after that pun on a crappy British comedy film from 15 years ago, here is the announcement it relates to…
Steve Molk and Kevin Perry join forces to launch DeciderTV
September 21, 2015
News – Kevin Perry
From today, Kevin Perry (Nelbie.com) & Steve Molk (MolksTVTalk.com) have joined forces to deliver a brand new media commentary presence focusing on the Australian TV landscape.
From free-to-air to subscription to SVOD, Australians have never had more choices when they turn on their TVs. Or tablets. Or phones.
Kevin & Steve have combined to bring years of media experience to DeciderTV that will present all the available information for audiences to be able to make easy decisions about what they watch (& when they watch it).
Together with a very talented team DeciderTV offers news, opinion, interviews, reviews, recaps, ratings, a TV guide, podcasts and more that will engage readers at all levels – from those with a passing interest in TV to passionate fans.
With the launch of the new site, Nebie.com & MolksTVTalk.com will cease publishing new content. Both Steve and Kevin would like to thank everyone that has supported our previous sites and we hope you will love joining us on this new publishing adventure.
Interesting.
As the newspaper TV supplements vanish (i.e. The Age’s legendary Green Guide is now around six pages plus listings), and with only TV Tonight posing any kind of online threat, DeciderTV is setting itself up as the alternative. They’ll talk about free-to-air, subscription, new-fangled TV delivered on devices, catch-up – you name it. Plus there’ll be interviews, podcasts, reviews and opinions. Sounds great doesn’t it? Let’s take a look at their first day…
Its Back! Offspring confirmed as returning to Ten in 2016
September 20, 2015
News: Kerry Perry
Kat Stewart and Asher Keddie return for a new season of Offspring on Ten.
After a year of waiting the Ten Network has given Offspring fans the news they were desperately waiting to hear with confirmation the show will return for a sixth season in 2016.
Exciting times for Offspring fans, but why’s it coming back?
The resurrection of Offspring comes at a time when Ten has little other drama in production. Wonderland was a massive flop that has since been axed while the Melbourne based political drama Party Tricks, which also feature Asher Keddie failed to engage viewers.
The sixth season of Offspring will be a more costly program for Ten to produce. Australian Tax Rules allow for a 30% rebate for TV Drama programs, however this ends after 65 episodes have been produced. Offspring hit that limit at the end of season 5.
So, it’s coming back because Ten’s fucked it drama-wise. We wonder if DeciderTV has any opinions on this?
The Return of Offspring – Just because you can doesn’t mean you should
September 21, 2015
Opinion – Steve Molk
Yesterday Network Ten made a lot of noise about the return of their dramedy hit OFFSPRING for season six in 2016.
As well they should.
Offspring remains the high watermark for the Network that hasn’t seen anything come close since the neatly-wrapped series finale in August 2014. Not one of their subsequent Aussie drama products (PARTY TRICKS, WONDERLAND) have delivered the ratings success or audience engagement of stories of the Proudman family.
Resurrecting Offspring will only end in one of two ways – it’ll be really great and the audience will lap it up, or it’ll just do OK and be seen as mediocre. Either way there will be guaranteed tears.
This isn’t a comment on the crew, cast, scriptwriters or anyone associated with Offspring. The production itself will be made well and with love, in the usual hope that the audience will embrace these adored characters and settle right back in with them.
But haven’t we all moved on?
Plenty of opinions in there, but a lot of them quite contradictory. Mainly the bit about criticising Ten for failing to make programs other than Offspring, then predicting the new series of Offspring will be crap, whilst making it clear you’re not commenting on “anyone associated with Offspring”.
Still, one vague opinion does shine through: Australian television makers can do no wrong, and the only judge of quality will be the ratings. “The production will be well made”, you say? Isn’t it possible that after five seasons there’s nothing left to say about the characters? And that after a full year off (and perhaps a reduced budget now the tax concession has gone) maybe the production side of things could be rocky too? But that would be a critical – as in displaying critical thinking – opinion, and this site doesn’t seem to be the place for that.
After all, having a clear opinion and being able to express it isn’t what’s made Steve Molk what he is today. The kicker for us was his first TV Guide for DeciderTV:
TV Guide for week commencing 20/09/15
September 20, 2015
TV Guide – Steve Molk
2015 week 39;
31st week of 2015 ratings year.
All times AEST unless noted otherwise.
Key:
#MustWatch (bold & italics)
#MolkPicks (bold)
Everything else worth a look without guarantee/endorsement.
STUFF TO WATCH
Sunday
Compass: For Better or Worse (E01 of 5) – 6:30pm ABC
Scorpion (S01E13 of 22) – 6:30pm Ten
The X Factor Australia (S06E06) – 7pm Seven
The Block (S11E09) – 7pm Nine
Open Slather (E13 of 20) – 7:30pm Comedy
Doctor Who (S09 premiere – E01 of 12) – 7:40pm ABC
Vera (S04 premiere – E01 of 4) – 8:30pm ABC
Sunday Sessions: Michael Hutchence: The Loved One – 8:30pm ABC2
60 Minutes (S41E34) – 8:30pm Nine
Jamie Oliver’s Sugar Rush – 8:30pm ABC
Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door (part 2/finale) – 8:40pm Seven
House of Lies (S03E11 of 12) – 10:15pm Eleven
Who knew there were so many good shows on Australian TV on just one evening. Presumably there’ll be less worth watching on Monday…
Monday
Cats Uncovered (E01 of 3) – 7:30pm SBS
The X Factor Australia (S06E07) – 7:30pm Seven
The Block (S11E10) – 7:30pm Nine
Show Me A Hero (E06 of 6) – 7:30pm showcase
Australian Story: The Making of Malcolm – 8pm ABC
Four Corners: Dethroning Tony Abbott – 8:30pm ABC
Humans (S01 finale) – 8:30pm ABC2
The Wonder of Dogs (E01 of 3) – 8:30pm SBS
Ramsay’s Hotel Hell (S02 finale) – 8:30pm Seven
Have You Been Paying Attention? (S03E20 of 30) – 8:30pm Ten
Ray Donovan (S03E11 of 12) – 8:30pm showcase
House Husbands (S04E07 of 10) – 8:45pm Nine
What Really Happens In Thailand (E02 of 6) – 9:10pm Seven
Media Watch – 9:20pm ABC
The Island with Bear Grylls: Reunion (S01E02 of 6) – 9:30pm SBS
Episodes (S04E03 of 9) – 9:30pm BBC First
Q&A Live in Ballarat: Bill Shorten – 9:35pm ABC
AAARRRGGGHHH!!!! There are almost 100 shows listed for this week. How are we supposed to find time for all this? Even getting through the #MolkPicks would be a challenge. And isn’t the point of a critic-curated TV Guide that the critic only suggests a manageable number of must watch shows per evening (i.e. two or three)?
Don’t get us wrong, we think there’s room for an alternative to TV Tonight and what remains of the TV commentators in the traditional media, but if it’s DeciderTV then DeciderTV needs a bit of work. Online’s a place where you can have opinions and survive. But if you’re setting yourself up as an opinion forming website, and none of your opinions are usable, then what’s the point?
Double Zero is Still Zero
Press release time!
Charlie Pickering returns to ABC with a double offering
Friday, September 18, 2015 — Following a highly successful debut season, ABC TV is thrilled to announce The Weekly will return this December with an end of year special called The Yearly.
Host Charlie Pickering: “The team at The Weekly is currently on an extended hiatus from screen duties. Our priority has been expending much-needed time and development funding coming up with a name for the one-hour annual news roundup special. After a laborious three minutes, we settled on The Yearly and will be taking the rest of the time off. See you in December!”
The Yearly will put an arm around the shoulder of 2015, gently take it aside and ask it to take a long hard look at itself. Charlie, Tom Gleeson and Kitty Flanagan, along with The Weekly’s global correspondents, will make sense, and make light, of an extraordinary year of change, upheaval and ridiculous breakfast television clips that no family can afford to miss.
And the good news doesn’t stop there. Charlie and the team will also return with an entirely new season of The Weekly with Charlie Pickering in 2016.
The news comedy show that Australia has ended up with will be back on our screens in February to again cut through the white noise of news, identifying this country’s hypocrisies and absurdities and finding new ways to laugh through the tears. Charlie will again be flanked by two of Australia’s best loved comedians Tom Gleeson and Kitty Flanagan, who would have been rapt to return even if they weren’t contractually obliged to do so.
Executive Producer Chris Walker: “It’s very exciting to be coming back so soon, and one thing we can be sure of in this country is that 2016 will be even ‘newsier’ than 2015 … so I personally can’t wait to see what Charlie, Tom and Kitty come up with.”
ABC Head of Entertainment Jon Casimir: “The Weekly With Charlie Pickering has established itself this year as a genuine new voice, a part of the public discourse, sometimes urgent, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes silly, always funny. We’re very proud to bring more of it to a hungry audience.”
The Yearly will premiere in December on ABC.
“And the good news doesn’t stop there”. No, the good news stopped with the headline. Actually, it stopped with “Charlie Pickering”.
You know how we work here: we drag quotes out of the press release (“highly successful debut season”; “two of Australia’s best-loved comedians”; “identifying this country’s hypocrisies and absurdities”) and point out that the truth lies roughly 180 degrees the other way. But this? Way too much to handle on a Friday afternoon. Talk it out amongst yourselves.
We did like the way the ABC boss referred to a “hungry audience” though. Shame he didn’t specify exactly what they were hungry for that they’d swallow this.
The Circus is Back in Town
So The Chaser’s Media Circus returned last week, and we had nothing to say about it. Well, actually we did: compared to the stodgy, plodding panel show we recalled from last year it was a snappy, pacy – even, dare we say, funny – slice of political comedy that used the game show angle to (mostly) move things forward and pile on the jokes. So of course, we decided to wait a week in case it all fell apart.
That’s not (entirely) bastardly behaviour on our part: this kind of political comedy is slightly more reliant on the week’s news than, say, The Weekly, and with nine months or so of news to work with for the first episode it wasn’t surprising at all that the first episode was serving up gold. But could they maintain that level of quality? Why not wait a week and find out?
Of course, a week in which a serving Prime Minister was dumped isn’t exactly going to be short of material, but we’ll be buggered if we’re going to wait around for a third week. So we squinted hard, tried to filter out the way 99% of the jokes were about the spill (the other 1% were fat jokes about Kim Beasley), and focused on the substance of the show. Kinda.
The big problem with Media Circus last year was that – like every other panel show ever – it was labouring under the impression that we actually wanted to hear from the panellists. So we’re pleased to report that the couch waffle has been cut back to the occasional quip or one-sentence insight. And extended segments on media guff – Manufactured Outrage was this week’s topic – was a return to the golden days of The Hamster Wheel’s worthy attempts to educate as well as amuse. As for using old news clips… well, fine, so long as they’re interesting. Having Chris Bath talk about burping on live television… well, not so much.
The game show bits remain the weak point, which is a problem as they’re the core rationale for the show. All the usual problems apply: the results don’t matter so the games have to be funny, but telling the same joke twice doesn’t work so having both teams do the same game is a dud 50% of the time. Fortunately they seem to have upped the number of games that directly pit the teams against each other, so those segments aren’t always lethal.
Generally speaking, this year’s Media Circus feels like there’s been a bit more work put into each episode than last year’s model. But while it doesn’t have last year’s air of exhaustion, it still feels like a bit of a mess. The scripted segments – again, a firm highlight – riff on various aspects of the local media, but the games are just the usual comedy game show stuff poking fun at the news. They sort of fit together in that they both involve “the news”, but one has real insights to offer; the other is just “guess which news stories we cut up to make this funny sentence”.
We’ve said it before, but the big problem facing television – and especially comedy – is that the internet is now the go-to place for lightweight crap. Making fun of the week in politics? Unless you’re able to go smarter or deeper than twitter, you’re wasting everybody’s time. So while the scripted parts of Media Circus remain strong, the game show part?
Keep Slathering It On
Remember Open Slather? The show that was going to revitalise Australian sketch comedy by harking back to the golden age of the late 80s and… well, that was pretty much it. But the late 80s! When comedy was funny! Not all the quasi-racist material mind you, and a lot of the stuff about women looks a bit iffy now, and the celebrity parodies can be a little basic and a lot of the really successful characters you probably couldn’t get away with today, but yeah… Open Slather.
It’s a sign of just how compelling this particular Foxtel sketch comedy show has been that we didn’t even realise it had gone on a break after its tenth episode. But the good news is, it’s back! Having sacked most of its writers during the course of the first series, we were pretty interested to see if narrowing down the staff to the ever-reliable core of Dave O’Neil and his buddies would lead to any noticeable uptick in quality on-screen.
Of course that didn’t happen, but it is fair to say that Open Slather 2.0 comes across as a far more solid effort than their first stab at it. Not funny, we have to stress – “solid”. Gone for the most part are the bizarrely unfunny sketches (remember “Rack”) that left us scratching our heads; gone also are a lot of the more blatant attempts to create “sure-fire” comedy characters. The TV show parodies have been scaled back a bit too, though you’re never going to kill off that Liz Hayes 60 Minutes one.
What’s left – aside from more jokes involving guys in suits of armour because they rented them for a Game of Thrones parody way back in ep one and they might as well get their money’s worth – is the kind of blandly competent sketches that have put Australian sketch comedy in its grave. A sketch about a hip restaurant’s overly complicated ordering system! A sketch about a guy at a job interview who doesn’t want to get hired! A sketch about separated parents who use their child as a weapon! Actually, that’s a series of sketches. That idea does not get funnier with repetition.
Occasionally things move out of a comfort zone firmly established in 1991. A sketch where a man is murdered in fairly gruesome fashion for writing on a whiteboard with a permanent marker is slightly unpleasant; Guru Steve’s surf karate course opens episode 12 because it’s almost kind of funny. And an extended sketch where Marg Downey is a daggy loser on Dancing With the Stars is the kind of thing she was doing 30 years ago with the D-Generation.
But for the most part this feels firmly like the thrill has gone. All that’s left is a bunch of professionals getting the job done. They’re still doing those Glenn Robbins roadside drug testing sketches, only now Robbins literally walks out of the sketch halfway through and lets the new guys finish things off.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Ray Badran not such a bad man?
Obvious statement: Sometimes the media don’t pick up on the right angle when they report a story. That was almost certainly the case when OUTRAGE occurred at this year’s MICF about a “rape joke” told by stand-up Ray Badran.
Badran told the joke at the Crab Lab comedy room to an audience which included a gender studies and law student called Ceceila Devlin. As reported in The Age Devlin objected to the gag and slid under her table to make a silent protest. Badran, upon seeing Devlin was under the table, asked her what her problem was. The exchange ended with Badran saying “Good on you for taking a stand, but you’re a piece of shit and I hope you die”.
A straight up case of a male comedian getting over-sensitive when called on his perceived right to make jokes about rape? Not quite, although that seemed to be the angle the media and those on social media were running with. But wait, why are we bringing this up again? We blogged about it at the time, haven’t we all moved on? Again, not quite…
Last month Justin Hamilton interviewed Badran for his Can You Take This Photo Please? podcast; that interview has shone a new light on the story. Badran, you may remember, was largely silent after the story blew up (and became the second highest trending story in the country after the Germanwings plane crash in the French Alps). And although his management issued a statement, he declined to be interviewed by the broadcast media. To our knowledge, his interview on Can You Take This Photo Please? is his first of any length detailing his side of the story. Sound interesting? Read on…
Badran starts to discuss the controversy about 51 minutes in to the podcast. Here’s a summary of what he said:
- The Crab Lab comedy room is usually free entry but on the night in question there was a cover charge. This, he says brought in a difference audience who’d never seen comedy before.
- There were only about 30 people at Crab Lab that evening and the atmosphere in the room wasn’t great overall: the gig also over-running and “everyone was dying”. Not helping matters, he says, was a vocal female audience member (Devlin) who’d been heckling the acts all evening.
- The material he did that night, including the “rape joke”, had been well honed in both the United States and Australia throughout the previous year. He’d recently performed it in Sydney in front of Chris Rock and The Chaser (both of whom praised the offensive gag). Badran estimates approximately 50,000 people had heard the gag before this gig, pointing out that its acceptability and comic value had been decided by consensus: “I’m not going to keep doing material that isn’t working”.
- The joke isn’t actually about rape but about stereotypes in comedy, and the butt of the joke is him. It’s as follows:
“If you’re black you can do jokes about being black, if you’re gay you can do jokes about being gay…so I’m not sure if you can tell just by looking at me but…I can do rape jokes.”
- When Devlin slid under her table he wasn’t sure what was happening as she’d done it without explanation. His initial thought was that she was drunk. When he tried to engage her, her response was to yell at him “You think rape is funny?!”. Badran found her comment hard to deal with. Then the situation suddenly escalated as other audience members started to defend him, yelling at Devlin to leave: “Get out, what are you doing at comedy?!” Badran and Devlin kept yelling at each other, and he admits his final words to her before leaving the room were as reported: that he thought it was great that she was taking a stand, but he thought she was a piece of shit and he hoped she died. He admits that neither of them had a mature or intelligent exchange with each other!
- After the gig, the guy who’d invited Devlin to Crab Lab that evening approached Badran and apologised for her behaviour. He said she hadn’t been to comedy before and gets easily offended.
- The next day Badran found he was being tweeted at by a small number of feminist activists, who’d read an account of the gig posted by Devlin on Reddit.
- As well as being a student and activist, Devlin, it turned out, was an aspiring writer, and she was effective at quickly getting various media on board. The Age published a story about the incident, while Devlin wrote a piece on Mamamia and also appeared on Triple J’s Hack.
- Badran’s take on why Devlin did this is that she felt humiliated about having been ostracised on the night by the rest of the audience, and that she wanted revenge on him and was interested in self-promotion.
- Badran admits that his management were also trying to play the media, to dampen down the flames. A Triple J insider fed them information on which comedians Hack were going to ask to appear on the show; this enabled them to prevent more than 20 comedians from appearing on the show by phoning them before Hack
- After Devlin wrote her piece for Mamamia, three different writers for that website contacted Badran to apologise saying they knew the story was being misreported (one had seen Badran perform the joke before, another was friends with someone who’d been at the gig and knew the context). In the end one of them interviewed Badran for Mamamia, but the eventual story was spiked by editors over concerns that it would get the site’s female readership offside.
- Apart from being subject to a lot of abuse and trolling on Twitter, both Badran and his mother received online threats. And while the controversy was ongoing someone sent a Facebook message to Badran’s girlfriend claiming she was sleeping with him (this was untrue).
- Badran found the incident difficult to cope with and he’s since seen a counsellor to deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-type symptoms.
Listening to Badran’s account, it’s clear that he’s no angel and that he dealt with Devlin’s heckling badly. And while Devlin and the activists who joined her had their hearts in the right place, they were off target with their protest and seem to have been prepared to spin the story to get media coverage. As for the media, it seemed to accept that spin without question, electing simply to fan the flames in the name of clickbait. It didn’t seem to matter to them that the joke wasn’t about rape or that this was basically an argument at a small gig that got way out of hand. They also seem to have missed the opportunity to provoke OUTRAGE over what looks like an actual rape joke, told at the same gig. From Devlin’s Mamamia article:
During the course of the show, however, several jokes were also centred around violence against women – including a zinger that went something like “you know it’s been a good night when you wake up with a fistful of hair and a dirty shovel.”
Presumably whoever told that gag was saved from days of being slated in the media by the fact that they didn’t get into a slanging match with the Devlin.
Devlin in telling her story to as many people as she could, was trying to raise awareness of the way in which rape and misogyny are often trivialised. It’s a laudable aim and the topic is worth further discussion, but it doesn’t help victims of rape and misogyny if the issue is misreported. We can only hope that somehow, somewhere, this story did something positive for anti-rape and anti-misogyny causes. It sure did bugger all to improve society’s understanding of comedy.
Gruen Gruen Gruen Gruen. Gruen?
“Lauren, isn’t that stretching credibility?” That was the moment we gave up on Gruen for 2015 (we made it a whole ten minutes in – gold star for us). Wil Anderson and the panel were talking about a pet food commercial involving warring street gangs that joined forces to save a dog, this issue of credibility came up and… it wasn’t a joke.
That’s always been the problem with Gruen: it happily makes fun of commercials – and news, pop culture, whatever – but it always does so from inside the tent. They’ll run a bit mocking a sportsman for all his endorsement deals because “he’s already got enough money” and why not; our question is, where’s the bit pointing out that pretty much everyone in advertising is massively overpaid and the two regulars on the panel are also raking in fat cash from other gigs (TV host, board member, etc)?
Oh that’s right: this is the show that sells advertising to the public. They might throw individual ads under the bus, but mocking the very concept of advertising, let alone the people who make it – seriously guys, did you have to specify “inner-city hipster” when getting in the two ad dudes for “The Pitch” segment – is never an option. Even when it’s literally the only thing worth saying about advertising.
That’s not to say that how advertising works isn’t an interesting topic. And making fun of advertising can be entertaining too. But since day one Gruen has been all about working with the ad agencies, which means that “how advertising works” is always going to assume that it does work, and that making fun of ads is always going to come with the assumption that only some ads are worth laughing at.
If you don’t care about any of that, Gruen still grates. How many cuts to the audience laughing-and-or-applauding do we need? None. The correct answer is none. But if they didn’t have those cutaways then they couldn’t edit the crap out of the answers to make sure there was absolutely no flow to the conversational back-and-forth. Or have room to shoe-horn in Anderson’s quippy quips. God forbid we missed out on any of them.
But it’s that insiders point-of-view that’s the real comedy killer each and every week. It’s as if they made a show focusing on politics where the panel were all sitting politicians, or a show about the environment where the panel were all from the mining industry, or a show about comedy where the panel were all working comedians. Which sounds like a great idea – they’d be experts! – until you think about the way they’d be very careful about what they said because when the cameras stop rolling comedy is the world where they make their living.
[there’s also the well-known fact that a lot of comedians seem to have somewhat shit taste in comedy; for every stand-up who’s good at pointing out acts worth seeing there’s at least three who just big up their mates]
Yet Gruen keeps on keeping on, putting ads on the ABC while being one giant ad for how great advertising is. It’s the kind of show that history will stare at in slack-jawed amazement, a Black and White Minstrel Show for rampant capitalism and naked greed. “They really made a show that treated shitful commercials with awe and respect?” our descendants will gawp from their hover-toilets. “The government-funded television network made a show promoting something only available on other networks?”
And if they don’t understand that, fuck knows how we’re going to explain the success of Wil Anderson to them.
That Was Pissweak That Was pt.2
If you’ve ever seriously wondered why television critics in this country are respected by no-one – even as television criticism around the English-speaking world enters some kind of magical golden age of relevancy thanks to the irresistible rise of the recap – may we quote Debi Enker on The Weekly:
“Through four months on air, the show has really started to strut its stuff. The scope of its interest has been broad and its focus sharp.”
The only way you could write this with a straight face is if you had spent the last four months a): not watching The Weekly and also b): completely avoiding the internet. The scope of The Weekly‘s interest has been “what is the internet talking about this week?”; its focus has been “get Pickering to cover a news story then say something smart-arse at the end of every third sentence.”
And then oh dear God there’s this:
“Pickering’s approach has led to criticism that the show is preachy, that he’s taking a finger-wagging tone and lecturing to his audience. Phooey to that. The obvious models here, Jon Stewart and John Oliver, don’t seem to incite comparable objections when they spotlight issues or express persuasively argued opinions. Often, they’re cheered. It’s as though foreigners are allowed that licence, but some of us get stroppy when locals do likewise, as though, heaven forbid, they’ve got tickets on themselves. Surely the criteria should be: is it a significant subject? Has it been capably covered? And, given the satirical bent of the show, has it been presented with some wit?”
Is it a significant subject? What, like that lion the US dentist shot?
Has it been capably covered? Well yeah – considering the coverage consists entirely of running other shows’ news clips.
Has it been presented with some wit? No. C’mon, seriously? No.
There are many reasons behind the problems with The Weekly – the budget, the talent, the need to avoid pissing anyone off – but the end result is that it’s not funny. Compare it to an episode of Mad as Hell, we dare you. It’s lightweight news coverage at best, and at worst it features Tom Gleeson trying to pretend that the “joke” with his segment is that it’s amazingly popular. The only way that joke is an actual joke is if his segment is unpopular. And even then that joke might work once; when you’re making it for three months straight, maybe the reason you’re unpopular is that you aren’t all that funny.
And because it’s lightweight news coverage (that is to say, news coverage that involves no actual original reporting), it’s built around a guy telling us stuff. So why do people say The Weekly is preachy? Because it features Charlie Pickering ACTUALLY PREACHING TO THE AUDIENCE. (We’d use “lecturing” rather than “preaching”, but same difference.) Blaming mentally ill people for gun violence is bad: an extended segment in a comedy show where all you’re doing is pointing out that blaming mentally ill people for gun violence is bad? That’s worse.
Put another way, you know how every other fake news comedy show has had a joke “rant” segment, from Saturday Night Live to The Late Show to CNNNN to Mad as Hell? That’s because the idea of a news reader giving his or her opinion on an issue is funny.
And yet The Weekly was built around doing this comedy idea completely straight. It’s just straight and fairly shallow current affairs coverage with a couple of snarky lines thrown in. And even in 2015 the ABC has an entire news department doing this stuff better.
Meanwhile, Helen Razer tells it like it is for The Saturday Paper:
we cannot blame Pickering entirely for a program whose aims exceed its execution. We must also blame funding, which can only buy analysis reheated from that week’s internet buffet instead of fresh, hot jolts. Working to a tight deadline and budget, writers are forced to let shaky cynicism substitute for knowledge. This program, very clearly derived from John Oliver’s impeccably researched Last Week Tonight, never had its high hopes costed. It aims to bring us informed irreverence. What it actually offers is something more like a vanity newsletter written by an underpaid youth worker.
Razer, being no fan of the trivial – see roughly 80% of her commentary on pop culture and the internet, which can be boiled down to “why are people paying attention to this crap when the real problem of entrenched financial inequality goes ignored” – gives The Weekly the thumbs down in large part because of its dismissive cynicism:
With a few exceptions, notably a timely report on proposed funding cuts to the cost-effective Custody Notification Service, Pickering has led a program that tailors news to a single punchline and conclusion. To wit: it’s all fucked.
Which is a little odd, because the version of The Weekly we were watching was desperately trying to make serious points week in week out. The previously mentioned segment on the way the media demonises the mentally ill wasn’t based around “shaky cynicism” or concluding “it’s all fucked”. True, many of the news jokes being made on the show did come from that easy point-of-view. But the problem wasn’t that it served up a “single punchline and conclusion” – it was that too often it didn’t serve up any punchline at all.
Rather than cynically dismissing issues for the sake of a laugh – which we might have actually enjoyed – time and again segments ended with a straight-faced Pickering looking down the barrel of the camera telling us that the situation he’d just outlined simply wasn’t good enough.
If only he’d done a report on his own show.
Well, This Is a New Low
Ok @mscott, if you won't let me be on #qanda, how about the Chaser? Put in a good word?
— Ben Pobjie (@benpobjie) September 8, 2015
If you don’t see why this kind of thing coming from a professional television critic is a problem – and it’s a firmly established pattern of behaviour now – then chances are you’re part of the problem.