Pop Culture! [#585]
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Pop Culture! [#585]

Chris Lilley’s back, and going by the ABC’s latest attempt to promote his upcoming new series, they’re not all that confident he’s served up a winner. For this weekend only (assuming you’ve grabbed this copy of Forte as soon as it hits the streets), the entirety of his new show Jonah from Tonga will be available to watch on the ABC’s iView streaming service – from 6 p.m. Friday, May 2 until 6 p.m. Sunday, May 4 AEST, to be exact. There’s next to no information about Jonah at this stage, but from the previews it seems safe to say that despite Jonah being shipped back to Tonga at the end of Summer Heights High he’s somehow made his way back to an Australian high school for this series, where he continues to disrespect teachers, fellow students, women in general, and … well, it’s a Chris Lilley show, so as they used to say, “nothing is sacred”.
Considering the lacklustre response to fellow Summer Heights High spin-off Ja’mie: Private School Girl late last year, it’s a little difficult to see why the ABC would be rushing another Lilley series to air (presumably contracts were signed), especially as this particular one seems to be suffering from much of the same problems that plagued the meandering, muddled and messed-up Ja’mie.
What seems fresh and funny in 2008 now seems stale and tired, and while with Summer Heights High the fact that all the characters were operating on basically the same note – all three leads (drama teacher Mr G being the third) were making the lives of everyone around them a living hell – was part of the point of the show, to justify giving these characters standalone series something new really needs to be added to the mix.
Of the three, Jonah was the one with the most depth (which really just means he had a reason for acting like a prick), so perhaps this series will actually stand up as more than just Lilley’s usual quasi-racism and trite “shock” comedy. But dumping the whole series on iView in one burst makes that seem a little unlikely.
Lilley’s last two series – Ja’mie, and before that Angry Boys – both started out with strong ratings, only to see viewers drift away once they realised Lilley was basically a one trick pony. So while this iView approach seems a bit like self-sabotage – why give the whole show away for free before it’s even aired on ABC1 – if you think about it it’s not hard to see this strategy as an attempt to try and maximise ratings this time around: this way the ABC can claim whatever figures the weekend session gets (presumably they’re expecting the high ratings that Lilley usually gets) are for the whole series instead of just the first episode. And then, if ratings for the screenings on ABC1 aren’t so good, they can say that “everyone” watched it when it was available on iView. None of which seems like the kind of thing you’d need to do if the series itself was any good.
Fortunately, the one real benefit of this approach is we’re not going to have to wait much longer now to find out.
Written by Anthony Morris