Pop Culture #626

Shaun Micallef’s sitcom The Ex-PM wrapped up last week – the DVD is in stores now, if you’re that way inclined – and it’s safe to say, despite often being very funny indeed, it didn’t exactly set the world on fire ratings wise, dropping around 300,000 viewers a week from its lead-in Gruen.
This makes the second (very funny) misfire for Micallef in sitcom form (Welcher & Welcher a decade ago being the first), and the strange thing is that they’re both the kind of shows you’d expect to have much more of an impact with the public. When Micallef made Welcher & Welcher, he was coming off the back of three series of his popular sketch show The Micallef Program; The Ex-PM comes along after the success of Mad as Hell seems to have cemented him into the “Australia’s favourite funnyman” slot. So it’s not like he just wandered in off the streets both times and expected Australia to figure out why he’s meant to be a funny guy: his sense of humour had been out there in the public eye for an extended period, and both times the public seemed happy to get on board… until they weren’t.
Perhaps it’s just that Australia isn’t all that interested in sitcoms any more? After all, the last big hit was 2008’s Summer Heights High, and that was more of a mockumentary than the traditional sitcoms Micallef’s made. It could just be that at this moment in time people want their laughs in bit-size formats where they can dip in, get a laugh and move on – hence the success of panel shows and the return (in the US at least) to prominence of sketch comedy. If true, that’d be a shame.
Television trends come and go for sure, but there are few things as funny as getting to know characters well enough that they can get laughs just from the start of a set-up, because we know how they’re going to react to it. But maybe characters are the problem here: Micallef has spent much of his comedy career playing “himself” – well, a dimmer, more arrogant version of himself in The Micallef Program, a slightly more nuanced but still exaggerated for comedic effect model in Mad as Hell. So in a way, audiences think they know him, when in fact they only know the character he plays. Which means a sitcom starring Shaun Micallef as someone else – a someone else who’s basically the same character he always plays, only in comedic situations – can feel a bit weird, like a sitcom starring a celebrity playing themselves. It’s presenting us with somebody we already find funny, only now they’re in a different setting and acting in a different way and it takes a little time to make that leap. American sitcoms often get at least 13 episodes to iron out those bumps: The Ex-PM was over and out after six. Still, at least Mad as Hell is meant to be back next year. The more we all get used to Shaun Micallef being funny, the closer we get to letting be funny in a sitcom.
Written by Anthony Morris