Sometimes you get to be a success just by sticking around long enough. Josh Thomas’s first series of Please Like Me took a long time to make it on air – it was initially announced for 2012 but didn’t arrive until 2013 – and moved around a bit on the way (it’s the only show to date to be announced for the main ABC free-to-air channel which eventually debuted on ABC2 instead), and even then it wasn’t exactly what anyone would have called a smash hit, pulling in only average ratings on the digital-only network. But when new US cable network Pivot bought the show, suddenly the ABC was all on board, despite rumours that they’d tried to bury the show when Thomas had publicly come out as gay and made the lead character (based on him and straight in the pitch that the ABC had bought) gay. In fact, the ABC are so on board they’ve already announced how happy they are that there’s going to be a third series of Please Like Me, even though the second – of ten episodes, which is longer than any other local comedy series they’ve aired this year – hasn’t even gone to air yet.
Basically, we can expect to see a lot of Please Like Me over the next year or so whether we like it or not, because it’s been bought and paid for by an overseas network so it’s bargain value local content for out ABC. But as all experienced shoppers know, it’s not a bargain if you don’t really want it, and with Please Like Me a lot – actually, pretty much everything – hinges on how much you like the comedy stylings of everyone’s favourite Optus spokesman and Celebrity Splash star Josh Thomas.
Thomas has said elsewhere that when he first pitched the show he had little idea of how to put together a sitcom and took much of his inspiration from The Office (the UK version), and many of the scenes in Please Like Me do make a bit more sense if you look at the character of “Josh” as a kind of David Brent-style jerk … only there’s just as many (if not more) scenes where we’re clearly meant to sympathise with him as he struggles to find love and deal with parents who are more than happy to foist their own extremely complicated lives onto him.
It kind of makes sense if you look at it as a show where we’re meant to side with the lead 100 per cent no matter what – clearly the star and writer of the show does, because it’s him – and therefore he can act like a dick or be hard done-by or lust after someone or, well, anything really without having to worry about constructing any kind of drama out of it because it’s all just stuff happening to a guy we’re on side with. But unless you’re a performer with a really, really strong sense of what you’re doing and where you want to go (i.e. Louis CK), just watching someone go through a bunch of stuff makes for very average television.
Written by Anthony Morris