TV

The Café Set On Fire While We Chatted To Benjamin Law About ‘The Family Law’ And Coming Out

"We wanted to capture that anxiety, denial, confusion, and shame, because those are all the ingredients of a great comedy".

by Patrick Lenton  15 January 2019
The Family Law Season 3

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“We’ve still got a long way to go. And I think we’ve got a long way to go with intersectionality, as well. We’ve got queer stories, but we need queer disabled stories, queer Indigenous stories, I mean we’re happy to tell this one very specific story — which just happens to be a queer migrant story, but there’s so much more to be mined. I want to see those stories… Speaking of gas, is that gas? Is something burning?”

We’re talking to Benjamin Law, the writer and creator of SBS’s gorgeous and hilarious The Family Law.

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Based on Ben’s own experience growing up in Queensland in the nineties as a young gay in high school, with a large and somewhat eccentric migrant family.

The Family Law manages to touch on a bunch of important ideas of representation and discussion of marginalised communities on Australian TV, while also being goddamn funny.

The third and upsettingly final season of The Family Law has just hit our screens. In this season, as well as a bunch of other hi-jinks and dramas, the character of Ben comes out of the closet.

In 2016, The Family Law made TV history as the first ever show with an Asian-Australian family as leads. The third season is making history again: as Australia’s first ever TV comedy about gay teen sexuality.

We seem to be at a kind of peak representation of queer TV and film, with gay rom-coms like Love, Simon hitting mass audiences. It’s exciting and important that Ben’s story on The Family Law has helped catch Australia up with that representation.

It was always going to be a pleasure talking to Benjamin Law about his views of queerness on Australian TV: he’s an erudite and charming speaker, and a joy to converse with. That’s why it’s both me and Junkee Editor Rae Johnston having a chat to him — it was going to be a nice time! And we’d learn something about the unique challenge of depicting an Australian coming out story in 2019.

What we didn’t expect was that the cafe would set on fire around us.

I’ve been calling this “the gay season” of The Family Law.

That’s what we’ve been calling it in the writers’ room, as well. We’ve had our divorce season. The whole thing’s been an Asian season. But now, even though it’s the gay season —  we already knew that from season 1. There’s a reason why Ben’s spying on the neighbours. This is not a surprise!

No this is like a Shyamalan plot twist for me, I had no idea Ben was gay!

That actually presented a challenge, because we were like — well if everyone knows Ben’s going to come out as gay by the final episode, like what’s the valid intention? There’s no reveal. But I think that anyone who’s ever come out, you know that that’s not actually the story. That’s the destination, but the story is actually how’s any young person supposed to navigate that.

Especially a teenager at school who might not know another queer person — which is like so many young queer people.

How are any of us supposed to navigate that, without any parental advice, without any kind of that much external guidance?

I mean Ben in the show has the internet, but you know I didn’t really have that much guidance or anyone to talk to so we wanted to capture that… that anxiety, denial, confusion, and shame, because those are all the ingredients of a great comedy, Patrick.

I’m going to be very interested in juxtaposing this season with something very lean and, I don’t know, sterile like Love, Simon — something very sterile and Hollywood, with, you know, The Family Law, which is always showing the more messier sides of life.

The family’s messy.

The story’s kind of deranged. Sometimes the costumes are deranged. The costumes get more deranged in Season 3.

Ben and Melissa, his best friend, they’re in their mid-teens, they live in Queensland — they could live in any part of Australia, but in Queensland especially, you gotta end up at a party that you’re not ready for —  and we’re like it has to be a fancy dress costume, because that’s going to be delicious, and they also have to rock up unknowingly in S&M gear.

So like, we’re like can we get away with that with SBS and our international partners? Let’s just try.

Because there have been so many things that we haven’t been able to get away with.

Really?

Not so many things but you know we’ve been given leeway but like there was a really good joke in season one that never made it, that involved physical menstrual blood, and we’re like that would have been a beautiful thing to see on screen — but you know people really have an aversion to that and we couldn’t show it.

But they let us get away with teenagers wearing PVC gear without knowing it.

I think we’re in the year of the harness anyway so…

Yes, we’re bringing it to the mainstream.

That’s funny because I think that the average Australian’s view of SBS is already bondage gear and menstrual blood.

Well, we’re halfway there. It’s definitely bondage gear but not menstrual blood yet.

I really liked Love, Simon. But I think with The Family Law you’ve got that added complication of like cultural specifics.

We didn’t necessarily labour on that, but it is the texture about it.

How is a conservative traditional Chinese dad like Danny going to react to that? How is a mum like Jenny, who’s got her own drama going to incorporate this into her own life? And you get the sense that Jenny — as in real life — is a really open-minded character. So inevitably she’s going to accept her son — but if it’s not even on your radar as a parent, you never actually know how you’re going to react until you get to that moment.

And so I think as much as this show is going to be good for teenagers, you know, what we really loved hearing was how many parents watch it with their teenagers. And I’d love for them to have that moment together to see why whether you’re coming out as queer or revealing something to your parents about yourself, about your identity that they don’t know about, that’s a really brave thing for a teenager to do — but I also think that it’s a brave thing for the parents, to actually seep in that information, and to support their kid and I don’t think that’s necessarily easy, either.

I think it’s so important that we see wholesome, non-tragic coming out stories too.

Yeah, and there’s no right way to come out.

It’s almost people saying there’s a right way of coming out — which there isn’t and almost it’s a right way of being supportive.

Which there is at the fundamental core of it it’s like do you love them? Do you support them and do you accept them? There are so many ways that that manifests. But those are the foundation of things which you did which my mom did, so we wanted to dramatise that.

I mean my parents in real life as in the show say some pretty wrong-town things, but it’s them trying to their best to express their love, and my parents were so inadvertently hilarious about it in real life, that there were some episodes throughout the show where it’s like, OK, nearly that whole episode is fiction — we want to get to an emotional truth but basically that whole episode’s fiction.

And then there are just some episodes where it’s like, wow, that is basically word for word, I’ve just plagiarised my family, because what they actually said you can’t match that in a script to be any more perfect.

And so Jenny and Danny do support their son, but the stuff they say is just so hilariously bad and we’re, like well that’s going on national television.

Wow, what is that?

Is that something burning?

I believe that there is something that has been caught on fire. Yes. There is…

A touch of welding.

There is a hint of burning….

Do you think there’s something unique about an Australian coming out experience, that maybe doesn’t translate to the rest of the world?

I think it’s interesting because we’re at this turning point where politically we’re quite behind and conservative, but I think socially we’re starting to race ahead but we don’t necessarily see that at the time.

We’re doing better at it. We’re still a little bit spooked by it (homosexuality). And I think we’re definitely spooked by making it the centre of the story…

[There is a loud fire-extinguisher noise from upstairs]

Wow should we… we maybe should leave?

Maybe that’s best.

Sorry guys.

Yeah as much as I’d to [Fire extinguisher noise] maybe we should [Fire extinguisher noise].

—

The Family Law is currently available on SBS On Demand.