The People Behind ‘Frontline’ Have A New Satirical Drama, And It Sounds Amazing
Where Parks and Recreation meets Office Space, set in the world of the Australian bureaucracy. Yes please.
Say what you will about Australian political satire, but it’s certainly had some high points — most of which were broadcast on the ABC in the ’80s and ’90s, and involved the same small group of Melbourne University students: Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner.
See also: champagne comedy.
Along with Magda Szubanski, Judith Lucy, Mick Molloy, Tony Martin and Jane Turner, the team spawned the D-Generation sketch show in 1986 and moved on to The Late Show in 1992, before Frontline went to air in 1994: a three-season satire centred around a fictional Australian news team, which skewered the Australian media so hard that it’s terrifying how little has changed. After Frontline finished up in the late ’90s, Sitch, Kennedy, Cilauro and Gleisner went on to produce The Castle and The Dish, and TV shows including The Panel, The Hollowmen, and Thank God You’re Here. And they’re coming back to the ABC in August with their third satirical drama: Utopia.
Where Frontline satirised Australian news media and The Hollowmen poked at the inner workings of Australian federal politics, Utopia evolves around the nightmare that is Australia’s bureaucracy, and the white elephants that drag it along. The show is set inside the ‘Nation Building Authority’, a fictional government organisation tasked with overseeing poorly-planned, fundamentally flawed and completely uncosted public building schemes, from roads to airports to high rise buildings. The show “explores that moment when bureaucracy and grand dreams collide” — so it kind of sounds like a mix between Parks and Recreation, Office Space and Brazil, and actually I can’t imagine anything better than that.
“Over the past few years, we’ve studied the anatomy of white elephants,” writes the team of producers. “Those massive, debt-funded public works schemes that governments love announcing but tend to quickly lose interest in. From third airports to flower-markets, national broadband schemes to film studios, it’s so often a case of grand visions being down-graded, amended or, in many cases, simply left as a large hole in the ground.
“As part of our research we spoke to a range of interested people from both sides of the process… Hearing their stories and frustrations we became convinced that this was a field ripe for satire.”
Written and produced by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, with casting by Jane Kennedy, the cast is headed up by Sitch and includes a huge amount of local comedic talent: Kitty Flanagan, Anthony ‘Lehmo’ Lehmann, Celia Pacquola, Toby Truslove, and more. Utopia premieres on the ABC on Wednesday August 13.