I was working at Comics In The Park at the Harold Park when Kitty Flanagan started out in comedy in the early 1990s. She has worked at her craft in the decades since, and fine-tuned it to the point where she is now is a comedy powerhouse, brilliantly wry and superb with irony.
But (and it does pain me to write the awful "But" here) if you're going to do a sitcom, I think she's just proved you need more of a detailed situation than "slightly offbeat woman goes to work for a suburban solicitor doing probate".
For example (I know comparisons are odious, but here goes...) Frayed has a woman with two spoilt kids forced to leave the high life in London after her husband dies in a compromising position and seems to leave her nothing but debts, and she struggles to survive back in the snakepit of her old home town in regional Aust. A lot at stake instantly - money, truth and justice, the kids' futures, her own - and her distress and that of her kids was manifest from the first frame and made for brilliant scenes and great comedy (and a degree of pathos too).
And yes, re sitcoms, there were two US comedies with no more of a premise than "friends negotiating love and life in New York in the 1990s", but they found great angles in every ep (well, Seinfeld did, and often very boldly, striking out in a direction we didn't think possible and going with it all the way).
The problems with last night's first ep of Fisk were there from the start. The exposition was handled poorly, and in lumps. Better for her to be a mystery creature who somehow wheedles her way back into working for a law firm after something went wrong in her life, and we learn more along the way, through drama. At present we're simply told she's returning to Melb after a divorce and she's a Supreme Court judge's daughter... there's no mystery for someone presented as an oddball. We know from the outset she's a (formerly) presumably privileged person who's in a jam in life. So?
The script overall was just not interesting and engaging enough, which is weird for Kitty, who always is. The thing about the vasectomy and sausage rolls didn't even make sense. Having a vasectomy is not nor even akin to having your dick cut in two. It's an internal procedure. How would this stop him making art with his dick? It wouldn't. No sense. (If indeed that was the problem... I wasn't even sure if it was that, or that he had a lot of kids with different mothers, propagating being an issue that a vasectomy would at least address if not by excision, but the whole deal seemed to be about his shall we say rather stretched art form). There were also just simply very few laughs.
I read she and her sister wrote it... my feeling watching was she would have been better advised having the first series written by seasoned writers (the Utopia team would be ideal for her) and join in later, once the characters have settled in and she's more used to the form. Writing for the screen beyond standup or sketch is another world after all. The reviews I've seen so far have been kind, which is fine, but it's really not great. Julia Zemiro looks positively uncomfortable, like she's trying to get away from a bad dinner party or has just trodden on a rake. The two lead blokes are fine but for me the only real saving graces in the opening ep were Alison Whyte and Glenn Robbins. Robbins was particularly good (well, he always is), even if the character he had to play he could have sketched with his knob.
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