We Interrupt This Broadcast

Australian and British TV has produced many good, well remembered sketch comedy shows over the years like Fast Forward, The Big Gig, Full Frontal, Benny Hill, French & Saunders, Not the nine o'clock news etc.

In more recent years there have been not very funny efforts like Kinne and Get Krackin, which thankfully disappeared pretty quickly.

You'd think it should be easy to make some quite good comedy sendups of lame pretentious reality shows like Survivor, Master Chef or MAFS, sadly WITB fails at this almost completely I don't think I laughed once during the entire show. Comedy is about pushing the envelope and trying new things, neither of which WITB tries to do. Old shows like D-Gen did this and launched the careers of quite few comedians who went on to feature in many other shows over the years.

According to the advertising this show has something like 25 writers yet for that it just isn't funny.

The premise, flicking through an on demand service and landing on a selection of reality TV, media staples and recent(ish) trends (well recent for close to retirement rellies Squid Game and Scandi Noir jeez in a fast moving media landscape eeeekkk), as a way of feeding short wee sketches to a broad contemporary audience is a good idea.

Many of the shows whether Love Island, I'm a Celeb, Survivor, Bachelor, Stranger Things are ripe for lampooning and some of the impressions are passable - the hosts of the Block and Celeb are convincing, the SAS fella, Manu and most others are an abomination, but not wrong or surreal enough to make you laugh.

The majority of the show is so unfunny its actually kinda compelling, like how you can write such uninteresting and pointless sketch comedy in the modern world.

The whole thing feels extremely old fashioned a) whilst there are some melanated cast regulars they tend to get the rubbish role/unfunny lines in the sketch b) the same older white guy is always the love interest to young highly attractive women c) yeah the writing, which feels like the team is made up of ya Gran's mate, an extremely unpopular 12 year old & cracker/Dad joke writers (which is kinda one of the regular sketches a pastiche of Netflix comedy specials for unfunny folk)

It's nice to see Oz TV investing in scripted comedy. The production values are high and nicely capture the look and feel of the various crappy tv shows being parodied. (I'm sure the crew work on them at other times)

There are some promising performers doing their best with some basic writing. 90% of each sketch is about faithfully reproducing the source, the rest of giving it a twist. Hopefully the writers find their feet in time and get a bit more creative - each punchline is visible a mile out - I'm sure it takes a while to warm up and it's only fair to remember that this is the first ep. The laugh track is painfully bad.

Update: Yeah it's not getting any better. I honestly dont know if it is a reflection on the sorry state of Oz tv that gives the writers little to work with or if it is that they have utter contempt for the channel 7 audience.

This was something I caught before another show. It was not funny, at all. Bad references, bad thought out jokes that seems like the first thing they thought of and just bad spoof ideas.

The acting seemed fine but wow this show didn't impress. And they showed an ad for the next episode, which should show the best skit and build anticipation. Instead it was an "oh we don't like you" joke. I mean seriously... There is a near endless stream of content to parody and mock and that's all they could come up with? I can do better. I just wish I got the great money those joke writers did to take a day off.

This had SUCH potential. Sketch comedy back in the day used to be funny. This just misses the mark. Typically the only funny ones are on the ad the previous week. I laughed maybe twice the entire episode, and I'm pretty easy to please. If they had approached the concept a bit more seriously it could be funny. The whole reason why the real shows are so bad is that they're not trying to be terrible. Also, just a typical low budget production in Aus. Millionaire was literally two office chairs with spotlights on them- very meh production value. Will I continue to hold my breath and watch the next ep? Probably not.