EDDIE: Australia, we're told time and time again, doesn't do sitcoms. And they're right: instead, we do its' wretched, half-assed, misshapen cousin - the dramedy. You know, where you don't actually have to be funny or dramatic so long as you show people having a latte in some hip inner-city shopping strip. Scruffy people with beards and scarves. Not a footy jumper to be seen, dammit.
Offspring is the kind of show where the producers will happily announce in public that they made the lead's ex-boyfriend an explosives-obsessed nutter because "men like explosions". Guess what: men like comedy too, but you didn't feel the need to put any of that in your smug, self-satisfied excuse to portray both genders as little more than gurning rejects from a soft focus coffee commercial. This streak of televisual piss is what's replaced actual comedy on our screens, but who needs to laugh when you can watch characters so utterly self-obsessed Stephen Hawking has telescopes trained on them waiting to watch them collapse into black holes under the weight of their quirks. Watching I Rock, it's hard not to think that if you're going to make a comedy based around a smug arrogant dickhead, it'd help if he occasionally said something funny. Or someone else said something funny. Or the concept was funny. Or you made a show that didn't feel entirely like a vanity project made by a guy who thought "it's like The Office, but about a band" was the smartest idea ever. At barely two minutes on a good day, Beached Az barely qualifies as a sitcom. Or even television. Maybe it's really just a crap joke your auntie tries to tell you over Christmas dinner, only she doesn't know how to tell it right and ends up just giving you a promotional t-shirt instead. You know Bert, we've made some great sitcoms over the years here at GTV-9... BERT: Is this going to be the point in these awards where the writers get one of us to do the great/grating joke? As in, "Oh sorry, I meant grating sitcoms, not great ones", because after five years of these awards that line never gets tired. EDDIE LOOKS AT THE SCRIPT. EDDIE: Yes. BERT: We're moving on...
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