#5: Utopia, And Why I'll Never Write Jokes
I recently revisited the ABC comedy series Utopia, which aired its first episode in 2014 and its last last year, for the third time. It follows Tony Woodford (Rob Stitch) as the CEO of the Nation Building Authority, a fictional government organisation which struggles to get anything done. Jim Gibson (Anthony Lehmenn), the government liaison, lands the Authority with impossible projects and additions in service of the ‘vision’. Rhonda Stewart (Kitty Flanagan), the media manager, endlessly pushes the latest digital or design fad onto the Authority and disrupts actual projects in the process. The rest of the cast is tasked with cleaning up the fallout.
This time, the rewatch was with a friend from the States. He was initially insistent on taking in all-things-Aussie, including Aussie media. I lent him a copy of our first Stella Prize-winning poetry book (Dropbear, by Evelyn Araluen) for the trip, sent him on his way with the beautiful Australian gothic novel I analysed in my dissertation (Flyaway, by Kathleen Jennings), and turned on Netflix during a sleepy weeknight in. The Australian movie offerings fast revealed our penchant for tragedy (Jasper Jones, Storm Boy) and so we turned to the old favourite.
During my master’s, I took an Independent Project unit which allowed me to write a single, longer work over the course of a semester under the tutelage of a supervisor. It gave me experience working one-on-one with a supervisor before my dissertation, but more importantly it offered an opportunity to fill the gap in the so-called-coursework-masters’ courses. No screenwriting class was available, and so I took aside undergraduate screenwriting tutor Shane and forced him to attend regular Zoom meetings with me. He taught me the structure of a script, I told him I wanted to test it out on writing for television, and so he taught me the structure of a show pilot. I soon discovered writing for television is considered the most rigid style of scriptwriting, and pat myself on the back for nailing it. I received a High Distinction. But that didn’t mean my idea was actually any good.
Let’s flash back to Utopia. My friend had a hard time with it, to say the least. He turned to me whenever a character spoke to confirm whether or not we were ‘supposed’ to like them. After an episode or two, he was distraught to realise they were all flawed; there was no clear hero to look up to and clear villain to beat down upon. He found the jokes depressing more than they were funny, as they represented the government as incompetent and unlikely to change. He couldn’t find a way within the show to see how it was ‘supposed’ to make him feel good.
I don’t tend to stake my personality on a television show. You can like or dislike Utopia. But I found these criticisms grating. Is it not childish, to need to be told what to think on your screen? To yearn for propaganda?
In one exchange, my friend became frustrated that the show was unclear how it sided politically. He said if it was anti-government, it must be right-wing. But it was anti-business, too. I asked him whether everything he watched told him who to vote for.
But when I wrote my pilot script, I was every bit as un-subtle as the American media I implicate in these statements. If only script readings had laugh tracks. I based my show idea partly off Utopia, but off my experience working at a volunteer radio station, too. I wanted to satirise how volunteer-run organisations can inflate themselves in importance without competence, becoming overly bureaucratic, involving restructures like a dying company without its employees or even managers ever having seen a cent. I did not, however, portray it accurately. I did not use the dry wit and pinpoint situational awareness that the Utopia writers used. My script included ridiculous antics and punchlines comparable to The Big Bang Theory.
“It’s funny,” Shane the supervisor said in one of our later meetings.
“That’s because you’re Gen X,” I replied, deflated, totally at a loss to write the comedy I actually enjoy.
My friend would've loved it.
That’s why I’ll never write jokes.
Word Count: 700