At some point the line between work and life blurred, then dissolved entirely, which was probably inevitable when Nakkiah Lui and her partner, Gabriel Dowrick, decided to make a TV show together.
The couple met in 2014 on ABC’s Black Comedy, Lui’s first television writing gig, which Dowrick edited. “I like to think he fell in love with me on the screen because of my sense of humour,” Lui says. A moment passes before a peal of laughter tumbles through the phone. “He’s just looking into the distance right now.”
In the years since, Lui has emerged as one of Australia’s leading multi-hyphenates – lauded playwright, screenwriter, podcast host and the publisher of her own book imprint. Dowrick is an in-demand editor, working on The Family Law, Wakefield, The Other Guy and Lui’s 2017 series Kiki and Kitty.
The desire to write something together was always there – and it’s about to be realised in the form of Preppers: a tightly plotted six-episode ABC comedy that premieres on 10 November.
Preppers tells the story of Charlie (Lui), a breakfast television host. Coerced into wearing a giant Australian flag thong costume for the show’s January 26 broadcast – her pleas to acknowledge the impact of Invasion Day dismissed by the show’s executive producer (Grant Denyer as you’ve never seen him before) – Charlie is finally tipped over the edge, only to become caught up with a community of doomsday preppers.
There are echoes of the finale of Get Krackin’, which Lui co-wrote, that featured a searing monologue from Miranda Tapsell against the racism stoked by breakfast TV. “I did not expect that final episode … to be as controversial as it was. I got a lot of hate mail over that, I got people sending stuff to my home,” says Lui. “For like two years, any time there was an op-ed about it … I would get a barrage of insults, calling me names. I think part of it for me was like, can I survive this?”
Writing Charlie, she drew from this experience: “What is it like to survive that type of public shaming?”
The interest in prepping, meanwhile, began with reality TV. “A couple of years ago, I got really into watching Doomsday Preppers, Doomsday Bunkers, just all of those kinds of shows,” Lui says. “And then I started spending a bit of time on forums. It was, like, a real descent.”
On one level, it was pure fascination, but there was also a deeper pull. “Being a First Nations person … that idea of survival and prepping for the worst, and survival being part of your history and this value you hold. For me, that’s definitely something I’ve inherited,” says Lui.
For Dowrick, prepping offered almost infinite possibilities for storytelling. “I always loved that within the subculture of doomsday prepping, you’ve got all of these different points of view, in terms of how someone might believe the world could end. Environmental catastrophe, economic shutdown, you know, even dopey stuff like zombies or whatever. Asteroids, Christian rapture ... ”
This spectrum of destruction is embodied by the ensemble of preppers assembled for the series and played by Meyne Wyatt, Ursula Yovich, Chum Ehelepola, Aaron McGrath and Eryn Jean Norvill. The group is led by Monty, a part written for Jack Charles. “It amazes me that no one has put Jack Charles in a comedy before,” says Lui. “He’s just so funny.”
Preppers is a skilful balancing act, a laugh-out-loud comedy that never shies away from the seriousness at its heart: First Nations people already faced a genocide, so why wouldn’t they be prepared for anything?
Nailing the tone required a lot of rewriting. “We went back and forth on a lot of these things, right up until the edit,” Dowrick says. “Like, how hard can you hit an idea and not make someone feel too uncomfortable that they’re not going to laugh when you come back out of that?”
“We would pull out the storyboard at like 9pm and yell at each other that the joke wasn’t funny and try and make a better joke,” says Lui. Or they would go out for a nice dinner and “next minute we’d just be talking about the script”.
“But in a way we both are really lucky that we love what we do. There’s kind of nothing I’d rather be talking about sometimes than the story that I’m playing with in my brain,” says Lui, who directs her next comment to Dowrick: “I think it might be the same for you.”
Lui says Dowrick was “a great white ally” during the process, bolstering her confidence that a mainstream comedy audience would stay with them through the moments of seriousness and follow them back to the funny.
“Because you’re so emotionally invested in it, especially around the stolen generation content. Or, you know, finding the bones of the colonial murder. Sorry, those are just really odd sentences,” she says. “But he was really great at coming in and … being like, nah fuck it, it’s a good idea. They can understand it. People will listen, and it’s going to make it funny and good.”
Preppers is on ABC TV and iView from 10 November
