“Stone the crows!” and “bugger me dead!” Australian yobbo humour often works best in contrast: instead of focusing solely on vulgar knuckleheads, storytellers insert somebody normal into the mix to bring friction and perspective. As is the case in Stan’s new comedy series Population 11, which is led by the strait-laced Andy (Ben Feldman), who’s irritated and flummoxed by residents of Bidgeegud, a tiny outback town from the back of beyond. Andy, a bank teller from Ohio, is a fish out of water as soon as he arrives, having an absurd exchange with police sergeant Geraldine Walters (Katrina Milosevic), who pulls him over and salaciously requests he breathe on to her face.
In this moderately amusing (at best) early scene, the humour is broad: it’s not lampooning Australian culture; it’s just weird. But the Australianisms soon flow thick and fast as we meet the residents of – in the words of one character – “a dying little shit-hole that nobody ever visits”.
They include Audrey (Emily Taheny), who runs a fusion Chinese restaurant and pie shop, serving flavours such as sweet and sour camel; Aboriginal priest Jimmy (Tony Briggs); Val (Genevieve Lemon), who runs a local pub crossed with a church that doesn’t really look like either; and Noel (Stephen Curry), a general store owner with a pet snake named Old Rex and a pet crocodile called Jeff. Andy is in town to track down his estranged father Hugo (Darren Gilshenan), who hosts UFO sighting tours and has mysteriously disappeared.
Several characters are introduced in a door-knocking montage that doesn’t provide time to acclimatise to their personalities or give the performers space to develop a tempo. They get there eventually, but the residents of Bidgeegud are a crusty bunch of cliches. The cast attempt to inject colour and flair but are hamstrung by the scripting, which is sometimes fun and flippant but mostly very average. When, for instance, Andy meets Val, she offers him a beer, but he demurs as: “It’s 10am.” To which she responds: “Better make it two then, ay?” We’ve heard variations of this kind of joke umpteen times before.
Population 11 was created by Phil Lloyd and co-directed by Trent O’Donnell, who collaborated on the hilariously twisted Review With Myles Barlow, which ABC’s meeker-than-ever comedy producers wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot clown pole these days. The show’s other co-directors are notable too: there’s Helena Brooks, whose work includes last year’s excellent mystery series The Messenger, and Ben Young, whose savagely intense feature debut Hounds of Love is breathtaking.
But Population 11 is a letdown: moment by moment it lacks spark and the overarching storyline is ho-hum and stretched out, delaying reveals for mysteries and ambiguities that weren’t particularly interesting to begin with. These include the exact reasons why Andy came looking for his father, and indeed what happened to him. The first episode’s introductory scene visually infers a potential encounter between Hugo and a UFO, but it’s unintentionally unclear and you know the show is playing funny buggers, buying time for some silly revelation later on.
If you haven’t watched a “foreigner stuck in the outback” comedy for a while, perhaps you’ll find some of it amusing, though superior offerings beckon – such as Netflix’s underrated series Irreverent, which launches a funnier premise, involving a crook who pretends to be a small-town priest. Better yet, there’s Stephan Elliott’s (also underrated) 90s film Welcome to Woop Woop, which brilliantly connects ockerism to kitsch, milking rubes for humour while delivering a satirical overlay that skewers notions of national identity. That additional layer isn’t essential, but it can help extrapolate comedic scenarios that might feel stale and exhaustingly parochial – as they do in Population 11.
Population 11 is on Stan now
