Transgressive Aussie Comedy’s Journey From ABC To Netflix

Transgressive Aussie Comedy’s Journey From ABC To Netflix

The ‘Series One Liner’ that was listed on the Press Kit for Why Are You Like This reads as “A six episode comedy following friends Mia, Penny and Austin through the divisive socio-political hellscape of 2021, leaving a path of destruction in their wake” and really, that about sums up this new Aussie comedy series that is due to hit the ABC on February 16 and will soon be a ‘must see’ on Netflix internationally later this year.

Star Observer sat down with Naomi Higgins for a chat the week before her show premiered on the ABC and while Naomi is the first to gush about the amount of talented people it took to bring this show together, it is more her story than anyone else’s, considering she co-wrote it based on her and her collaborators’ lives AND also co-stars as Penny in this hilarious and squirm inducing six part comedy.

Why Are You Like This covers a lot of themes, including but not limited to; gay and bisexual representation, workplace discrimination against the LGBTQI community, seemingly inappropriate cosplay porn and tragically leaving treasured family heirlooms inside other people. Although it tends to leave you questioning just where you stand on these topical social discussions Naomi thinks that this is one of the reasons Netflix got on board with the production after seeing the pilot.

“After we got the full series, we had a call with Netflix because they were interested in the themes of the show and the fact that it could work internationally… I think there’s some Australian TV that does really well in Australia but doesn’t have that international appeal, at least from the network perspective, but they liked that the show had that international appeal because of the themes and the style of the show and they got on board, which was crazy and amazing!”

 I was also interested if having Netflix onboard offered any sort of security to the production when it had to be shut down during the COVID lockdowns, of which the production had to weather twice since they were producing the show in Melbourne. Naomi mentions that they were very lucky with the timing and how it all ended up happening, though.

“We’d filmed most of it before we got shut down, we’d probably got through 3/5’s of it. So in my mind, it was like, too much money that we’d sunk in not to add a little bit more because at that point we did end up needing some extra funding to get production back up and running but they did give us extra funding thank god!”

This transgressive show, which is snappy and stylishly shot, will make you laugh out loud and slap your head in disbelief with some of the antics of the main characters and their mis-adventures. I came away from viewing the series feeling more educated about the world around me and also very glad to be in my 40s in the 2020s and not my 20s.

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