The ABC’s new workplace comedy about a theatre, Bad Company, simply mocks from the outside
- Written by Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara, Tutor in English & Theatre, The University of Melbourne
There’s a line in the opening moments of Anne Edmonds’ Bad Company that announces the show’s premise: “Money is the death of creativity”.
Delivered by Margie Argyle (Edmonds), the wildly self-assured artistic director of the Argyle Theatre, it’s meant to be funny – a declaration so absurd, so blinkered, we recognise the comedy in it immediately.
The trouble is the line reveals the show’s inherent outdatedness. Margie is raging against a battle Australian theatre fought – and largely lost – decades ago.
Tension between creative ambition and institutional sustainability is not imaginary. Smaller, more innovative companies – most likely to produce new work – were disproportionately gutted by Brandis-era funding cuts.
The cultural stakes of the argument Margie is making were once genuinely urgent. But Bad Company doesn’t seem aware of this history. The show presents the creative-versus-corporate conflict as if it were fresh provocation rather than the settled vocabulary of a debate Australian performing arts administrators have been having, wearily, for at least 30 years.
I found myself wondering: for whom is this new?
Are we just recycling old jokes?
The show is positioned as a Fisk-adjacent workplace comedy, riding the critical and commercial success of Kitty Flanagan’s much-loved ABC legal series. The comparison is inescapable, not least because Fisk’s director, Tom Peterson, is at the helm here, and because Flanagan herself appears as Julia McNamara, the corporate fixer brought in to rescue the Argyle from financial collapse.
Fisk succeeds on the strength of a central character so precisely realised that Flanagan generates comedy from almost any situation the character is placed in.
But Bad Company populates the Argyle Theatre with a collection of types assembled from familiar stereotypes rather than fully imagined ones. The overtly queer wig designer. The quirky seamstress. The earnest marketing person. The interfering board member. Each is recognisable. None has been written beyond an initial sketch.
This is where the show encounters its central problem. Edmonds is well known to Australian audience as a comedian whose natural habitat is herself. Her humour is confessional, self-lacerating and bracingly direct. It suits panel shows and stand-up. It is less suited to playing someone else.
Margie Argyle demands such a transformation, and Edmonds doesn’t quite achieve it. The character is an attitude in search of a person. Her certainty about her own genius is the joke, but the joke can only sustain so many repetitions before the audience begins asking not “what will she do next?” but “why should I care?”
There is an irony hovering over the whole enterprise the show does not appear to notice: Edmonds is the writer and creator of a series in which she plays the visionary lead creative, programming work to further her own performing career, certain of her own brilliance, resistant to outside interference, putting herself emphatically at the centre.
Whether that irony is intentional or not, it’s hard to ignore.
Julia McNamara, the corporate fixer, is a more contained role and Flanagan brings precision to it. But even she cannot manufacture warmth or contradiction from a character who is, in these first episodes at least, essentially a function, the rational force to Margie’s chaotic one.
The two performers have chemistry in the abstract, the way any two confident comics in the same room might. What they don’t yet have is a relationship with texture, stakes or surprise. The show mistakes opposition for conflict, and conflict for drama.
In one early scene, Margie summons the company for a collective movement and breathing ritual, a managerial gesture presented as collegial necessity. In the second episode, the theatre stages a production about humans as eggs – performers costumed accordingly – the entire company treating the endeavour with solemn conviction.
It is the kind of joke aimed at theatre that landed in the 1990s and has been recycled with diminishing returns ever since. It is hard to find a second laugh in material asking us to find arts people funny simply for being arts people.
Mocking from the outside
The best workplace comedies, from The Office to Fisk, earn their laughs by finding genuine humanity inside the absurdity, by letting us see the ridiculous world on screen has a unique appeal and a logic that is relatable.
Bad Company, at least in its opening episodes, simply mocks from the outside.
There are bright spots. Several supporting actors, given little room but making the most of what they have, suggest a richer world the show has not yet decided to explore. Whether subsequent episodes will find the courage to bring them forward is an open question, but could be genuinely promising.
Bad Company is clearer about the arguments it stages than the perspective it takes on them. Margie’s hostility to financial pragmatism is offset by Julia’s corporate rationalism, but the show has yet to find a compelling position between the two, or fresh humour in the tension between them.
Bad Company is on ABC and ABC iView from Sunday.
Authors: Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara, Tutor in English & Theatre, The University of Melbourne
