Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 26 August

Utopia (Sitch/Cilauro/Gleisner, 2014-2023)

On (almost) this day back in 2021, I was filling in for Simon Morris on RNZ At the Movies dur­ing one of those peri­ods where cinemas were shut due to the coronavirus.

In that epis­ode I reviewed one of the best tele­vi­sion shows ever put to air which to that point had only been four sea­sons. There is now a fifth.

Utopia is pro­duced by Working Dog Productions who have been a fix­ture in the Australian com­edy scene for nearly 30 years, and respons­ible – if that’s the right word – for the clas­sic films The Castle and The Dish and the TV com­ed­ies Frontline and The Hollowmen.

Amazingly, the writ­ing and dir­ect­ing team of Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner with pro­du­cer Jane Kennedy have been work­ing togeth­er since the mid-80s when they formed the D‑Generation break­fast radio team and on the evid­ence of Utopia they’re still going strong.

Sitch plays Tony Woodford the much put-upon CEO of Australian fed­er­al gov­ern­ment agency, the Nation Building Authority.

It’s their job to cut through the red tape that pre­vents big infra­struc­ture pro­jects from hap­pen­ing, bypassing the Nimbys and get­ting buy-in from the stake­hold­ers. That sort of thing.

But as is so often the case, their efforts are thwarted time and again by incom­pet­ence out of their control.

So, there’s much gold to be mined from Australia’s fairly inflated sense of its own import­ance and the self-interested politi­cians and polit­ic­al and media advisors derail­ing pro­jects like fast trains or cross city tun­nels or a second Sydney airport.

On anoth­er level, it’s also like a fam­ily com­edy – with Sitch in the role of the put-upon dad who nev­er gets his way sur­roun­ded by wacky char­ac­ters who won’t do what they’re told.

But at its heart it’s a clas­sic work­place com­edy, get­ting much mileage out flaky wi-fi, office recyc­ling, new secur­ity sys­tems and the mys­ter­ies of HR.

Working Dog have been fol­low­ing much the same format for dec­ades now. Utopia feels very like Frontline did in 1994 only it is honed to a razor-sharp edge now.

The pace is superb and the jokes come thick and fast, so much so that we will often be laugh­ing from begin­ning to end – I don’t make that claim lightly.

One reas­on for this is that the ABC has no com­mer­cials which means the rhythm of the show does­n’t depend on those six-to-eight-minute arcs that con­strain a lot of American situ­ation com­edy. And there’s usu­ally a sol­id main story as well as a sec­ond­ary story in each epis­ode which makes it more like Dad’s Army – the high water­mark for tele­vi­sion com­edy in my eyes – than some­thing like Home Improvement.

For the last couple of months whenev­er we’ve felt like we needed a pal­ate cleanser after a heavy drama or even a big day, we’ve gone to Utopia and haven’t been disappointed.

Also in that 25 August edi­tion of At the Movies: the Gerard Butler dis­aster movie Greenland; The Tomorrow War, a science-fiction film star­ring Chris Pratt as a former Green Beret sent 30 years into the future to fight off an ali­en inva­sion; and the doc­u­ment­ary Max Richter’s Sleep about the composer’s eight and a half hour ‘lul­laby’.

Where to watch Utopia

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix or Stan

Canada: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Not cur­rently avail­able online

UK: Not cur­rently avail­able online