Fans of bureaucracy-themed workplace comedies such as Utopia and The Hollowmen will feel right at home watching Ground Up, an easily digestible and well-paced series that feasts on the genre’s familiar staples: pointless meetings, labyrinthine approval processes, mountains of red tape and endless rounds of buck-passing. Like the Sydney Olympics-themed The Games – my favourite Australian show in this genre – Gary McCaffrie’s series is about the management of a major upcoming sports project: the launch of an AFL team in Tasmania.
As part of the AFL licensing deal, a new stadium must also be built, which is controversial for various reasons, not least because it’ll cost a pretty penny. This is all rather topical: while each episode (this review encompasses the first four) begins with text declaring that “the following events never took place”, many viewers will recognise its real-life scaffolding. After years of debate and hullabaloo, the Tasmanian parliament finally approved a $1.13bn Hobart stadium late last year, allowing Tassie’s team – the Devils – to enter the AFL and AFLW.
In Ground Up, Sam Pang heads the cast as an AFL administrator, Hugh Shen, who has moved from Melbourne to oversee the creation of a new club and everything that comes with it – from uniforms and sponsorship deals to meetings with stakeholders. Things, of course, don’t go smoothly. We learn in the first scene that Hugh isn’t impressed with the first pass at a Hobart-centric team song and that’s just the start of his problems. There’s tension between him and the chief financial officer, Destiny Pitt (Emma Harvie), who has been sent to keep things running on budget, which of course is a poisoned chalice.
As in screwball comedies and Armando Iannucci productions – including The Thick of It and Veep, the creme de la creme of rapid-fire bureaucratic satires – the actors speak at an accelerated clip, giving the dialogue a bouncy to-and-fro. Their core challenge (which Pang in particular handles well, and the late John Clarke excelled at) is to make lines sound as natural as possible – no easy task given all the linguistic gymnastics. Take, for example, this exchange in episode three, between Hugh and the AFL chief executive, Alistair Penfold (Josh McConville, bringing his blokiest blokeyness).
Alistair: You’ve gotta spend money to make money.
Hugh: Yeah, but first you’ve gotta make the money you’re gonna spend to make money.
Alistair: So you spend money to make that money, that you’re gonna spend to make money.
Hugh: Yeah, but you’ve gotta make the money you’re gonna spend, to make the money you spend to make the money.
Conversations like that are never going to be belly-laugh material but are important in maintaining an upbeat rhythm and keeping sparks flying. One of the dangers of this style of writing is a feeling that the creators are trying hard to impress. Ground Up never tips into too-strained territory, though at times it comes close. There are also moments when the material feels a tad stretched, though McCaffrie does a good job of filling out the kind of script that often works best in writers-room environments, where scenarios can be thoroughly workshopped and zingers finessed.
He also has some fun configuring small, amusing moments. Again in episode three, for instance, Hugh opens a bottle of non-alcoholic red wine at his desk first thing in the morning, triggering shock and condemnation from Destiny, who adjusts her reaction when she learns there’s no booze in it but insists “it’s a shocking look”. Hugh poses the question: “What time are you allowed to start having non-alcoholic drinks?”
None of this will set your pants on fire – and this kind of comedy has been done better plenty of times before – but tonally it’s a pleasant space to be in.
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Ground Up premieres at 8.30pm on Sunday on ABC TV and ABC iview
