In Australia: Wednesdays, 9.30pm, ABC
Breakfast and morning TV shows are almost self-parodies, even the ones that don’t feature Piers Morgan. Having to fill up hours of the day during which the viewers are typically doing housework, they’re like televised versions of the stupidest parts of the stupidest women’s magazines, filled with banal segments with no quality filters and staff who are hoping to use them as the next step in their upward progress towards better jobs.
So you’d think that a comedy programme mocking morning TV wouldn’t have to do much work. The makers could just coast along, putting out easy gags that are mild exaggerations of what already exists.
Yet Get Krack!n, ABC (Australia)’s latest comedy show, has clearly put the work in to produce something that’s vastly funnier and cleverer than you’d ever have expected. Indeed, I think if Chris Morris and the rest of The Day Today team had been starting out today in Australia – and had been women – they’d have made something almost identical to Get Krack!n. It’s that good.
Get Krack!n – if you can
The show starts from the premise that it’s going out at 3am, a time when virtually everyone in Australia is asleep so not watching the show but a select bunch of American viewers are watching mid-morning in their country thanks to a distribution deal and the time difference. The two hosts – show creators Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (The Katering Show) – are therefore:
- Absolutely knackered and tanked up on coffee (“I think my eyelashes are vibrating out of my face”)
- Able to say and do whatever they like but no one will care
- Able to claim anything they like and their American viewers won’t be any the wiser
So the main joke of the show is that you have two very smart feminists aghast at the brainless content they’re having to deal with, so saying exactly what’s on their mind, as well as ‘speaking the sub-text out loud’. Which is frequently hilarious, but would of itself be unsubtle.
Yet simultaneously, the show’s throwing countless other jokes at you. There’s the onscreen captions about the current or upcoming segments, audience polls and the news – they’re often just filled with typos or the show’s ridiculous k-obssessed branding, but often they’re just as vicious about what’s happening as the hosts and sometimes they take on an all Morris-level of whimsy and surrealism:
There’s the Acorn Antiques-grade production values, there’s the failure to follow the schedule properly that results in guest star Sam Neill having to talk about assisted suicide in just three seconds at the end of the programme. There’s the guest contributors who talk complete nonsense.
There’s fake interstitials, adverts and infomercials.
There’s even ridiculous science:
The first two episodes are genuinely among the funniest things I’ve seen in ages, certainly the funniest Australian comedy I think I’ve ever seen. Seek it out and watch it if you possibly can.
The first episode is below (at least for now), so give it a try while you still can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsNpoO4xrnU
