The cast of Fix Her Up. Image supplied.
Fix Her Up has all the ingredients you’d expect from a sitcom: four friends complete with their own eccentricities and neurosis, a shared run-of-the-mill office and the search for love comprised almost entirely of missteps. It’s all there and that’s the problem. Fix Her Up occupies an awkward middle-ground between a sitcom parodying stereotypical and formulaic sitcoms and stereotypical and formulaic sitcom trying to differentiate itself with a little well-meaning self-deprecation.
Formulaic sitcoms work. There’s a reason shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother still feature prominently everywhere from airplane screens to streaming services. They’re mindless, easily digestible pieces of entertainment where even the laughing is done for you. That is not an insult. No-one wants to watch Black Mirror or The Kettering Incident all day. Light entertainment is great as long as it doesn’t try to be something else.
It’s difficult to have a successful Australian comedy that doesn’t take the piss out of someone or something, usually the characters themselves. So for a sitcom like this to work, it kind of has to. But this show isn’t subtle about it. To begin with the characters actually joke about how they are or should be on television or how their lives are like a television show. They reference Asher Keddie because of/or despite the fact that the main character, Jane, appears to be based on her or at least her Offspring character, which is a pitty because Katherine Innes is the show’s stand-out. Then there are the stereotypes. They’re either taken too far by the likes of Nicki and Meadow’s supposed birth-mother in episode two or not far enough by Meadow herself whose serrated tongue and hair-trigger temper would make for a great character if they worked better with her upbringing by Byron Bay hippies. Creator, Arden Pryor’s history with Fat Pizza comes through here but the gag’s don’t quite cross-over.
The show has some nice moments like Nicki’s attempt to lie her way into an all-lesbian cruise holiday prize with the help of naïve Prue but some of the other ‘crazy hijinks’ that the group get up to revert back to well-worn plot lines and changes of pace between comedy and sincerity that feel rushed. The idea of a sitcom that doesn’t take itself too seriously and pokes fun at a bloated genre with an Aussie twist is good one but this one doesn’t quite execute as hoped.
Fix Her Up is not without its chuckles and sticks to the sitcom formula well-enough to bring an audience back for more but it’s empty calories as far comedy is concerned. It’s great to see independent Australian shows getting made and being picked up but this one is unlikely to raise the bar.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Fix Her Up
Thursdays at 9.30pm on Aurora (Foxtel)
Executive Producer: Arden Pryor
Starring: Katharine Innes, Seon Williams, Jennifer B. Ashley, Asleen Mauthoor, Louise Bremner, Matthew Crowley, Donna Pope, Cas Yates, Patrick Moonie, Mayumi Nobetsu, and Rosa Nix
Directed by: Arden Pryor, Jack Savige, Gordon Napier
Written By: Arden Pryor, Jack Savige, Dean Watson, Gordon Napier, and Seon Williams
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