Laying the foundation: Utopia’s success
Wouldn’t it be fantastic to live in a world where everything at work runs like clockwork, the government always follows through with its promises and the Wi-Fi never drops out?
That’s exactly what the characters in ABC’s comedy Utopia strive for, with little success.
The show is written by Australian trio Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro and Rob Sitch. These guys (along with others) formed Working Dog Productions in 1993 and have been responsible for shows like The Castle, Russell Coight’s All-Aussie Adventures, Thank God You’re Here and now Utopia. They’ve been a dominant figure in Australian comedy for over two decades. Keep up the great work lads.
Utopia is based around the office of the National Building Authority (NBA), who are in charge of all of the government’s infrastructure projects.
Gleisner said that the show’s individuals aren’t inspired by real world colleagues, because none of the writers have actually ever had a job.
“We’ve never actually worked in a large office, let alone an office weighed down by bureaucracy. Everything in the series, from the characters to the plots to the dialogue is based on speaking to people and observing, but not from direct experiences,” Gleisner said.
Selecting poor actors and actresses are often a huge flaw in locally-produced comedies, but Utopia flirted with danger, choosing a different approach with their cast. They aren’t all actors, but there is a common link between Celia Pacquola (who plays Nat), Anthony ‘Lehmo’ Lehmann (Jim), Kitty Flanagan (Rhonda) and Luke McGregor (Hugh):
“We realised that when you’re doing a comedy, the best thing you can do is cast comics in all of the roles.
That really made it such an enjoyable experience for us because we were seeing the lines that we’d written delivered so deftly,” Gleisner said.
The reaction from fans on social media has primarily been on how close to home the show hits. Twitter, with the hashtag #UtopiaABC, is especially popular on Wednesday nights when the show aired.
Poor communication, poor organisation and poor management are evidently very relatable to the people of Australia. That can’t be a good indiction of our local businesses.
Despite the each character’s quirky shortcomings, the show itself has flourished, including where television programs are most harshly critiqued: in the ratings.
Season 2 enjoyed an extra 160,000 viewers per episode in 2015, averaging just under 800,000 viewers each week.
The consistency of their ratings week to week would’ve come as a relief, following a sharp drop-off in viewers after the debut episode of the first season. Interestingly, as can be seen in the table below, the first episode of each season attracted an almost identical amount of viewers.
Utopia’s second season clearly maintained viewers throughout the run a lot more effectively than the first. Gleisner admits writing became “easier” the further production progressed, as starting from scratch with a blank canvas took a lot of work.
The show ran on Wednesdays at 9:05pm on ABC1, hardly TV’s most prized slot. However, you can only beat what’s put in front of you, and Utopia consistently won its time slot, helped in part by immediately following the popular panel comedy show, Gruen Transfer. Utopia’s Season 2 began on August 19 and ran through to October 7, while Season 1 was aired during a similar period in 2014.
The show almost never made it off the ground however, with co-writer and star Rob Sitch admitting to losing faith in the project several times.
How would a show about infrastucture and government policy excite and entertain viewers? Gleisner explained that this wasn’t unusual for Working Dog projects, especially considering the Gleisner-Sitch-Cilauro group dynamic. On the one hand, it had never been done before, so that was a plus.
They’ve been together long enough to know what will work and what won’t. And Gleisner admitted at times he was as unenthusiastic about the ‘urban planning’ idea as anyone.
The first major prize won by Working Dog and the team behind Utopia was a Logie Award for Most Outstanding Comedy. While far from the first award for Working Dog Productions, to receive major recognition for the show after its first season came as a real delight to the crew.
“With awards you never take it for granted because you never know who is judging them or what the criteria is, but we were certainly delighted to win the award,” Gleisner said.
A lot of hard work goes into the process, including seemingly endless hours for writers and producers. Gleisner explained the writing to be a very fluid process, each script constantly a work in progress over weeks or months and jumping from one script to another.
“Usually we do upwards of eight or nine drafts for any script, and in terms of shooting… an episode a week.”
During the production period, the turnaround time between producing episodes is very minimal. As Gleisner mentioned, spending the weeks or months beforehand on script ideas comes in handy when a new episode has to be pumped out each week for eight straight.
“It’s very intensive work, especially in the period where we shoot it… there’s eight weeks there where we really don’t come up for air,” Gleisner said.
Clearly, Gleisner is ready for a rest and will ponder what is next in store in the coming months.
When quizzed about the show’s future, Gleisner was reluctant to commit stressing that nothing was “locked in”.
“We’ll never go into another series of anything until we can be certain we can make it better than the last series. At this stage, given the show has just finished it’s free to air run, I don’t think we’ve made any decision yet.”
Fans around the country will be hoping that the team do go ahead with a third season when the time is right to make that call.
Oh bugger, there goes my Wi-Fi again…
