Creamerie: A pandemic comedy set in a world without men

Free healthcare and education, plus mandatory menstruation leave. Sounds great. But then why is utopia so creepy?

A post-apocalyptic vision of the future doesn’t usually make for laughs-a-plenty but there’s plenty of dry, dark humour in Creamerie, a six-part comedy series from New Zealand.

Set eight years after a pandemic – not Covid – wiped out half the world’s population. Specifically, the male half.

We see this great reaping in the opening scene, a slow-motion plague of men succumbing to a mysterious disease, all blood splatter and flailing limbs, before an enormous pile of bodies is burnt.

Flash forward eight years and that mound is transformed into a green grassy hill, against an idyllic backdrop of the Kiwi countryside.

The world has been remade with women in charge. Free education, healthcare and mandatory menstruation leave sounds amazing, but replacing the patriarchy with another social order still gives way to despots. Nature abhors a power vacuum.

The new social order is wellness, with familiar refrains about abundance and goddesses in addition to the spinach and flax seed smoothies.

Kiwi comedy Creamerie stars Ally Xue, J.J. Fong and Perlina Lau.

But there is an authoritarian tinge to utopia and anyone who steps out of line or dare to exhibit “civic negativity” is punished by having a bliss drug take them out of action for several days. There is only one type of “truthspeak” that’s acceptable and it’s not dissent.

Repeat offenders or agitators risk lobotomies, ostensibly to take away their stress but the whole “lobotomy for your own good” myth has been thoroughly debunked.

One of these agitators is Alex (Ally Xue), who really hasn’t bought into the wellness cult, but her healthy dose of scepticism lands her in trouble, frequently. She lives on a small dairy farm with her sister-in-law Jaime (J.J. Fong) and Jaime’s friend Pip (Perlina Lau).

Jaime lost her husband Jackson (Yoson An) and her baby son when it all went down and, unsurprisingly, she’s still dealing with the trauma of her grief while running the farm’s 19 and a half cows.

She’s also desperate for her number to come up in the sperm lottery – the government is repopulating the world through existing sperm bank deposits – and the local doctor (Rachel House) said she’s a prime candidate given her magnificent vulva.

People pleaser Pip has been seduced by the wellness psychobabble, and wants nothing more than to prove herself to the town’s soulless mayor and wellness leader Lane (Tandi Wright).

When the trio stumble across what they thought extinct – a man (Jay Ryan, OK there’s one man in this show) – shenanigans ensue.

Why does paradise always turn out to be a cult?

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If this so-called paradise, with its emphasis on fertility, is starting to sound like The Handmaid’s Tale, but with an extremist matriarchy, that’s not a coincidence. Xue, Lau and Fong, who created the series with Roseanne Liang, have said that they were inspired by the punishing dystopian series.

It’s a tricky thing, balancing what is, on the surface, a pretty bleak narrative with a wicked sense of humour without overstepping and trivialising heavy issues. Creamerie deftly straddles the line, knowing when to take the piss and when to step back.

And it cleverly uses physical comedy for some of that comic lifting – a sequence in a funhouse of mirrors is simple but effective.

While it’s sometimes undercooked, as if it’s skimming many of the dramatic beats, Creamerie has built a compelling world that takes deserved shots at the empty promises of wellness fanaticism. And the writing is pretty sharp.

More significantly, the show has created three characters who feel real, with ambitions, history and a vision of how things could be.

Creamerie is streaming now on SBS On Demand

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