Kath & Kim 20th anniversary reunion special is a party without punch

Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life, Kath & Kim: 20 Preposterous Years ★★★½
Seven

Reunions - high school, sports team or much-loved iconic TV comedies - are fraught with risk. Not just because hindsight is always more forgiving than the harsh light of the present day, but because it taps into the question which sits uncomfortably at the heart of nostalgia: can you ever really recapture the magic?

In this case, memory lane winds back two decades to 4 Lagoon Court, Fountain Lakes, when Jane Turner and Gina Riley’s sitcom Kath & Kim, spun out of two recurring sketches from Fast Forward and Something Stupid, transformed itself into something greater than the sum of its parts, the apotheosis of modern Australian television comedy.

The cast of Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life.

The answer to the question - can you ever really go back? - is an individual thing. For some, the stroll down memory lane offered by Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life and Kath & Kim: 20 Preposterous Years, two reunion programs screened on successive nights by Seven, will offer easy laughs. For others, if social media reaction is any measure, disappointment awaits.

It also offers a gentle reflection on the impact not just of the show itself, though that is unequivocally gigantic, but of the generation of female comedians whose names will be forever fused to it: Turner, Riley, Magda Szubanski and Marg Downey.

As for the reunion itself, it is fraught with complications. Reflecting on the show’s magnificence are historian Professor Michelle Arrow, former prime minister Julia Gillard, comedian Stephen K Amos and TV personality Carson Kressley. Even by clip show standards it is a thin assembly of cultural expertise.

Gina Riley, Magda Szubanski and Jane Turner as Kim, Sharon and Kath, respectively.

And there is the egregious over-use of green screen. At first you’re not sure if you’re seeing it right. And then you can’t help seeing it everywhere it is used. On some programs every dollar spent is visible on screen. Our Effluent Life and 20 Preposterous Years in contrast, feel hampered by what looks like a microscopic budget.

And all of that, frustratingly, detracts from the most important detail in the narrative: that Kath & Kim is a great Australian institution, its brilliant characters writ large from our shared cultural consciousness. Turner, Riley, Szubanski and Downey are comedians almost without peer, and enduring proof that the greatest talents in Australian comedy have been, with few exceptions, women.

Over two decades Kath & Kim has displayed enduring and almost unrivalled repeatability. Watched on a streaming platform, a hotel room television, or on an airplane, they are easy to watch, and in the here and now as funny, if not funnier, than they were when they first screened. My own iPad has all four seasons, the telemovie and the feature film. And all are worn thin.

The original series is a deliciously dark but loving slice of Australian suburban life. It struck a complex balance, throwing a lot of shade but never disrespect. It could plunge into the bleak pathos of Sharon’s loneliness and, a moment later, pivot into the near-absurdist exploration of Kath’s hat craft, amateur dramatics or peerless dance skills.

Jane Turner as Prue and Gina Riley as Trude.

It gave us iconic characters like empty-nester Kath (Turner), her nightmare daughter Kim (Riley), Kim’s second best friend Sharon (Szubanski) and Kath’s lover and, later, second husband, Kel (Glenn Robbins). Alongside them it gave us a pantheon of magnificent peripheral characters in homeware shop ladies Prue and Trude (Turner and Riley), Kel’s friend Sandy Freckle (William McInnes), menswear shop manager Darryl Lee (Mark Trevorrow) and, deliciously, Brett’s nightmare mother Lorraine (Szubanski).

It also gave us a lexicon of malapropisms and mangled phrases that have been horrifically but magnificently etched into the Australian vernacular. The world’s best comedies are often remembered for just one but Kath & Kim gave us almost too many to list: ignoranus, egotesticle, effluent, hornbag, balloowend, gropeable, day-facto, fauxhemian, greassssh, Cardonnay and, of course, the show’s most memorable phrases, “noiyce, different, unusual” and “look at moiye”.

Here’s the thing: there are a lot of laughs to be mined in Our Effluent Life, which packages new material with original series clips, bloopers and behind-the-scenes footage, particularly from A-list guest star appearances, such as Michael Bublé, Matt Lucas, Richard E. Grant, Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director Stephen Page and Kylie Minogue, who played Kim and Brett’s grown daughter Epponnee Raelene Kathleen Darlene Charlene Craig.

Those clips are great fun, a genuinely rare glimpse into the making of a hit comedy. Bublé and Grant’s enthusiasm is contagious. Kath, Kel and Eric Bana giving in-character interviews on the set during filming is brilliant. And the backstage interviews with cricketer Shane Warne, with whom cricket-mad Sharon was obsessed, are genuinely poignant.

But the new material feels the weakest, hampered by rickety production values and a lack of narrative cohesion. Broken up into a sequence of loosely linear scenes, they might have been better structured as a standalone episode, which would have served as a better companion piece to the promised cast reunion and would have made good on the implied promise in the marketing.

And therein lies the real problem. Selling a two-part reunion special to a prospective audience as new content was always going to be a tough pitch, especially when the program delivers what amounts to a clip show. Frustratingly too, the biggest potential firepower - interviews with Turner, Riley, Szubanski and other cast and creatives - feel like they must have been left for the second instalment, but ultimately they do not materialise there either.

The second part, 20 Preposterous Years, is instead more of the same, though with an expanded list of talking heads, including Mick Molloy, who also appeared in the series, as Kath’s ex-husband Gary Poole. Frustratingly, no reunion is forthcoming. Nor, among all those talking heads, do we get to hear from Turner, Riley or Szubanski in any meaningful sense. As an event to mark the show’s 20th anniversary, it feels like a lost opportunity.

Our Effluent Life and 20 Preposterous Years lack a gimmick, such as the pilot episode table read used to reunite the cast of The Nanny. They lack a superfan host, such as Jennifer Garner, who played master of ceremonies for the reunion of the cast of Schitt’s Creek. And they lack the big-budget punch of the Friends reunion, which is inevitably the high bar against which they (and other such anniversary markers) will be compared.

But revisiting the world of Kath & Kim, even briefly, is genuinely thrilling. The original material, despite the emergence of a younger generation of edgier comedies, is ageless, and as razor sharp and delightful as it was the first time it landed.

Kath & Kim: Our Effluent Life and Kath & Kim: 20 Preposterous Years are available to watch now on 7plus.

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