Jenna Owen (left) and Vic Zerbst are the writers and stars of new ABC comedy Optics, which is set in crisis management company.Credit: Louie Douvis
We all know how it goes: a celebrity, businessman or sportsperson is caught doing something they shouldn’t. The press and social media swoop and then the damage control starts.
Think sympathetic photo opportunities. A long-suffering partner roped into an interview. A charity is created. And then – bingo! – a scandal is forgotten, a new narrative has been produced, and a career is left, mostly, intact.
Jenna Owen and Vic Zerbst – creators and stars of the new ABC comedy Optics – have seen it all before. “The Johnny Depp [scandal] was the big one while we were writing and pitching the show,” Zerbst says.
“Teenagers were coming with information, your grandparents knew about it. It was a conversation where everyone had a perspective on it. And it was also the main one where you were learning about the bots, the infiltration and the influence from political governments.”
Jenna Owen (left) as Nicole Kidman, Vic Zerbst (right) as Greta Goldman and Charles Firth as Ian Randell in Optics.Credit: ABC TV
For the uninitiated, the Depp scandal centred on the 2022 defamation case between Depp and his former wife Amber Heard, who accused each other of domestic violence. The trial became a media sensation, with Heard trolled relentlessly by Saudi-backed Twitter accounts, while Depp was largely painted as innocent. It was seen as a classic case of “Darvo” – deny, attack and reverse victim and offender – a tactic used by PR firms to discredit women.
“For the Amber v Johnny case to be a global and political sort of issue, where you’ve got Saudi Arabia funnelling all these trolls into a debate between a married couple in Hollywood, it’s absolutely insane,” Owen says.
Optics is set in the public relations firm of Fritz & Randell; Owen and Zerbst play Nicole Kidman and Greta Goldman, two junior PRs suddenly thrust into leadership when the firm’s decrepit CEO Frank Fritz (Peter Carroll) dies. To distract from an impending PR disaster, the company’s owner Bobby Bahl (Claude Jabbour) anoints Nicole and Greta over long-time executive Ian Randell (Charles Firth).
Owen and Zerbst’s double act is thrust to the helm of a crisis PR agency. Credit: ABC TV
Together, they have to navigate a footballer’s disastrous night out, spin a bullying chief executive out of a PR disaster by targeting “the misogynistic medical profession” and bury a young Hollywood star’s kink.
Is it a genuine promotion for the two women or, you know, optics? “It’s the idea of that glass boardroom,” Zerbst says. “For so long, they have been outside of that glass boardroom, and for the girls, that [promotion] represents, for them, the inner circle: we can be part of this; we can have this power.
“But when we were doing our research, we came across this term … ‘glass cliffing’, which is … where women are promoted to positions of power when a company is in turmoil, and she’s not given the structure of support, she’s put there to take the fall, to be a pain sponge.” Owen jumps in: “And mop up the blood, dispose of that, and then get the man back in.”
Charles Firth is the perfect foil to the stars on set and in the writing room. Credit: ABC TV
Owen, 29, and Zerbst, 30, met at university in Sydney and have since worked together on nightly SBS satire The Feed, for which they won three Writers’ Guild awards, performed with The Chaser (their 2020 Contact Tracys video with Firth about a pair of Millennial COVID-19 contact tracers was a hit during the pandemic) and last year they wrote and starred in Stan film Nugget Is Dead: A Christmas Story. They are incredibly close and talk up and over one another, but always in sync.
“We anchor each other,” Owen says. “I don’t really remember the last time we had an actual argument about anything creative.” Says Zerbst: “We are so lucky to be in a place where we can turn up to work as our full selves and be who we want to be, and be strong and be excited. And that can be a difficult thing to find a partner that gets you and knows that.”
Optics is the biggest step yet in their burgeoning comedy empire – their work on The Feed gained more than 90 million views online – and it builds on their previous characters, situations and satire.
American Kate Walsh, of Private Practice fame, guest stars in the ABC series. Credit: ABC TV
“The news stories that were the most inspiring and interesting to us were often these corporate scandals, these cancellation stories,” Zerbst says. “So we’ve always been across creating satire around that, and finding the satirical lens for those hot-button topics.
“And then we’ve always had these characters, these PR girls who are savvy, who are switched on, who are so smart and intelligent about the way the media operates, and we wanted to combine our interest in these corporate scandals, our background in political satire and comedy, and creating a universe in which it is plausible that two young women can become the new power brokers in their office environment.”
Adds Owen: “Exactly. There’s not that many areas in which your youth and even your gender can help you because so many institutions are so male-dominated, and this is the same thing, until it’s not.”
As the bumbling Ian Randell, Firth is the perfect foil to Owen and Zerbst’s characters, a dynamic reflected in real life. “It’s not too dissimilar,” Zerbst says, laughing. “We joke that the show’s a documentary because he comes to the writers’ room with this different perspective, these different generational references, and we just go, ‘What are you saying?’”
Vic Zerbst (left) and Jenna Owen met at university and trust each completely as creative partners. Credit: Louie Douvis
Adds Owen: “And sometimes we’ll just say, ‘Was that gibberish?’ He’ll reference names and say, ‘Oh, it’s kind of like Baby John Burgess.’ And we’ll be like, ‘Who? Have you just made that up?’
“One of the best parts of the show was just seeing him come to life as that character. He just wears his heart on his sleeve. A lot of actors are so wooden, self-conscious. He just gives you everything.”
Optics comes at a time when the ABC in particular has been accused of relying on established talent instead of promoting new faces. To be fair, the ABC is far from alone in this. Name a show – especially a comedy – on one of the commercial networks that doesn’t rely on road-tested personalities.
Is there enough opportunity on Australian television for younger comedians?
“Absolutely not,” Zerbst says. “The problem is that now you just have people coming up on TikTok or self-funding their own work, but they come from a very specific class of people who can afford to do that.
“Neither of us came from that kind of support or from money. We’re both scholarship kids, so for us, it had to be about getting paid, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Zerbst adds.
Owen, meanwhile, laments the loss of The Feed, which ran from 2013 to 2022 and launched the careers of not only Zerbst and Owen, but Marc Fennell, Mark Humphries and Jan Fran among others.
“The talent in Australia is so dense,” Owen says. “With The Feed, I had never been somewhere that was so supportive and incredible, [but we were] also allowed to fail, and also allowed to be amazing, and it was a safe haven for people to meet each other.
“The more you eliminate those spaces, the only opportunities I see are on panel shows, and access to those panel shows are [through social media] followings. And how do you get followings? It’s really difficult, really difficult.”
Optics premieres on Wednesday, January 29, at 8.30pm, on the ABC.
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