Kitty Flanagan lays down the comedy law in Fisk season two

The much-loved comedian returns — with a host of guest stars — for a new season of her clever but unassuming sitcom, Fisk.

Kitty Flanagan in season two of the ABC comedy Fisk.

It’s a pleasure to welcome back the very enjoyable Kitty Flanagan in the second season of Fisk, the comedian’s first venture into the travails of sitcom and, in its drolly modest fashion, it’s proved very popular.

It’s a great vehicle for Flanagan, though she’s more than happy to share the limelight with her comic colleagues. It’s a nice variation on her solo shows. Her dialogue as a stand-up drips with excruciating-yet-hilarious anecdotes about her on and off-stage life, performed with a gift for giving her considerable audiences scope for self-identification. She tells tales about herself and, by extension, her audience.

But if comics are performers who won’t or can’t conform, she has proved herself also as a considerable orchestral player, nicely fitting into ensembles as a comic actor in Working Dog’s incisive satire Utopia, helping Rob Sitch and his team of hapless functionaries deal with a government full of ideas to develop infrastructure that will certainly have no life past their initial announcement.

And she’s also been a TV regular in shows like comedy news program Have You Been Paying Attention and as a writer and performer she was seen as herself on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. She’s been in our homes often enough now, almost as if she is part of our social circle — at least for regular ABC viewers.

But she continues to have a foot in the grassroots of the profession, currently on a comprehensive tour of regional centres effortlessly coaxing any truant punters back into the theatres, her houses largely sold out.

Her sitcom is unassuming in the way Flanagan’s lead character is. Fisk is a one-time corporate contract lawyer who, at the start of the first season, took a job in a small suburban law firm in Melbourne. Her life in Sydney had been totally disrupted when her husband ran off with an older woman, something she couldn’t help telling anyone who showed the slightest interest.

She was emotionally shell-shocked and a little dazed when she joined Gruber & Gruber, a slightly threadbare suburban company that assists and advises in settling affairs for someone who has died, advising their personal representatives in overseeing the deceased wishes, the complexity of which depends on whether the descendant died with a valid last will and testament.

As Fisk quickly discovered, probate law brings with it a great deal of boring paper work but becomes somewhat more complicated when she had to deal with squabbling relatives, those who just don’t see that a client’s best legal interests are so frequently inconsistent with their own. It’s worse, of course, for any lawyer when the bickering occurs while the client is still alive and looking to avoid unnecessary drama from their relatives.

It’s a clever concept and illustrates the two vital elements in writing a successful situation comedy – you need amusing characters, obviously, but also a situation that allows them to be amusing. And in Fisk, character and situation are a perfect fit. She’s become Gruber & Associates’ most efficient probate solicitor, her “brown suit every day” fashion strategy perfectly reflecting both her personality, the kind of clients the firm attracts, and the way the legal firm operates. Functional but just a little bit offbeat.

The regular cast returns, too — Julia Zemiro’s hyper active Roz Gruber, chatty and always on the lookout for blokes, she still wears the colourful textured blazers with shiny buttons for every occasion; Marty Sheargold’s principal solicitor Ray Gruber, who, after years of experience, knows every trick for avoiding work; and Aaron Chen’s probate clerk, George, geeky and a bit obdurate, the self-described office “Webmaster”.

John Gaden is back, too, as Helen’s father, retired court judge Anthony, married to his life partner and former tipstaff, Viktor, played by Glenn Butcher, devoted cryptic crossword enthusiast. And the show again welcomes season-one favourites: Glenn Robbins, Bessie Holland, Alex Papps, Denise Scott and Marg Downey. Rob Sitch also turns up in episode five as a rather scary barrister. “Apart from all being people I know and like, I just think it’s hard to go past a comedian when it comes to good, comic timing,” says Flanagan.

Last week’s first episode in the new season, Goddamn Flim-Flam Man, neatly reintroduced the ensemble, Fisk firstly encountering a “blended beverage bar” near her office – source of running gags, perhaps - that doesn’t serve coffee and she has to settle for a “Berry Good Time”, the day not starting well. George has become obsessed with some kind of internet simulator game involving machinery that knocks stuff down after blowing it up. Ray is “shedding”, determined to lose weight for a school reunion in Sydney, the office stinking of the canned fish he devours at all hours. And Roz dumps a huge copier in Fisk’s office, the size of “a new aircraft carrier”, according to Fisk, that causes her no end of discomfort.

The main story, though, concerns a nuisance claim made by a dead woman’s lodger, happily occupying a granny flat on her property. Her daughter, Leslie Lee (Denise Scott), still missing her dead mother, is outraged when the lodger, hirsute Keith Budge (Harley Breen), says he was promised money from the will and hires formidable “nuisance claim expert” Debbie Lim (Ting Lim) to represent him.

Next week’s episode sees Ray entrusting Fisk with the firm’s most prestigious client, Sergei Bennett, played in deadpan fashion by Stephen Curry, the son of an infamous playwright famous for his hatred of women. A copyright issue has emerged with a local amateur theatre company, the Clown Car community group, who want to perform Bennett’s most celebrated work, Death of Man, but altered to Death of A Woman. Their aim to smash the patriarchy. It’s an amusing satire of what passes as what was once called alternative theatre, and Fisk has to determine what’s most important, a breach of the Copyright Act or a case of gender discrimination.

It’s often said that the poet, Philip Larkin, who described all plots as having “a beginning, a muddle and an end”, also perhaps inadvertently described the structure of the sitcom. There is a problem to be solved involving the main character which must be resolved by the end. But along the way the “muddle” occurs. And Fisk must deal with these various crises or find a new way of wrangling them before the end credits.

The series is again written by Flanagan and her sister, Penny, along with script editors, Bruce Griffiths (Good News Week, Enough Rope with Andrew Denton) and Sophie Braham (Gruen, The Weekly with Charlie Pickering), their job to keep the scripts tight, logical and relevant but also to provide additional material. Flanagan also directs again, alongside Tom Peterson, known as “the third Flanagan sister”.

Penny, the head writer, “makes sure we get the jokes on to the page and Tom makes sure we get them off it”, says Kitty, though the process sounds just a little madcap. “I’m impatient and easily frustrated, which means I don’t always communicate clearly. Both Penny and Tom have an uncanny ability to interpret my gibberish.”

Sisters in life and in comedy ... Penny and Kitty Flanagan.

Kitty makes sure her sister is always on set to rewrite lines that don’t work, while Tom has found a way over several years to interpret whatever Kitty throws at him. “If the comedy’s not working visually, I can’t necessarily tell you how to fix it. That’s when I go to Tom and start acting things out in front of him and babbling things like: ‘Okay, imagine you’re the camera, now we need to see THIS then THIS then THIS and then it’s funny … so how do we do that?’”

This description makes the series seem a little more manic than it actually is. The pacing is quite sedate and it’s often more like a sketch show, with fast blackouts abruptly cutting off short scenes that Flanagan usually tags with a gesture or a raised eyebrow.

And Flanagan’s Fisk is herself composed through most of them; there’s a hangdog seriousness about her each time we see her in the office. She’s always a bit suspicious of the life around her and her demeanour is epitomised by an intense vulnerability that’s never allowed to lapse into pathos. And no matter what disasters or frustrations fall across her path, she finds a way to survive with some dignity intact. She tries to keep pace with an increasingly formidable world yet seems fated to remain an outsider forever.

It’s an odd little series, in some ways, but Kitty Flanagan is, as always, irresistible.

Fisk, Wednesday, ABC, 9pm. And streaming on iview