Modern moral dilemmas in Why are You Like This?

Each fast-paced episode charts the parallel and often intertwined adventures of trio of self-absorbed 20-something Melburnians.

Olivia Junkeer, Naomi Higgins and Wil King in Why Are You Like This?

Free-to-air

Eddie Cockrell picks the Free-to-air, Pay TV and Streaming highlights this week.

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As early as 1965, then 22-year-old Mick Jagger may or may not have said something along the lines of not being caught dead singing Satisfaction past the age of, well, 30, 32, 40 or 45, depending on the source. We all know how that turned out.

The point is, he was idealistic, his creation at once inspired the young and shocked the old, and, behind his rock-star posing and dissatisfaction with a culture controlled by older people, he, like the rest of us, didn’t relish growing into the generation he was rebelling against.

All this by way of introducing Why are You Like This?, a raucous and outspoken new comedy series of six half-hours in which a trio of self-absorbed 20-something Melburnians navigate a world where — to quote the equally raucous ABC press kit — “every thought is soaked in the corrosive brine of identity politics and no opinion is left unsaid”. Surprising, profane and possibly culturally baffling to anybody without a 20-something in their own life, these purposefully exaggerated modern moral dilemmas will nevertheless prompt a high degree of proudly un-woke comedic satisfaction.

Seemingly the only woman in a tech start-up, anxious yet righteous crusader Penny (Naomi Higgins) is prone to saying things like “as a white person it is my job to shield you from micro­aggressions wherever possible”, whether her intended target needs or even wants the advocacy. Penny shares a house with out-of-work artist and aspiring drag performer Austin (Wil King), who performs under a series of outrageous names and thinks his perpetual depression will shortly dissipate after having seen an off-screen therapist exactly once. Their fast friend is Mia (Olivia Junkeer, Yashvi Rebecchi on Neighbours), a bi, South Asian woman possessed of unchecked narcissism who sabotages job after job while offering unwanted opinions along the lines of “Incels. They love free speech until a woman uses it to do something sexy online.”

Each fast-paced episode charts their parallel and often intertwined adventures in a world they’re trying hard to understand but can’t seem to get out of their own ways long enough to do so.

Highlights include Penny mobilising a group of marginalised female employees at a male-dominated workplace with catastrophic results, Mia’s attempt to monetise an online cosplay endeav­our and later struggles with her religion, and Austin’s thankless job in artist services.

Why are You Like This? is the throbbing brainchild of stand-up comic and writer Higgins, writer-illustrator-lawyer Humyara Mahbub and Mark Samual Bonanno, the actor, writer and one of three featured players in the Aunty Donna sketch troupe. All three have writing credits on four of the six shows, with Mahbub and Bonanno each delivering standout episodes. Each edition is drenched with popular songs both new (Princess Vitarah) and old (Skeeter Davis) that comment on the action. In a world where culture is being questioned from all sides, Why are You Like This? is a show that refuses to be cancelled.

Why are You Like This?, Tuesday, 8.45pm, ABC TV Plus and iview.

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The Bites

Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime
Wednesday, 8.30pm, SBS and SBS On Demand

“It’s gonna be a helluva long journey,” travel pioneer and charter Monty Python member Michael Palin says, standing at the North Pole in 1991 on the cusp of his second televised adventure. “But, ah, let’s go … South Pole, here we come!” What do travel show presenters do when travel isn’t possible? In Palin’s case, proudly and unapologetically repackage his groundbreaking early peregrinations into a brand new series. In this second of four episodes, Palin comments on scenes from the original broadcast from what looks like his home library, and the journey is punctuated by contemporary interviews with admirers who include Sir David Attenborough, Joanna Lumley and others. And what a journey it is, 141 days south through the end-of-days Soviet Union, down the Nile in Egypt, an unexpected war-prompted detour south of Khartoum, another west from Capetown to the tip of South America when a freighter there wouldn’t take him, and on to the South Pole. Sometimes TV is about spending quality time with old friends, and this is that. “Epic, I suppose, is a good word,” Palin says, reflecting on his adventures. He’s right.

The Pier (El Embarcadero)
Tuesday, 11pm, SBS and SBS On Demand

In this, the second eight-part season of the well-received Spanish polygamous mystery series The Pier, successful Valencia architect Alejandra (Veronica Sanchez), posing as bird biologist “Martina,” has ingratiated herself into the life of Veronica (Irene Arcos). Why? Because at the very start of the first season, which can be caught up with for free on the SBS On Demand online service, she discovered that her husband Oscar (Alvaro Morte), who apparently committed suicide, had built an entirely secret life with Veronica. Now, as their feelings for each other intensify, Alejandra will jeopardise these new awakenings with Veronica as the women navigate their lives without Oscar as they continue to unravel the mystery of his death. The Pier was created by Alex Pina and Esther Martinez Lobato, whose previous show was the Netflix sensation Money Heist (La casa de papel), which also starred Morte. Pena has called the show “a fascinating journey of personal improvement where [Alejandra] frees herself from prejudice”. Together, they deftly avoid the sudsier tendencies inherent in such a melodramatic plotline, with the exotic locations and intense performances going a long way towards selling the kind of labyrinthine storyline you don’t come across every day.

Quoll Farm
Sunday, 7.40pm, ABC and iview

The 1kg Eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) has gone extinct in mainland Australia, and may now be found only across approximately half of Tasmania. In late 2016, after co-photographing and co-producing the Tasmanian devils documentary The Last Devils, Welsh-born environmental filmmaker Simon Plowright and cinematographer Nick Hayward decided to focus their energies on embedding with the cute yet misunderstood marsupials in their natural habitat. They discovered an abandoned farm in a hidden Tasmanian valley and decided to spend a year living with and filming them in the reasonably habitable farmhouse and nearby derelict cottage to answer the question “why do wild animals, if given the chance, choose to live alongside us?” The answer, in this case, makes for captivating and family-friendly TV as lone onscreen host Plowright and the hidden Hayward become the first to film a quoll family in their den. Their footage makes a persuasive case for what writer Plowright calls “these crazy characters” as vital links in the circle of life. “When a person has a positive experience with a wild animal,” he says, “they unwittingly become a conservationist.” As will anyone who spends an hour in his, and their, enlightening company.

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Pay TV/Streaming

Stephen Graham in The Virtues.

Putting the pieces back together

Already established as among his generation’s most chameleon-like and forceful performers for distinctive work in touchstone films, from writer-director Shane Meadows’s 2006 British drama This is England to Martin Scorsese’s 2019 late-career triumph The Irishman, British actor Stephen Graham has also distinguished himself on the small screen. Performances in Meadows’s trio of This is England sequels and the most recent series of the BBC police procedural Line of Duty are of note. Incredibly, also in 2019, Graham reteamed with Meadows for the laceratingly emotional four-part series The Virtues, which has finally made its way to an Australian streaming service.

Autobiographically inspired, if “inspired” is the right word, by a recently remembered trauma from Meadows’s childhood, it showcases a sublimely nuanced performance of great vulnerability and authoritative power from Graham that is even more intense, if that’s possible, than anything he’s done to date.

In contemporary Liverpool, labourer and recovering alcoholic Joseph McCarthy (Graham) is steeling himself for an unpleasant yet necessary task. Debbie (Juliet Ellis), the ex-wife he lost to drink, is moving with their son Shea (Shea Michael-Shaw) to a better life in Australia with her new partner, David (Evan Hamilton). ­Graham clears up all doubt of Joe’s sincerity with a moving talk between father and the son he obviously loves dearly in which he promises to faithfully stay in touch via video chat. As strong as he clearly yearns to be, Joe is nevertheless overwhelmed with grief and promptly goes on a monumental bender with strangers at a local pub — a bravura sequence of sustained improvisation and looming disaster — that loses his job and leaves him nearly penniless.

For reasons that only incrementally become clear, Joe uses the last of his funds to take the Belfast ferry to his small Irish village hometown and reunite with the sister, Anna (Helen Behan), whom he hasn’t seen in three decades. After her initial shock, she welcomes Joe into her family of three kids, and he’s immediately hired as a day worker on a building site by Anna’s understanding contractor husband, Michael (Frank Laverty).

Back in instinctually familiar surroundings, Joe’s traumatic childhood memories begin to resurface. How he was forcefully separated from Anna at age nine, and ran away from the nearby orphanage to which he was subsequently taken. But why? When he discovers one of his co-workers, Craigsy (Mark O’Halloran), remembers Joe from their days together at the institution, another piece falls into place. It isn’t until he forges a bond of sorts with Michael’s directionless sister, Dinah (Niamh Algar), herself grieving the child she gave up for adoption at 15, that truth comes flooding back. Joe’s knowledge prompts a reckoning for himself and Dinah.

Meadows and long-time This is England writing partner Jack Thorne fashioned the script from a random incident of sexual abuse the director endured as a child. Commenting on the repercussions such trauma can have on victims’ lives, Meadows told one interviewer:“It’s very easy to expect people to be virtuous, it’s very easy to judge. But someone who appears to be taking a ‘sinful’ path, addicted to substances or whatever, may be doing a lot better than you think, given circumstances. That’s what this story was really about, making you care about characters who on the surface appear pretty broken by showing you how they ended up there.”

As Joe, Graham does just that, imbuing his essentially decent everyman with a core strength that speaks simply and powerfully to the endurance of the human spirit in an unforgiving world. The Virtues is essential viewing.

The Virtues, streaming on Stan.

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The Bites

Industry
Streaming on Binge

University friends, subsequent bankers and now screenwriting partners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay created the bulk of the propulsive and new HBO British drama Industry, which follows a group of five young, ambitious yet unproven college graduates as they vie for permanent positions at the fictitious yet convincing London financial services institution Pierpoint & Company. The show plays like a cross between director Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and writer Aaron Sorkin’s underrated workplace drama The Newsroom, with the suffocating competitiveness and bawdy situations of the former mixing it up with the tart, jargon-strewn dialogue of the latter. Upstate New York transplant Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold) seems to be the most prominent of the five driven protagonists in the early going of the eight-episode series, though her dark secret is sure to be matched in scandal by the financial and sexual chicanery of the other four hopefuls. The first episode is directed with sinewy assurance by Girls creator Lena Dunham, and propelled by Nathan Micay’s seductively electronic score. Kay described the series as evoking “the transactional nature of workplace relationships,” and in a world where such offices seem in suspended animation, Industry plays as pleasingly voyeuristic.

Crimes Gone Viral
Thursday, 8.30pm, Investigation Discovery and Foxtel On Demand

Closed circuit surveillance footage, familiarly known as CCTV, is a sad but necessary facet of modern life, and such footage, ubiquitous and immediately recognisable, has been used to interesting aesthetic and narrative effect in fiction films and TV shows. So it was inevitable that reality TV would get in on the act, and the result is the Investigation Discovery production Crimes Gone Viral. In 2015 New Orleans, med student and Peter Gold stops to help a drunk woman being abducted by a hooded stranger, only to be shot for his effort. Later, a Valentines Day robbery at a Bradenton, Florida chemist is foiled by the pharmacist’s boyfriend, semi-pro boxer David West, who promptly gives the drug-addicted thief, Rob, an on-camera beating. The footage of such encounters is by definition fragmentary, but deft editing is buttressed by the show’s inspired idea of having Gold and West appear to explain why they did what they did and the effect it had on their lives (Gold recovers and starts a foundation for at-risk youth, West’s girlfriend is grateful, and even Rob got clean upon release from jail). Unexpectedly, behind the lurid title are constructive and inspiring slices of American life.

Soulmates
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

What would you sacrifice to discover and connect with your one true love, satisfaction 100 per cent guaranteed? That’s the premise of the admirably uneven yet thought-provoking six-part AMC anthology series Soulmates. Fifteen years from now biotech firm Soul Connex have created a test which matches kindred spirits, and the ripple effect on curious marrieds and others with an itch to scratch is the heart of the show. In the first episode, Adelaide’s Sarah Snook (Succession) stars as Nikki, a mother at first sceptical of the process who mulls taking the test in secret but is unprepared for the reaction of husband Franklin (Kingsley Ben-Adir, One Night in Miami…). Compared to the popular dystopian British series Black Mirror for its blending of sinister hi-tech concepts and O. Henry-ish storytelling, Soulmates was created by Emmy-winning writer William Bridges (Stranger Things and — surprise, surprise — Black Mirror) and actor-writer Brett Goldstein (Ted Lasso). “A soulmate isn’t someone who is going to fix you,” Bridges has warned in interviews, suggesting the recently confirmed second season shows similarly double-edged promise.