Where there’s a will, there are laughs in ABC’s Fisk

Kitty Flanagan, playing a lawyer rebuilding her life after her husband runs off with an older woman, makes her first sitcom foray, and the results are promising.

Kitty Flanagan in a scene from Fisk.

Fisk is the new observational comedy built around popular comedian Kitty Flanagan, a performer with a gift for giving her considerable audiences scope for self-identification. Few comics so innately appreciate that the best way to an audience’s heart is through the truth.

She is one of our most empathetic comics and most successful — before that, Flanagan says she was one of Australia’s least known waitresses at Pizza Hut — and, having performed around the world in Japan, Germany, Singapore, The Netherlands and Britain, still tours inexorably across Australia. (“If she hasn’t been to your town, and you have a stage of some sort then please drop her a line and she’ll be there shortly,” her website suggests.)

More recently she has found a new audience as a comic actress in Working Dog’s incisive satire Utopia, helping Rob Sitch and his team of hapless functionaries deal with the ministerial obfuscation of our government’s approach to what it deems the greater good when it comes to infrastructure in this country.

She’s the flame-haired public relations manager Rhonda Stewart, with an obdurate commitment to impracticality that transcends politics, and is disdainfully contemptuous of common sense and usefulness. She’s only too happy to put Sitch down the rabbit hole of yet more Utopian ideas that will certainly have no life past their initial announcement. It’s always a joy when she interrupts another meeting with some harebrained idea or leads her boss out on another ministerial promotion involving unlikely props and high-vis vests.

Flanagan also pops up regularly on the comedy news program Have You Been Paying Attention, and as a writer and performer she can be seen on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering.

Her new show, her first venture into sitcom, finds Flanagan as corporate contract lawyer Helen Tudor-Fisk, who after her life falls apart in Sydney — her husband ran off with an older woman, something she can’t help telling anyone who shows the slightest interest and she now detests the word “hubby” — takes a job in a small suburban law firm in Melbourne.

Gruber & Gruber is a slightly shabby, unprepossessing company dealing with the process of authenticating a last will and testament of someone who has died, if they in fact made one. As Fisk discovers — it’s certainly not her territory but she needs a job — it includes determining the value of the deceased’s assets and distributing the remainder of the estate to their rightful beneficiaries. She just hopes as the people are dead she won’t have to engage emotionally with anyone, shell-shocked as she is from whatever happened to her in Sydney.

But there are a lot of papers to be read and sorted when it comes to probate. The slightly shabby Ray Gruber (played in a lovely dry deadpan fashion by another well-known comic in Marty Sheargold), who hires Fisk because he’s too bored to look for anyone else, tells her: “When someone dies, it’s sad; then it’s really boring, a lot of paperwork.” But as Fisk discovers it becomes somewhat complicated when she has to deal with squabbling relatives, those who just don’t see that a client’s best legal interests are so frequently inconsistent with their driving emotions.

As the great crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote, “There is something about wills that brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words ‘I devise and bequeath’.” (One of my favourite vintage New Yorker cartoons is from Peter Arno: A disgruntled old codger almost enveloped by a huge armchair while his lawyer holds his will. “Now read me the part again where I disinherit everybody.”)

The series, one of Porchlight Films’ final productions, is co-written by Flanagan with her sister Penny Flanagan. (After 15 features, five television series, two docos and three shorts, Porchlight Films is ceasing operations as founding partners Vincent Sheehan, Liz Watts and Anita Sheehan move on to pursue new opportunities individually.)

Producer and co-creator Vincent Sheehan (The Kettering Incident, Operation Buffalo) came up with the idea of probate as the basis for the series when, according to the production notes, he witnessed, second-hand, a messy and complicated fight over assets after a friend’s great-aunt died.

“I realised that probate cases are riddled with mysteries, they twist and turn as more things from the past are brought to light and everyone fights for what’s left behind,” he says.

He conceived the show originally as a drama, shocked by the behaviour of those contesting wills and their sense of entitlement, but then Flanagan’s work on The Weekly, her popular comedy segments drawn from the news cycle, came to mind. “I thought that the combination of this bizarre world of heightened behaviour and Kitty’s very relatable approach to storytelling was exciting.”

Flanagan jumped at the idea. “Everyone has their own version of history and that’s what you get out of these wills and probate stories,” she says. “And everyone thinks their version of history is the correct version. So there’s immediate conflict, which is a great starting point for story.” But one thing the creative team agreed on — no one wanted to make “another glamorous law show”.

Flanagan is an astute comic, engaging and witty, and with a lovely line in belittling self-deprecation. As Fisk, her life is a series of downfalls, knockbacks, humiliations, pratfalls and disasters. (It turns out she lost her Sydney job for attacking a client, calling her “a silly old whore”, though it later turned out she was the older woman having an affair with her husband.) But she handles it all with a kind of amazed, often desperate good cheer — though there’s a lot of eye-rolling and lifted eyebrows — suggesting that everything in her world is under control yet also about to go dreadfully wrong. Partly defiant and a little aggressive, she’s also easily overwhelmed, her rebellion against a hostile environment easily quashed.

There’s something a little sad sack about her appearance, too, an almost clownish sense of not caring about how she is perceived by others. Fisk wears a slightly baggy brown suit to work every day (rotating three identical suits) because it saves time each morning on deciding what to wear.

The trouble with wearing brown, however, is that it tends to make her blend in with the furniture. Unsuspecting people not paying enough attention sometimes sit on her. It also tends to make her look older than she is, which doesn’t seem to particularly worry her if it makes people think she’s more capable and dependable than she really is.

But her social awkwardness conceals a pretty sharp lawyer’s brain and she’s not afraid of speaking the truth even if it’s bluntly hurtful. Look up the word fisk and you’ll find dictionaries agreeing that its usage stems from an internet argument tactic constructed around negations and refutations, a way of castigating an argument by revealing the mistakes in each of its points. (The word seems to emanate from the work of English journalist Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, noted by critics for a certain slackness with details.) And so, frustrated by the world at large, Fisk has an unfortunate habit of saying aloud what others are thinking and pointing out when they are wrong. It gets her into a lot of trouble.

In the first episode, Portrait of a Lady, Fisk is given no time for preparation, taking on the case of the exasperated Ruth O’Malley (played by Alison Whyte with a deliciously stubborn edginess), a nightmare for even an experienced litigator. O’Malley is determined that Fisk enforce a “vasectomy clause” in her mother’s will, a document that’s “a proper will kit from the post office”. The clause states that O’Malley’s brother Dean, a free-spirited artist with five kids from different wives it seems, who likes to paint with his penis, will inherit his share only if he has a vasectomy.

The director credit is shared between Flanagan and her long-time collaborator, Tom Peterson, who also produces her weekly sketches on The Weekly. And, although it is a long jump from sketch comedy to the kind of creative control required for a TV series, they manage it well enough with the help of cinematographer Joanne Donahoe-Beckwith, the director of photography who helps Sitch develop the witty ensemble style of Utopia.

Flanagan says she watched the fast-paced organic style of shooting employed by Sitch and was after the same kind of energy where camera operators become part of the ensemble, pivoting and working in conjunction with the performers. It’s not quite there yet but a little visual awkwardness at this early stage in no ways dimin­ishes the fun.

Fisk, Wednesday, 9.30pm, ABC.