Last week, the Australian comedy Fisk dropped on Netflix with no fanfare, and quickly ended up in the service’s top ten list of TV shows. After watching the first couple of episodes, we can see why; it’s an easy watch, and the show’s creator and star infuses the main character with the type of had-it-with-people personality that has come out of a lot of us over the last three years.
Opening Shot: A woman in a baggy brown suit walks into a law employment agency.
The Gist: Helen Tudor-Fisk (Kitty Flanagan) used to practice contract law at a high-end Sydney law firm, but after her husband ran off with an older woman, she’s decided to move back to her hometown of Melbourne. Her life is certainly unsettled — she’s living in an Airbnb rental — and she’ll take anything, especially if it involves little interaction with clients. Oh, and she won’t give any references from her old firm.
She’s referred to a small suburban estate law agency, Gruber & Gruber, and told to lose the “festival of brown” she usually wears (she has three identical brown baggy suits). She wears a new bright-yellow suit to the interview and is called out on it. Partner Ray Gruber (Marty Sheargold) hires her mostly because she’s the daughter of a former Supreme Court justice; he doesn’t even care that she doesn’t have a reference, or rather the agency never sent one, according to Helen.
She’s there to take the place of Ray’s sister Roz (Julia Zemiro), who has been suspended from practicing law but still works at the firm as the office manager. Also at the office is George (Alan Chen), a probate clerk who keeps calling himself the “webmaster” because he manages the firm’s website and likes to use terms that have been outmoded for 20 years.
On her first day of work, she’s banned from the cafe downstairs for speaking too loudly when calling out a customer speaking loudly on FaceTime. She finds out later that the guy she called out is the owner.
She’s thrown onto a case right away; a woman wants her brother — who makes a living painting art with his penis — to get a vasectomy to fulfill the conditions of their mother’s will. Helen tries to tell her that such a condition isn’t legal, but does so in a way that’s pretty dismissive. It’s when that client storms out that Roz decides to find out more about Helen; she ended up getting fired from her Sydney firm for being rude to clients.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Fisk is a workplace comedy along the lines of The Office or Parks And Recreation, though Helen Tudor-Fisk is certainly a bit more caustic than the characters at the center of these kinds of shows.
Our Take: Flanagan co-created Fisk with Vincent Sheehan, and she co-directs all the episodes with Tom Peterson, so the show is definitely Flanagan’s vision. And she makes Helen Tudor-Fisk into a funny and likable character that conducts herself in an unlikable way. It’s certainly a tough thing to pull off.
Helen is not a fan of people, and it shows in most of her interactions, whether it’s with her clients, the people in the office, her father Anthony (John Gaden), or Anthony’s husband Viktor (Glenn Butcher). But she somehow finds a way to connect with her clients and find creative solutions to their issues. In the second episode, for instance, a gag about how the grandmother of the Airbnb’s owner likes to burn her rubbish pays off again later during a cremains dispute between a man’s family and his Instagram girlfriend.
It’s when she does connect with clients that we see Helen for who she really is; a regular middle-aged person who is just trying to get past a down period in her life. She’s forging forward the best she can, even if the situations she finds herself in can be funny, but she feels she can do it without having to change anything about a personality she seems completely comfortable with.
That personality certainly leads to funny moments, but Flanagan and her co-writer/sister Penny, don’t try to stuff the show with laughs. They let most of the laughs come from the characters, which means that when there is a gag, it has more impact. Not everything works, like the Airbnb owner’s grandmother constantly invading Helen’s space, but the show works more often than not.
Sex and Skin: We see the client’s brother painting a portrait of Roz as the credits roll, and of course given what he uses as a brush, he is naked by design.
Parting Shot: The penis-painting scene we just described.
Sleeper Star: Julia Zemiro’s character Roz is a good foil for Helen, and she’s got some quirks of her own, like her obsession with making a P-Touch label for everything in the office.
Most Pilot-y Line: When the recruiter tells Helen that she’s a “furniture chameleon”, how she blended in is demonstrated when a co-worker busts in and sits on Helen as if she’s not there.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the show isn’t consistently funny, Kitty Flanagan makes Fisk an appealing-enough workplace comedy.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.