Frontline

Frontline is the best, most intelligent series to have come out of Australia. It is as insightful as it is funny. For anyone who believes in the validity of what you watch on current affairs television, this show is for you.

Rob, Santo, Tom, and Jane (the creators, and producers) should have kept making these episodes, television is worse off without them. They did go on to great things though, and their same brand of humour is evident. These people, are the creators of the brilliant Australian movies "The Castle", and "The Dish", and you would enjoy this series if you liked those movies.

This series is made up of a host of hilarious characters who help to expose aspects of journalists that we all can identify with, like the huge egos, (Brooke van den Burg), the stupidity and lack of talent accept as an actor pretending to be serious and intelligent (Mike Moore - the classic anchorman), and the drive for ratings (executive producer Brian Thompson was the best of the three - R.I.P Brian).

"Frontline" was an apt satire that exposed current affairs television for the uncaring, sexist, ratings-grabbing, irresponsible shows they are.

What's more, the show is hilarious! Funny in an intelligent way.

9 out of 10

Between 'Frontline'and 'Media Watch', the credibility of 'tabloid tv' was destroyed. Brilliant playing, great scripts, and all this, on a shoestring budget. Like 'The Games', 'Frontline' often prophesied actual stories. Journalists both loved it and hated it. It's a shame these guys did 'The Panel'. It's not likely that tv comedy will get as good as this in the near future.

Our local public TV station showed this, though a change of title was necessary ("Frontline" is the title of a very serious investigative/documentary series produced by PBS). It didn't attract a lot of attention (and wasn't heavily promoted), but for those who caught it, many laughs were to be had. The satire was sharp and very funny, but perhaps the most surprising aspect of the show was that just about every character, from the pompously moronic host through the crew of pranksters to the earnest producer (and the Machiavellian Exec producers) managed to remain largely sympathetic. If this makes its way around again, I encourage all to watch it.

As I am so far the only non-Australian to post a comment, I'll assume no-one in the UK knows much about this gem of a show. In fact I happened to catch it when I was on holiday and haven't seen it anywhere in Britain, whether it be on Sky or terrestrial TV.

Anyway, to get a flavour, it is 'The Larry Sanders Show' crossed with 'Drop The Dead Donkey'. It doesn't have a laughter track but unlike 'DTDD', there is no attempt to make it topical ('DTDD' had segments that were filmed the day before to get a current, satirical comment in the script).

The real star of this show was Bruno Lawrence (such a shame to hear he died in 1995), who was simply hysterical as the Executive Producer Brian Thompson. He was the first person I saw as EP and so far (I've only seen him and Sam Murphy) the best by far.

The script is tight, although sometimes, albeit very occasionally, it does decend into pure sit-com territory. While this does not prevent the show from being funny, I feel that the show succeeds more as a satire.

I feel that it could work in Britain as the humour is very similar to British humour, although we do not have these daily tabloid current affairs programmes that seem so popular in the USA and Australia. So assuming no-one in the UK has bought it already, SOMEONE GET THE RIGHTS AND SHOW THIS DAMN FUNNY COMEDY! NOW!!!

Now I'm off to watch 'The Castle'. I'll let you know...

This series was the watershed of satirical description of TV current affairs. After the rubbish that the commercial stations dish up as current affairs it was at times hard to tell the difference between this and the real thing.