The Wedge

Usually with horrible television shows, you can still understand how some people would enjoy it. This film defies that rule.

If you were a religious person, the fact that this show got optioned for a second season would make you question your faith.

This show is absolutely terrible. It consists of clichéd, stereotyped, "bogan"-like characters. Each sketch (of which there are only about 7) has one punchline (if you could even call it that) and each sketch ends the same way. The exact same jokes doing the exact same characters. How this show stays on air is beyond me.

Watch one episode of this show. That's all you need to know every character (or one dimensional, one joke, repetitive, shallow shell pf a character).

The jokes are lame, exhausted, old, reused, predictable and completely unfunny.

Please cancel this show and blacklist the actors from ever working again.

In my opinion, The Wedge is one of those shows that start off good but starts to run out of ideas for skits. I like The Wedge unlike many other people I have heard about and seen on IMDb. Some of the jokes are lame, eg: A dancing act where a fat lady teaches a dance school. Then there are some good skits, eg: An athlete who is always in trouble with the law; a la Shane Warne, or two Indian telemarketers receiving phone calls about Aussie sayings and having to translate them into simple terms. The Wedge is good if you need a cheap laugh or two but if you want a really funny comedy program, I suggest you avoid this. My advice to haters of The Wedge is "If you don't like it, then don't watch it."

The Wedge is a sketch show which takes place in the non-existent Australian town of Wedgedale. Here we meet a variety of recurring characters, like the farmer, the local sports hero, the two gambling slags and the psycho teenage girl, who's stalking the college's heart throb.

Not much is sacred in this show, so if you're easily offended, steer well clear. On the other hand, if you enjoy shows which take the p**s and satirize things like local news reporting, sportsmen as role models and those awful British "documentaries" about people fighting e.g. fat, this show is for you.

Another plus is the fact that it's Australian - it makes a nice change from the usual US and UK sitcoms and comedy shows.

Scattered amidst the elephants graveyard of bad Australian television there has always been one dependable genre: the sketch comedy show. Whilst our country has only made a handful of genuinely good sitcoms, the sketch comedy genre has been the source of numerous gems. "Fast Forward", "The Late Show", "The Big Gig" and "The Micallef Programme" are just four examples of great Australian comedy.

Sadly, the last few years have not been so kind, with duds such as "Skithouse", "Big Bite" and the disastrous "Let Loose Live" going some way to degrading a once reasonably proud tradition. Now along comes "The Wedge", an amalgam of every single thing that is wrong with Australian TV comedy.

If you're the kind of person who finds bogans, wogs, fat people and overbearing laugh tracks automatically funny - without anything so intrusive as wit or irony - this is the show for you.

"The Wedge" tries desperately to be a "Little Britain" or "League of Gentlemen" for Australian audiences, which is a worthy idea, except that to succeed in that goal, the writing actually needs to be, y'know, funny. All the performers try too hard to be funny, as if you were stuck watching a bad university revue. The writing is loaded with tired stereotypes, grindingly predictable setups and lame puns (Sandra Sultry - stop, my sides!) backed up with the world's most unsubtle laugh track (Laugh dammit! LAUGH!!!!!) which often runs when there isn't even a joke! If "The Wedge" had run on Nine or Seven it would have been axed within six weeks. Ten may be more patient, but based on what "The Wedge" has come up with so far, that goodwill is sorely misplaced. It's truly disheartening that Ten has given a 26 episode commitment to this garbage when we have some of the best stand-up comedians in the world who can deliver more laughs in 30 seconds than an episode of "The Wedge" can muster in 30 minutes.

From the beginning till the end of each episode 'The Wedge' relies of cheap and often out dated humour which portrays Australians as a bunch of idiotic bogans. Further more producers feel it is necessary to add an obvious canned laughter track to make scenes funnier than they really are with very little effect. Even the actors appear to be embarrassed by the fact that they are starring in such a miserable show which puts their acting on par with the writing. Catherine Deveny has even given the show a bad review in an article in The Age despite the fact that she was actually one of the writers for the wedge claiming that the producers required the writers to "rewriting" and "blanding out" the script to appeal to a wider audience. To top of the negative reviews from the public and other professional critics alike the wedge has been criticised by Who Magazine and was awarded the "honour" of the fourth worst t.v. shows of 2006.