ABC’s six-part comedy Ground Up has arrived with Sam Pang in the lead as Hugh Shen, an AFL administrator sent from Melbourne to oversee the creation of a new club in Tasmania. The series turns the launch of the Devils into a workplace scramble over uniforms, sponsorship deals and meetings with stakeholders, with a $1.13bn Hobart stadium sitting in the middle of it all.
That is why the show is landing now. The Tasmanian parliament approved the stadium late last year, clearing the way for Tassie’s team to enter the AFL and AFLW, and the state’s long-running football fight has become a live political and sporting issue again. A comedy built around that project has an obvious hook: it takes a real, expensive and still argued-over development and drops it into the machinery of office politics.
Pang’s Hugh is not a heroic fixer. He is the kind of manager who sounds permanently one spreadsheet away from disaster, which suits the show’s rapid-fire bureaucratic style. Josh McConville plays AFL chief executive Alistair Penfold, and their exchanges land in the clipped, looping rhythm familiar from other satires about power and process. When Penfold says, “You’ve gotta spend money to make money,” Hugh fires back, “Yeah, but first you’ve gotta make the money you’re gonna spend to make money.” Penfold doubles down: “So you spend money to make that money, that you’re gonna spend to make money.” Hugh comes back with the kind of reply that makes the joke work: “Yeah, but you’ve gotta make the money you’re gonna spend, to make the money you spend to make the money.”
The series borrows openly from the bureaucracy satire playbook, and its office-bound comedy has the feel of workplace favourites such as Utopia, The Hollowmen and The Games. It is pleasant, easy to watch and built on familiar rhythms, but it is not belly-laugh material; the jokes are more about the machinery of decision-making than sudden comic shock. That matters because the source material is so loaded with real-world noise. Tasmania’s bid for an AFL team has been wrapped in years of debate and hullabaloo, and the show is trying to squeeze sustained comedy out of a project that has already generated plenty of drama on its own.
One early detail shows where Ground Up is headed. In the first episode, the show flashes text warning that what follows never happened, then goes ahead and imagines the politics, egos and budget angst anyway. Hugh is unimpressed with the first version of a Hobart-centric team song, and Destiny Pitt, the chief financial officer, has been brought in to keep the whole thing on budget. The first four episodes reviewed suggest the series understands the appeal of the premise more than it solves the harder problem inside it: whether a dispute over a team, a stadium and a licence can be turned into comedy that keeps escalating beyond the initial joke.
