How do you make a comedy about a subject that very few people find funny?

How do you make a comedy about a subject that very few people find funny? I’m talking about the ABC’s new series Ground Up, a workplace comedy about the establishment of Tasmania’s new AFL team and the building of the stadium.

The development of the stadium, in particular, has divided the Apple Isle, with the project condemned by the state’s independent planning commission. A poll conducted in 2025 for the Australia Institute, meanwhile, found that more than two-thirds of Tasmanians didn’t want the stadium at all.

Funny? Clearly, many Tasmanians think not.

However, the executive producers of Ground Up, Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler, and its star, Sam Pang, hope Tasmanians in particular will see past the local politics and instead see the funny side.

“People are cautious before something goes on,” says Hope, who also directed all six episodes. “It’s very common with our shows that people are, ‘Oh, what are they going to do with Upper Middle Bogan? Are you having a go at bogans?’ They’re always worried beforehand and then when you see it … it’s an equal measure and it’s having fun with people’s take on things and the behaviour and the extremes that we all go to around issues, and kind of celebrating that. So I hope, on balance, people come away going, ‘That’s just funny and a good entertaining watch’.”

The fact that the show is so topical is something Butler sees as a plus. “It’s a corporate juggernaut coming into a place, so there’s a point of friction, which I think is ultimately what creates a good workplace comedy,” she says. “And then you set the characters in it, there’s these opposing forces, and in this case the real-life current affairs had just presented themselves as the sources of friction: the state versus this giant corporation, which is the AFL.”

Adds Pang: “I think I can safely say that it’s not making fun of Tassie or Tasmanians. It’s bureaucracy, it’s corporate versus community, and they butt heads … If anything, there’s more fun to be had in the bureaucracy and all the things that have to be done [to set up the club].”

Written by Gary McCaffrie, who worked with Shaun Micallef on Mad as Hell for 15 seasons, Ground Up follows AFL administrator Hugh Shen (Pang), who has been sent to Hobart to establish the Great Southern Football Club. Working with Destiny Pitt (Emma Harvie), who is keeping track of every government dollar spent, Shen faces a divided city, hapless co-workers and an overbearing boss in AFL chief Alistair Penfold (Josh McConville).

When asked by the club’s head of marketing if he can address people’s concerns about the stadium, Hugh is blunt in his reply: “We’ll build the stadium and shut them up.”

Not all of it works (our reviewer was not a fan) but McCaffrie’s Mad as Hell experience is evident, especially when it comes to the ridiculousness of finding a team mascot (there’s concern the religious right in the state’s north are not going to be happy about the connotations surrounding the word “devil”), a club song and corporate sponsors.

“At times he’s in over his head but I think he’s got good intentions and he’s doing his best,” says Pang of Hugh, who hopes the job will catapult him into the chief executive’s chair. “He wants to do the best job he can. If there’s certain rewards that come from that, maybe that’s a good thing, too. But yeah, I think, like many people, he’s just trying to do his best.”

Ground Up is Pang’s first lead acting role, after guest appearances in comedies such as Fisk and Urzila. He is self-deprecating about his abilities on screen, joking that “this is not Daniel Day-Lewis sort of stuff. It’s still a big leap [but] … all I’m doing is waiting for the other actors to finish their lines so I can say mine.”

Hope, however, is full of praise for Pang.

“He was incredibly respectful of the process,” says Hope. “You would think with someone who’s done as many flying hours in front of a camera as Sam has that he could take a position and go, ‘I’ve got this’, but he was very deferential to the process and saying, ‘OK, I haven’t done narrative before, so break it down for me’.

“He wanted to spend time with the two of us [Hope and Butler] long before we started filming to kind of understand the tone that we were going for and how to approach it, and really it was nothing but admiration for Sam and his application.

“He really had made the decision that this is something creatively he wanted to do and he immersed himself in the process and he immersed himself with the ensemble cast and spent lots of time with them, which was such a generous and smart thing to do, really, to know that if he was going to pull this off that he needed to pay as much attention to detail as he did.”

As for whether a comedian with limited acting experience has the capability to lead a show – there had been some online criticism following ABC comedy Bad Company that too many comedians were being cast instead of trained actors – Butler and Hope only see positives.

“I understand that and I think we’ve got a really big history across all our work of putting actors in [our shows],” says Butler. “But you’ve got to work from the place of, well, two things. I read the script and went, ‘That’s Sam Pang’. I didn’t go, ‘What’s a name? Who’s a name that we can put in here?’ It wasn’t working backwards. It was seeing somebody in the part, which we always do first and foremost.

“It certainly doesn’t hurt the ABC or us or anybody that Sam has an enormous profile. The ABC doesn’t have billions of dollars to spend on marketing, they need all the help they can get, they want people to be in their shows. But we have cast an enormous amount of actors who we think are incredible in the job … We just cast the person who was the funniest in the role, the best fit.”

Adds Hope: “I also question the kind of compartmentalisation of performers. We’re in a tiny country as it is. If we need to segment even more and go, ‘OK, you’re in that corner and you’re in that corner’ … Plus we have a great history of comic voices in this country, shows are led by comic voices that come through and they build the shows around themselves. I think it would be silly to deny that this is a great ensemble of really fine actors in this show.”

As for Pang, he is characteristically unbothered: “If Sam Neill or another actor was asked to do it and they went with them I would have completely understood.”

Ground Up airs on Sundays at 8.30pm on the ABC and streams on ABC iview.

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