Anne Edmonds’ new ABC comedy won’t be for everyone – but that’s what makes it so good

Bad Company ★★★★

Margie Argyle (Anne Edmonds) is the artistic director of a struggling Melbourne theatre company, the Argyle. The finances are a mess and the board wants her to include a popular musical in her new season to boost audience numbers.

“I’m here to push boundaries and I’m unapologetic about that,” she says, to the frustrated CEO (Alex Papps) and the marketing officer Christian (Cameron James), who have noted that three of her proposed shows have full-frontal nudity.

Enter Julia McNamara (Kitty Flanagan), who has no experience in the arts and no great love of theatre, but has been sent by the chair of the board to clean up the company. First action on the list: redundancies. “Profit is not a dirty word,” says Julia, who doesn’t even know who Ibsen is, much to the eye-rolling of the Argyle’s staff.

This culture clash is at the heart of Bad Company, a delicious six-part satire created by Edmonds that is as much a love letter to the arts as it is a gloved slap in the face. It’s about the fronts we put on when all is collapsing around us, and a sharp poke at the corporatisation of artistic freedom.

“It’s not personal, I have to stand up for my art,” Margie tells Julia.

“Is it art, or plays starring you?” replies Julia.

Edmonds was inspired to write the show by her time spent at Melbourne Theatre Company, and it’s all there on screen: the self-important season launch (“copious totes!”), the posters for productions hanging in the background (my favourite is one titled Despair) and even Margie’s passion project, a French peasant play requiring tonnes of sand that very much mirrors Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

If you strip away the bells, whistles and wigs, Bad Company is a workplace comedy, a genre we have excelled in. Think back to Utopia or Fisk (RIP the Australian version of The Office), they found great humour in very specific settings (the Nation Building Authority and a suburban law firm specialising in probate matters) and Bad Company is the same. You don’t need to work in a theatre to understand the hot guy in the office is usually the most boring.

But where Utopia and Fisk had employees you could barrack for, it’s a bit more complicated in Bad Company. Margie and Julia are meant to be unlikeable from the get-go (Margie is a raging artsy egomaniac, Julia a corporate robot) and it takes a bit more time to understand what’s really going on underneath their veneers of bravado.

For me, that is the brilliance of Edmonds. She is not interested in sanding down her characters’ sharp edges. She wants you to be uncomfortable. She wants them to be a bit weird, a bit different, a bit off-kilter.

It’s all there in Edmonds’ alter ego Helen Bidou, the fake tan-smeared, sarong-clad woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown who appeared in the breakfast TV satire Get Krack!n. It was even there in Edmonds’ early work, where she baited racists with a mock Facebook group called the True Australian Patriots, and then lifted the veil on competitive calisthenics in her 2017 Aussie-Scandi-noir ABC series The Edge of the Bush.

Margie Argyle fits neatly into this bunch, and like Helen Bidou, there’s pain underneath Margie’s manipulative exterior. Some won’t like Edmonds’ comedy style, but I love it. Comedy doesn’t have to be easy or nice – people with flaws are compelling.

As Margie, Edmonds is at her erratic best, cajoling and bullying all at once, while Flanagan’s Julia has threads of both Roz from Fisk and Rhonda from Utopia. As put-upon Christian, Cameron James is terrific, as is Ben Pfeiffer, as the specialist wig-maker Jacob (shout out, too, to Phil Lloyd, who pops up as a method actor playing Julian Assange).

There is bound to be some humourless pushback that Bad Company mocks theatre and the arts. I think anyone who has spent any time in the sector – as a creator, worker or as an audience member who was given tickets to a three-hour monologue by their avant-garde aunty for Christmas – will find something to love in it.

Bad Company airs at 8.15pm on Sundays on the ABC and streams on ABC iview.

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