Review – Outland – Episode 3

Outland – ABC1 – 9:30pm Wednesday – AUS
Episode 3: Andy

The ratings for Outland took another dive last week with the second episode drawing only 210,000 viewers which is less than half the number of viewers watching Gordon Street Tonight directly before it. Those numbers are pretty disastrous and highlight one or two things about this show. The first is that the ABC are doing a terrible job of convincing people to watch and the second is that Outland belongs on ABC2 where a tiny audience can just be referred to as a ‘loyal audience’. This third episode of the series was a step back from last week, which I found really charming and funny; this week we got a rubber penis flying through the air and not much else.

This time out the weekly sci-fi meeting was held at Andy’s place and the gang all pop round to discover his house is an old church that he’s converted into a sex dungeon. They find Andy bound and gagged to the ceiling and the episode revolves around them trying to get him down. Oddly Outland never finds anything funny to do with Andy being tied to the ceiling beyond how calm Andy is about the whole situation. The episode also has Max freaking out because he has to warn Toby about Toby’s two-timing new boyfriend. This was sitcom 101 storytelling and again the show never found a funny way to approach the situation and just had Fab acting like a bitch and Max hyperventilating a lot, which is becoming tiring.

Now, while I found very little of this episode funny, in order to fix its problems the show needs to sharpen the writing and find its heart again. What worked so well about last week is that it showed why these characters might want to spend time with each other – this episode lacked that. You’ll notice my problem with the show isn’t that it needs a straight character, which was The Age critic Jim Schembri’s solution to Outland’s failings. Before we get into this we have to acknowledge that Jim Schembri is basically an internet troll who just happens to write for a big newspaper and get paid to bait readers into knee-jerk reactions to his ‘reviews’, but for the fun of it let’s take the bait on his dopey Outland review, which suggests that the problem with Outland is that it’s “too gay” and that it is “badly in need of a straight man – both figuratively and literally”.

As Australian Tumbleweeds have already quite rightly pointed out there is a ‘straight man’ in the cast in the form of Max, I’d add to that that Christine Anu’s Rae acts a ‘straight man’ as well seeing as she always tries to keep control of the crazy. While I agree with Schembri that this episode was lifeless, I disagree that it was because there were too many gay jokes and not enough sci-fi references. Outland certainly fails to do much of anything with its sci-fi premise – when Max and Fab entered Andy’s house it felt like the show was going to do an X-Files parody but then nothing eventuated; the show continues to miss opportunities like that one. Yes, Outland doesn’t make many sci-fi jokes and the sci-fi jokes it does make seem to always miss the mark but it’s not because the show is “too gay-centric”, as Schembri puts it.

Outland is a show about gay characters and even though I haven’t liked two out of the three episodes I still found it refreshing that the series only features gay characters. The idea that a show about homosexuals could have too many homosexuals is just so absurd. I don’t think Schembri’s argument is homophobic but it’s certainly nonsensical. Basically he boils down the problem with Outland to “with all of the characters batting for the same team, the comic pot is too calm; there is simply not enough conflict to generate enough fizz or energy” which seems especially strange considering that all of the characters ARE different – the only trait they share with each other is that they are gay. They may just be a bunch of stereotypes but each of them is a DIFFERENT stereotype.

Schembri defends his review by saying “If a sitcom suffers from having a cast that’s too white, then you can complain that the show is too white, surely.” This is true, except the difference between complaining that a show is ‘too white’ and a show is ‘too gay’ is that television has an abundance of straight white characters. Saying a show is ‘too gay’ isn’t the same as saying that it’s ‘too white’, it’s the same as saying it’s ‘too black’. How is Schembri going to cope with the ABC’s upcoming all-Indigenous drama series Redfern Now if it isn’t so great? Is he going to suggest that it needs more white people to make it better and that the show is ‘too black-centric’?

Outland exists in part as a response to how straight and white the rest of the television landscape is – this show would not exist if gay characters appeared on more television shows. To say ‘oh this one show about this one minority group shows too much of that minority group’ is incredibly ignorant. While I agree with Schembri that this episode of the show isn’t all that funny it certainly isn’t because of the sexual orientation of the characters, it is because the writers failed this week to do anything funny with those characters. It’s easy to ignore Schembri because he only wrote this review to provoke people into reacting, just like I am right now, because page views and comments means that he gets to keep his job but sadly this is just another pathetic example of what passes for television criticism in The Age these days.

Adding a straight character to the mix wouldn’t have made this episode of Outland any funnier – they just need cleverer dialogue and better comedic pay-offs rather than simply having a rubber penis flying through the air. It also felt that even though the characters deepened just a little bit in Episode 2 they reverted back to their one-joke character descriptions this week; Fab is being bitchy, Max is freaking out, Andy’s being completely relaxed about his absurd sex life and that’s it. My hope is that the rest of the season is more like Episode 2 and less like this episode because while I like these actors the show doesn’t really know what to do with them.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad

This review is part of Change The Channel’s episode by episode coverage of Outland. The full list of episode reviews can be found under Series.