Mining humour from middle-age haplessness

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This article was published 17/02/2024 (950 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I want to write this week on Fisk, an Australian comedy series currently available on Netflix. This is not because the show is trendy, topical, prestigious or popular.

Fisk is absolutely none of these things. In fact, that’s really the whole point of Fisk, both the title character and the show itself.

The two brief seasons of this idiosyncratic, oddly endearing show offer only low-stakes, low-key comedy centering on a slightly tired-looking middle-aged woman named Helen Tudor-Fisk (Kitty Flanagan, who also co-created the series). Fisk’s marriage and successful legal career in Sydney have imploded, bringing her back home to Melbourne, where she manages to scrape a job at a small suburban legal firm dealing with wills and probate.

Preternaturally placid senior partner Ray Gruber (Marty Sheargold) hires Helen because clients like to deal with “a more mature lady.” His sister Roz Gruber (Julia Zemiro), whose law license has been temporarily suspended, is currently exercising her inner control freak as the office manager. Then there’s the firm’s probate clerk, George Chen (Aaron Chen), a rather sweet gen-Z guy who likes to be called “The Webmaster.”

Much of the series’ deadpan humour comes from the cast’s crack timing and understated performances. The office-comedy setups are all purposely small-scale, with subplots involving Fisk’s perpetual search for a decent cup of coffee, an ongoing conflict over the key to the office toilet, a running feud about the location of a copy machine that throws off blast-furnace waves of heat. There’s also a lot of comedy involving the firm’s clients, since nothing brings out people’s fundamental weirdness like splitting an inheritance.

After hours, Fisk’s general haplessness continues, as she negotiates an affectionate but tetchy relationship with her father (John Gaden) and his fussy husband (Glenn Butcher), while trying to figure out some new living arrangements. Poor Fisk goes through three locations within the span of 12 episodes, and they all seem to involve random people wandering through her bedroom and kitchen.

In both her professional and personal life, Fisk remains somewhat baffled by the contemporary world. Here’s a partial list of things Fisk just doesn’t get: social hugging; toast that requires recipes; “influencing” as a job; grown men and women who celebrate their “birthday week;” HR procedures that involve emotional sharing; people who say “porte-cochère;” inspirational word art; Airbnb rules; wellness beverages.

Fisk is undeniably cranky, but the show manages to avoid the angry, aggrieved, “kids these days” vibe often found in curmudgeon-centric comedy. Here it’s more midlife confusion and the understandable grumpiness of a slightly uptight introvert forced by new circumstances to interact.

Fisk also remains sympathetic because, as a middle-aged woman, she’s so often overlooked — sometimes literally. (It doesn’t help that she wears nothing but three identical baggy suits of such a profoundly neutral brown that she occasionally blends into the background. “You’re like a furniture chameleon,” a character remarks when someone sits on Fisk by mistake.)

And while a lot of the comedy mines Fisk’s general mud-brown mopeyness — at one point posing the dampening question, “Oh, Helen, is this how you thought your life would turn out?” — the ultimate arc of the show is hopeful. By the second season, we see Fisk dutifully practising “friendly chit-chat” to the point she can actually make small talk. It turns out there’s enough emotional generosity and general goodwill in this comic universe to dent even Fisk’s protective coverings.

By the show’s end it even looks as if Fisk could be emulating a perkier prototype in the “single career gal” comedy canon, Mary Tyler Moore. Of course, Fisk is never going to throw her beret in the air, but we do get the feeling she’s going to make it after all.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca