HOW TO STAY MARRIED

Greg and Em Butler have been married fourteen years. They have two daughters, Chloe, who has just started school, and teenage Sophie. Greg is (perhaps overly) content in his management role with Births, Deaths and Marriages and Em has kept things (mostly) together on the home front since the children were born. It’s a good marriage, as marriages go. The children tolerate them, the sex is frequent enough and they have the domestic routine more or less down pat. Greg refers to the partnership as “Team Greg and Em” or “Team Grem” for short.

But change is on its way. With Chloe starting school, Em has decided to go back to work.  Greg is initially hesitant to disrupt the status quo, but when redundancies are offered at his job, he starts to wonder whether he’s really happy with things the way they are. When Greg’s brother Brad announces that he’s staying with them – for an unspecified period – after being dumped by his girlfriend, it’s clear there is more upheaval ahead.

HOW TO STAY MARRIED is an eight-part comedy series about staying together when romance has made way for routine and change disturbs the peace inside a marriage. The series takes a refreshingly honest look at the problems that can befall even a good marriage. The characters are magnets for trouble with an endearing ability to dig themselves deeper into the very problems they are trying to avoid. The series mixes big subjects – raising children, boredom, guilt, fertility, temptation, dreams, ambition and the need for purpose – with the funny and recognizable minutiae of married life.

PHOTOS

SUPERWOG

Superwog, the first original scripted series to air on ABC COMEDY, follows the often misunderstood, dysfunctional Superwog family as they struggle to navigate life in Australian heartland suburbia. Superwog is a flawed teenager, obsessed with girls and fast food, who is enrolled in a prestigious private school. His misadventures with best friend Johnny often cause Superwog’s primitive, highly-strung father extreme stress as he battles to keep his delusional, but fiercely loyal wife happy.

Developed over eight years by Theodore and Nathan Saidden, the Superwog YouTube channel has garnered an extraordinary 185+ million YouTube views and over 905k subscribers, cementing their spot amongst Australia’s most watched YouTube comedy creators.

The Superwog pilot, funded by Screen Australia and YouTube as part of the Skip Ahead initiative, was the highest trending YouTube video in Australia last year, with over 3.5 million views (90% Australian based) and the most watched piece of content in the country in 2017.

Produced by Princess Pictures, the full series will continue on from The Superwog pilot with six brand new half-hour episodes premiering weekly on the Superwog YouTube channel at the same time as ABC COMEDY.

PHOTOS

The Kununurra Kid

An 8-part, fly-on-the-wall documentary series following Tom Forrest, a young Aussie who jumps in his van and ventures into the unknown to uncover the mystery of his roots and figure out his future.

PHOTOS

WRONG KIND OF BLACK

Based on the life and stories of Boori Monty Pryor, Wrong Kind of Black is an indigenous narrative comedy-drama that brings a rare perspective to a tumultuous era in Australia’s history.

From the crocs and cops of 1960s Queensland, to the blood-splattered dance floors of Melbourne’s 1970s nightclubs, Monty (played by Clarence Ryan) and his younger brother Paul (Aaron McGrath) reveal the inspiring and sometimes heartbreaking journey of growing up ‘the wrong kind of black’.

At the height of the ’70s disco inferno, Monty is Melbourne’s hottest DJ dubbed “The Black Superman”, he and Paul rub shoulders with a motley crew of Russian mobsters and Aussie yobbos alike. The ‘fro and flares seem like worlds away from their childhood on remote Palm Island – but beneath the surface not much has changed. Aboriginal culture is still not welcome in white society, and the price of its preservation can be deadly. As tensions rise and trouble follows, Monty decides to take his future into his own hands and stand against the tide of Australian racism.

 

My Year 7 Life

The most highly anticipated year of a student’s life is also the one that can change the course of their adult psychology forever – the transition into Year 7. Psychologists have discovered that the way we navigate the change from Top Dog to Small Fish affects how successfully we navigate our entire lives, making the finding of new friends, dealing with new teachers and surviving puberty critically important.

In My Year 7 Life, 16 diverse kids from around the country were given cameras to document their transition from primary school to high school. The series goes straight to the source, getting first-hand accounts from the kids as they navigate the monumental changes taking place during their first year of high school. Through their experiences, we discover just how much homework parents and carers have to do to help the kids relieve the stress and anxiety around a year that everyone remembers as one of the hardest at high school.

 

 

The Slot

An original Foxtel series, The Slot presents emerging and experimental short form comedy from Australia’s most successful online comedy content creators.

Each episode follows hosts Christiaan Van Vuuren (Bondi Hipsters) and Adele Vuko (Skit Box), and the unorthodox encounters they conjure with this new wave of Australian viral classics.

Featuring SketchShe, Troy Kinne, RackaRacka, Aunty Donna, Skit Box, Michael Cusack, Superwog, Michael Shanks, Bondi Hipsters and Natalie Tran – no comedic boundary is left untouched.

Between them they’ve amassed billions of views with their captivating, weird, hilarious and at times absurd comedy never before seen on TV. They’re not asking permission, they’ve rewritten the rulebook.

Click here to watch The Slot 

PHOTOS

My Year 12 Life

At the start of 2016, Princess Pictures gave cameras to a diverse group of 14 teenagers across Australia to film the most dramatic twelve months of their lives – Year 12. The resulting self executed ‘vlogumentary’ series is emotional, often hilarious and full of suspense – what will their number be and what do they go through to get there?

There were no film crews, no producers on the ground; just 14 teenagers telling their own stories to their own cameras in their own way. They have documented the raw drama of their final year of school, and remind us how important Year 12 is to those living through it, what the future looks like at 18, and how that’s changed over the years. The series aims to create a national conversation about the pressures of life in Year 12.

ABC ME – Monday to Wednesday at 7.30pm from Monday, February 20
ABC – Sundays at 6.30pm from Sunday, February 26
ABC iview and ABC ME app – will house all full episodes as catch-up from February 20 as well as over 400 pieces of additional content. The additional content will be live from February 10 as an introduction to the 14 students
ABC ME YouTube – will also be used to distribute My Year 12 Life to the widest possible Australian audience
 

JOHN KASSAB

JOHN KASSAB‘s career in film launched in 2009 as the sound designer of Shaun Tan’s Oscar Winning animation The Lost Thing and Ariel Kleiman’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning short film Deeper Than Yesterday. Later that year, John received a Winston Churchill Fellowship and eventually relocated overseas where he has produced films in Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Massachusetts, Atlanta and London.

John’s productions have collectively received over 40 international awards and nominations, playing at such festivals as Sundance, SXSW,Telluride and Fantasia. In 2014, John released the acclaimed documentary 12 O’Clock Boys which was later adapted to HBO’s Charm City Kings by producers Will and Jada Pinket-Smith. In 2015 John made his directorial debut with the web series Renaissance Woman which was written and performed by comedian Hannah Gadsby.

John returned to Australia in 2017 where he served a term as president of diversity film education and outreach organisation Cinespace, Inc. before joining Princess Pictures as a producer in 2021. In 2020 and 2021, John received development funding for his projects from Screen Australia. John’s recent projects include the forthcoming feature documentary Clutch Gang (Writer, Director), and TV shows Last Days Of The Space Age (Disney; Assistant Producer), GEM (Amazon Prime; Associate Producer) and Galaxy Girl (ABC; Associate Producer).

Ali Bird

Ali Bird is a commercial lawyer specialising in media and entertainment law. Her expertise includes commercial contracts, dispute resolution, consumer law, procurement and corporate governance, with a particular interest in helping creatives maximise the value of their intellectual property.

Ali’s extensive industry experience includes seven years as Film Victoria’s in-house legal counsel, two years with ITV London as in-house legal counsel and recently as in-house legal counsel at Guesswork Pictures and Token. Ali also runs her own sole practice law firm, Ali Bird Legal. She has overseen complex production and financing arrangements, licensing agreements and investment deals. 

Throughout, Ali has maintained strong ties to the creative community. She served as a board member for City of Melbourne’s Music Strategy Advisory Committee for four years and Board Secretary of Melbourne’s Schoolhouse Studios for three years. Ali is also the co-founder of Real Life, a collective that encourages real-life connections to mentor, support and learn.

How To Life

In an exciting, first-time collaboration, Australian production companies Radio Karate (Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year) and Princess Pictures (It’s a Date) have joined forces with UK company Objective Fiction (Peep Show, Toast of London) to produce a brand new comedy Blap for Channel 4.

Written and created by Ryan Shelton (Rove, The Wrong Girl, Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year), HOW TO LIFE is a 3-part short form web comedy series that follows Ryan as he turns his unusual, everyday life experiences into even unusualer life lessons (How to Lie, How to French Kiss and How to Escape Boring Conversations). It’s a series that explores what might happen if one egotistical know-it-all turned his bizarre, everyday life-experiences into a series of spontaneous and idiotic How To lessons.

Playing a heightened version of himself, comedian Ryan Shelton stars as the host and protagonist in How to Life; a fast-moving hybrid of narrative, sketch and surrealism, featuring regular appearances from a number of familiar faces (including Gina Riley, Hamish Blake, Pia Miranda) in fun, unfamiliar roles.

It is directed by Tim Bartley, produced by Laura Waters, Andrea Denholm, Tim Bartley and Ryan Shelton, and from Objective Fiction, executive produced by Ben Farrell and produced by Kelly McGolpin.