Australian legal comedy lands in the UK

 Kitty Flanagan’s Australian sitcom Fisk is coming to the UK

The series, in which the stand-up plays the titular lawyer forced to take a job at a ‘shabby suburban firm specialising in wills’, has been snapped up by the ITVX streaming service.

First airing on the ABC network in 2021,  the comedy also stars comedian Aaron Chen alongside Julia Zemiro, Marty Sheargold, Glenn Butcher and John Gaden and is described as a ‘fast-paced workplace sitcom that taps into the everyday world of inheritances and squabbling relatives’.

Flanagan co-wrote the show with her musician sister Penny and co-directs with Tom Peterson. It has so far run for two series. Here's a primer that launched season two:

When it launched, she said: ‘This is the dream. My own show with all my favourite people both in front of the camera and behind it too. I’m thrilled to be making this in Melbourne for the ABC. We have such amazing, creative people in Australia, the more local content we can turn out, the better.’

Flanagan worked on the UK stand-up circuit around the turn of the millennium and starred in the second series of ITV’s The Sketch Show in 2003 alongside Lee Mack, Tim Vine, Karen Taylor and Jim Tavare. 

She more recently played one of the main characters in Australian sitcom Utopia, set in a quango responsible for major infrastructure projects, alongside fellow comics Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor.

Fisk is one of three antipodean sitcoms coming to the streaming service in April under the banner April Fools’ Comedy Collection.

The others are  Upper Middle Bogan – in which a posh doctor discovers she is adopted and actually comes from a rough-and-ready working class family – and New Zealand’s Kid Sister, created by and starring Simone Nathan as a Jewish woman dealing with millennial life.

Amy Poehler’s US sitcom Parks and Recreation is also coming to ITVX in April.

Published: 16 Feb 2023