This article is by Michael Idato from Fairfax Media here:

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/homemade-is-where-the-heart-is-20130327-2gsux.html

A sharp team is wielding a powerful comedic weapon.

The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, Wednesday, ABC1, 9pm.
Michael Idato – SMH – March 28, 2013

Sketch comedy is television’s difficult middle child. Its bigger siblings – the sitcoms –
are more confident, and tend to overachieve. Its younger siblings – the quirkier
programs loved by the ABC and SBS – get more attention and are given more
freedom.Awkward, uncertain commercial sketch is wedged in the middle like Jan Brady
sitting by the phone waiting for George Glass to call. It has historically had the
toughest time finding its space in the TV schedule. And finding an audience to love it.
The successes are fewer than the failures, but Jungleboys, the production company
behind A Moody Christmas, is diving into the genre head first with the result The
Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting.

The Jungleboys (from left) Trent O’Donnell, Jason Burrows and Phil Lloyd.
”Phil [Lloyd] and I have always wanted to do a sketch comedy. We have always
scribbled down ideas for it,” director Trent O’Donnell says. ”It’s just taken this long
to come around. And so many shows didn’t do well that it scares people away.”
Lloyd, whose body of acting work – Review with Myles Barlow and At Home with
Julia, in which he played ”first bloke” Tim Mathieson – makes him a more
recognisable face, agrees. ”Commercial TV is very risk-averse when it comes to
comedy, and there are examples of where they have [been] stung by it,” he says. ”The
reality is they are more practised at making drama.”

The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, commissioned by the ABC for
ABC1, will have considerably more room to breathe. It stars Patrick Brammall,
Damon Herriman, Robin McLeavy, Eliza Logan and Dave Eastgate. Jungleboys’
O’Donnell, Lloyd and Jason Burrows describe the series as ”random, ridiculous and
surreal”.

The first episode has all the signs it will make its mark. It delivers a mixture of the
staples – dinner parties gone awry, office politics – but weaves into them barbed
punchlines about contemporary politics and social mores. Given a choice between
silly and unsettling, it reaches for the latter.

When not making edgy comedies, however, Jungleboys is also one of the five top
advertising production companies in Australia, industry blog Campaign Brief says.
TV commercials are its ”day job”.

The blend of the two worlds, and the creative freedom that one inadvertently bestows
on the other, is what makes the Jungleboys partnership so intriguing.What is clear is that the business model for making television is changing, just as it
was when the Working Dog team pioneered using hand-held DV cameras to film
Frontline.

The company’s core business, for the moment, is filming TV commercials, a more
lucrative line than critically acclaimed comedies. ”The idea is to build up the longform TV side of the business so that it can become a very profitable thing as well,”
says Burrows, who runs the commercial side. ”Producing shows that have
international appeal is key to doing that.”

Review with Myles Barlow, created by Lloyd and O’Donnell, was a critical triumph. It
aired on ABC2, got rave reviews and was snapped up for the American market by the
Comedy Channel. The American version, Review with Forrest MacNeil, will launch
later in 2013.

That was followed by A Moody Christmas, produced with Burrows, which was
another success. It screened on ABC1, with a second series expected to follow. It also
generated international interest, but Jungleboys held it back from sale to bundle it
with the second series, a move that will, ultimately, increase its value.
In the US, the company is repped by Mosaic, home of Judd Apatow and Will Ferrell’s
production companies. In Australia, meanwhile, it has evolved into something of an
artistic collective.

Under its umbrella is an eclectic jumble of personalities: feature film director Wayne
Blair, Bondi Hipsters Connor and Christiaan van Vuuren and Tropfest-winning
writer-director Abe Forsythe. ”It’s about building up a collaborative culture of people
who don’t have such great egos that they accept great ideas can come from other
people,” Burrows says.

As for the future, anything is possible. Even a sitcom. ”We certainly are open to that,
if an idea or character is that strong.”

UCLA/Writers Guild of America Report:

by Jonathan Handel – Hollywood Reporter – 26 March 2013

Despite some slow progress over the last decade, women and minorities remain
dramatically underrepresented on TV writing staffs, according to a UCLA/WGA West
report released Tuesday. The document – the 2013 WGAW TV Staffing Report – was prepared for the WGAW by Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociologist who is director of the
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

The numbers are daunting: minorities are underrepresented on TV staffs by a factor
of 2 to 1 in comparison to their percentage of the population. Among executive
producers, women are underrepresented by 2 to 1 and minorities by 5 to 1.
“In the Hollywood entertainment industry, unfortunately, there has all too often
existed a disconnect between the writers hired to tell the stories and an America
that’s increasingly diverse with each passing day,” Hunt said.

The report looked at 190 shows on 28 broadcast and cable networks, employing 1,722 writers. “We can’t tell the whole story if only half of us write it,” said WGA West
president Christopher Keyser at a morning event at which the report was presented.
There are signs of progress, albeit slow. Minority representation doubled over the
last decade (2011-12 season compared with 1999-2000). But during that same
period, female representation inched up a mere 5% – a rate of increase so sluggish
that parity of men won’t be achieved for another 42 years unless faster progress is
made.

Hunt remarked that he had considered subtitling the report “Pockets of Promise,
Minimal Progress.” The report also looked at age-related issues, and found that for the first time, writers over 40 have over 50% of all staff positions. On the other hand, nearly a third of shows had no writers over 50, suggesting a sharp drop-off occurs.

The report didn’t look at LGBT issues because of the difficulty of obtaining data, said
Hunt.

Rutgers business school professor Nancy DiTomaso, author of the new book The
American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, told The Hollywood
Reporter that the project-based and who-knows-who nature of the entertainment
industry accentuates the difficulty that diverse writers have in breaking into
established networks.

“It is not just a friendship network, but one that is often based on neighborhood,
race/ethnic or religious groups, people who went to the same school, attend the same
church, who are associated with the same institutions and so on,” she said. “The
impact of networking in this field and others is the perpetuation of inequality and
often the opportunity for some people to build skills that others are denied.”
As Hunt said, entertainment is “a very relationship-oriented business.” DiTomaso
was not involved in the UCLA/WGA research.

One attempt to change the dynamic is the WGAW Writer Access Project, which
attempts to open doors for diverse writers by identifying diverse writers with television staffing experience and making samples of their work available to
showrunners, producers, executives, agents and managers.