I’d never watched Wilfred — the home-grown SBS TV comedy series “about a woman, her new boyfriend and her old dog”. I’d heard it was funny but you know how it is. Too many TV show box sets, not enough time.
The Herald Sun decided to do its bit to promote Wilfred at the weekend by reporting that the federal and state taxpayer-funded show featured “bong smoking … profanity, full-frontal nudity and jokes about rape”. Nudity on SBS? Say it ain’t so!
Go-to guy for indignant moral outrage, Family First Senator Steve Fielding, slammed Wilfred because he didn’t “think taxpayers’ money should be used to finance film projects that display acts of bestiality”. What kind of sick and twisted show was this? Now I had to watch it.
I’d missed the first couple of episodes of series 2 that had aired this month but thankfully they’re available to view on SBS’s website. Someone ought to do something about that. There should be a filter or something to stop people watching bestiality online. Except there wasn’t any. Just an actor (Jason Gann) in a dog suit pretending to root — there isn’t much romance in the animal kingdom — a teddy bear during an amusing Aussie comedy about Wilfred (Gann as the titular dog) trying to rid his owner Sarah (Cindy Waddingham) of her boyfriend Adam (Adam Zwar) since he was quite happy before Adam showed up. And that was about it.
Sure, some of the swearing may put wowsers offside but Wilfred is actually less offensive than the turgid and misogynist likes of US comedy import Two And A Half Men. (But hey, who am I to judge — the public gets what the public wants.)
You can catch up on Wilfred online here and watch the third episode of series 2 on SBS tonight at 10pm.
Good article. Interestingly I posted about this on the Herald Sun website on the weekend, but my post was not accepted – probably because I labelled this as yet another bit of confected tabloid outrage, with a comment from the ususal suspects. Wilfred is never going to be as popular as the nonsense on the commercials, but is there something wrong with that?
Good article -I think the earthworm longs for the days when programming consisted of shows like little house on the prarie, and highway to heaven, perhaps even something as cutting edge as the loveboat.
I really enjoy the show. Makes a change from reading the Womens Weekly and New Idea.
I watched some of the first series and on Crikey’s recommendation watched again last night – from what I could see of last night’s episode (second part of a 2-parter!) it is better than series 1. Very original idea quite well implemented, and with a few more jokes it would be a classic.
Dunno about reducing Two And A Half Men to being “turgid and misogynist”, but I suppose it’s beside the point.
Wilfred is the perfect example of the perils of fanning-out a perfectly good short film idea into a series; it starts to get awfully thin. I have my fill of it after a single promo ad. (I did try to watch a whole episode once, but found myself pulling threads from my clothing within 5 minutes.)