The last time Richard Gadd was here he bombed. Now he's a superstar

The Age

3 days ago

The last time Richard Gadd was in Australia, it didn't go so well. 'I got absolutely panned,' says the creator of Netflix smash Baby Reindeer. 'It was 2017, I was at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and some of the reviews were savage.'
Writing for this masthead, reviewer Craig Platt gave his show Monkey See, Monkey Do two-and-a-half stars, noting it was 'not really a comedy', but rather 'performance as therapy'.
Some other reviews were kinder, some a lot more savage.
'We got the full scorecard,' says Gadd, who has just finished shooting his new series, Half Man, for the BBC and HBO (in Australia, it will air on Stan*).
'I actually got five, four, three, two, and one [stars], so we put the full rainbow of reviews on the posters, and said 'come down, make up your own mind'. And we started to actually sell tickets.'
Gadd has, of course, gone on to master the art of transforming negative experiences into gold. His series – which was in part based on Monkey See, Monkey Do – was the TV sensation of 2024, won him three Emmys, and sparked enormous controversy. It has also embroiled Netflix in a $US170 million lawsuit about which he can say nothing.
Now he's in Australia for the Future Vision television summit at Melbourne's ACMI, alongside fellow international guests Sally Wainwright (creator of Happy Valley) and Soo Hugh (Pachinko) and a vast array of local talent (Harriet Dyer of Colin From Accounts, The Kates of Deadloch, uberproducers Tony Ayres and Bruna Papandrea, and many others).
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The three-day event is open to the public on Monday, before switching to an industry-only gabfest for the other two days, in which the discussion will focus on how Australia can grab a sustainable piece of the global TV action.
The theme is 'Optimism', but Hugh says there's precious little of that among the creatives she knows in the States right now.
'Everyone's so depressed because they realise the market has turned and the industry is changing, and these shows that took so much time and love to make would never sell any more. And there's something a little heartbreaking about knowing that.'
Apple commissioned Pachinko, a multi-generational saga set in Korea, Japan and the US, seven years ago. If she tried to pitch it now, she says with absolute conviction, 'It would never sell'.
Why? 'I think [TV commissioners] are like, 'Oh, the audience doesn't want anything difficult'.' But the success of shows like Baby Reindeer and Adolescence suggests otherwise.
For Wainwright – who has just finished editing her new series, Riot Women, 'about five menopausal women who form a sort of ad-hoc punk rock band' – the problem is simple. 'There's too much content and it's pretty homogenous, and a lot of it is very silly.'
The ones that stand out, she says, 'are incredibly well written. There are things that get through that are difficult and challenging.'
Her Happy Valley is a crime drama, one of the most tried and tested genres on TV. But it is also exceptionally well-written and acted, with an incredibly strong sense of place. And that's what she loves about Deadloch, the show that is, to some degree, why she has come to Australia (as soon as she's done at the summit, she's off to Tasmania, to visit the town in which the first season was set).
'Police procedurals can be very dark and intense and intelligent, or they can be – in England anyway – very lightweight and a bit silly,' she says. 'What I thought was very clever about Deadloch was the way it mixed the two.
'I think you can be dark and funny at the same time. However dark life is, people try to be funny. So if you can mix the two, that's gold dust.'
Gadd's advice to Australians wanting to find an international audience is simple: stay true to yourself and your culture, while tapping into the things that bind us all, no matter where we live.
'If you look at Parasite, nobody would have expected a Korean film about the societal divide to have such international renown,' he says. 'But aside from being a fantastically original piece of art, it also tapped into so much humanity – poverty, desire, struggle, a craving for a better life – and in such a unique way too.'
His own show was deemed similarly unique. But 'the themes are still universal: loneliness, shame, the need for connection, coming to terms with the past.
'I think a show can be shot anywhere and be a success,' he adds, 'as long as it taps into the human condition in unique and interesting ways.'