Reviewing your life, one misadventure at a time

Emerging from the gelatinous quagmire of television comedy, Review with Myles Barlow has quickly proven itself one of the most entertaining and original Australian comedies to grace our television screens in recent years. Each half hour episode sees the earnest Myles responding to letters from a curious public by purposefully undergoing all manner of human experience – such as compulsive theft, voyeurism, acrimonious divorce, and sex with a male prostitute – before offering a critical analysis and star rating.

Myles’ ‘real world’ alter ego Phil Lloyd is in good spirits when we catch up, excitement at the impending airing of Review’s second season being eclipsed by his status as a newly fledged father – having a month-old baby “kind of puts everything else into total perspective,” he informs me.

As with so many great ideas, Review was born out of a booze-fuelled evening, shared by Lloyd and his long-time writing partner Trent O’Donnell. “I started giving things a rating” he explains, “[like] a stain on the carpet, I gave it a stupid analytical dissection and a star rating. In our drunken state we thought it was pretty funny and we thought, well wouldn’t it be funny if there was a guy who applied the whole arts critic rating framework to real life objects. So we started doing that then we took it to experiences and it snowballed from there.”

From these innocuous beginnings, the pair took the idea to Sydney-based Starchild Productions, developing four initial sketches under their own steam, before pitching a pilot to the various Australian broadcasters – Auntie being the only one savvy enough to take the bait.

Season one yielded paydirt, their efforts being rewarded with critical praise, a couple of AFI awards and the enduring buzz of word-of-mouth recommendations. Says Lloyd, “it’s always a worry, when you go out on a limb and do your own thing, whether everyone else will find it funny or not; so it was heartening to get a good response.”

As with shows such as The Office, The Thick of It or Summer Heights High, Review employs a fly-on-the-wall mockumentary style, generating laughs through the excruciating situations that Myles determinedly braves. Segments have an eerie tendency to end in acts of gross inebriation, unforgiveable duplicity, utter degradation, or some happy combination of all three.

“I’m a fan of all those comedies,” admits Lloyd. “We don’t try to emulate anything, but we are fans of that stuff so it probably comes through in our work. That’s certainly my favourite kind of comedy, that’s got some teeth and is sort of a bit awkward and uncomfortable, and that’s certainly what we try and do with Review. A lot of the feedback is that it’s sometimes really hard to watch – which we take as a compliment.”

Although Review is often as painful as funny, Lloyd is adamant that being ‘controversial’ for its own sake was never the goal. “If we go there it has to be justified, even if it’s very dark … Sometimes we can be gratuitous, but hopefully it’s funny because its gratuitous; it’s so ridiculously extreme and over-the-top that it’s stupid; it’s funny because he shouldn’t have gone that far.”

Pushing things to the limit might well be the duo’s unspoken mantra; it’s also the underlying principle of Myles Barlow’s elaborate metaphors, which meander off on tangents of their own. “They’re the hardest bit to write because they’re so verbose and absurd and often nonsensical” explains Lloyd, “they take a lot of work, we’ll write them and rewrite them over and over – it’s all about the language…

“[Also] there’s a certain absurdity about having an expert give something a rating out of five stars and telling you how good something is. I guess we play on that, that’s kind of the character of Myles, why he’s ridiculous at times and why his summations are…” he pauses to reflect, before admitting, “Maybe we are having a little dig there; not consciously though.”

In a case of art imitating life, season two features Myles starting his own cult (promising his disciples salvation through ‘the five stars towards enlightenment’), enjoying the dubious thrill of being a B-Grade celebrity, and acting out the popular fantasy of killing Kyle Sandilands. A more generous budget has also enabled Myles, already a man of the world, to become much more of a globetrotter, his critical dedication taking him to India, Europe and the United States.

While obviously pleased with the fruits of his labour, Lloyd is unassuming about the show’s future. “I think the concept holds up okay. I think it’ll hold up as long as he’s doing new and interesting things, but that’s the trick with anything I guess, coming up with new ideas that have enough legs to sustain it. I wouldn’t want to keep pushing it so that everyone gets tired of it.” With a show that hits the mark as consistently as Review, this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 371, July 19th 2010