The Weekly's Big Reunion!

Co-starring good friends Tom Gleeson and Kitty Flanagan, The Weekly — which takes the faux-cynical news cycle analysis perfected by Colbert, Stewart et al and doses it liberally with Micallef absurdity — won both a strong following and an AACTA Award for Best Light Entertainment Television Series, enough to get a green light for a second season.

"We're hoping that Season Two will be just as steep a learning curve because we always just want to make the show better in any way that we can."

"The team's feeling really excited about the season, and I've just got to say that this team is the best bunch of people that I've ever worked with," Pickering beams. "From top to bottom, left to right, every single person is awesome, so after being away from each other it actually fells great to be back working. It's like getting the band back together! This is our big reunion, and everyone has used the break to come up with new ideas — there's just lots of great ideas flying around and that's just exciting."

Pickering says his team enjoyed the first season immensely, and learned plenty in the process. "It was a lot of work — a new show is a lot of work — but it was a lot of fun," he reflects. "Season One was a very steep learning curve, we had a lot to learn. We just had to figure out how to make the show starting from scratch and building the team and the show from the ground up — it's like building a contraption, and hoping that it works — but by the end of Season One it felt like we knew what we were doing. But we're hoping that Season Two will be just as steep a learning curve because we always just want to make the show better in any way that we can."

In Season One The Weekly found a perfect balance between the silly and the cerebral, a trait they plan to continue. "The balance of serious and funny doesn't happen by accident — you have to do things consciously," he explains. "We had a few times last year where I think we stepped into some pretty tricky territory and did it ok. When we covered victim blaming around rape — doing jokes on that subject is very difficult — and then we finished with a Motown musical number about 'not raping'. There's risk in mixing something as serious as that with entertainment, but I do also think that that is the best way to talk about anything. If you just sit down and go, 'I'm serious now and I'm just going to talk about some serious things,' I don't find that as engaging, and I do think that people enjoy learning new things in an entertaining way."