Spoiler: Chris Lilley’s ‘Lunatics’ Is Not Worth Your Time

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the later the powers that behold a reviewer to an embargo, the lower the quality of the material under embargo. Reviews of Chris Lilley’s new Netflix comedy Lunatics have been embargoed until the very minute the show premieres on the streaming service.

There’s a reason.

Lilley has never been my particular cup of tea. I’m not a fan of the ‘make you cringe, then make you feel’ approach he tends to take in telling the stories of his characters, who strike me as being either immature and unformed (Ja’mie King, Jonah Takalua), horribly self-obsessed (Mr G) or harmless but pathetic (too many to count). And, yes, there’s a chance I’m missing some of the shading or nuance Lilley might bring to his creations and their story arcs but I find he paints in such broad strokes that any meaning or message isn’t too hard to discern. Generally, that message is that there’s more to any story that what you see on the surface, and if you really get to know someone, you’ll find hidden depths and maybe, just maybe, a reason to care about them.

I don’t have that long. My time on this planet is limited. The planet’s time is limited. And I’ll be fucked if I’m gonna wade through the muck and mire of Lunatics’ 10 episodes to see if the bulk of these people – especially the male ones – are worth a damn.

For mine, that’s Lilley’s biggest mistake this time around. There’s a good chance fans of his work may find the boorish behaviour and demeanour of characters like belligerent, blokey salesman Keith or crude, laddish real estate agent Quentin or teenage sex pest Gavin hilarious in an “OMG, I can’t believe he went there!” kind of way, and that viewers who consider themselves savvy will view these characters at the starting line of a journey that will force them to grow and learn and change for the better.

But if, a sizeable handful of episodes into the series, all I want to do is kick a hole in my screen so that I no longer have to hear Gavin talk about his dick or Quentin use the word ‘cunt’ to describe everything in his field of vision, it offers two possibilities: (1) My patience, attention span and cognitive abilities have diminished to alarming degrees, in which case I should seek some form of therapy, or (2) Chris Lilley’s long-game skills as a comic storyteller are faulty, perhaps FUBAR.

Maybe I have too much regard for myself, but I’m going with (2).

Despite what the previous 400 words have indicated, I’m not completely down on Lilley. As a performer, I think he’s exceptional – he slides under the skin of multiple people with amazing skill, finding small, subtle points of differentiation to vividly distinguish characters that initially appear like rehashes of previous creations.

Having said that, would I have preferred that he didn’t superimpose his head onto that of a naked woman for a scene showing the X-rated work history of Lunatics character Joyce, a former porn star now living a sad, reclusive life as an obsessive hoarder? Well, yeah, but that’s my problem, not yours. (It may well be yours too.)

The entire run of Lunatics was not made available to reviewers prior to its Good Friday premiere, so there’s a chance that Lilley may steer this particular ship true in later stages, and that there may in the end be an enlightening destination totally worth the troublesome journey. Shit, you may just find odd, offbeat, primitive or inappropriate characters piss-funny – in that case, have at it.

But Lunatics was not my bag, and not even because I think Lilley should stay in his lane when it comes to portraying people of different races and sexes. With that in mind, I know the whole ‘man of a thousand faces’ thing is the multi-hyphenate’s trademark as a performer, but I was of a mind that we were at least trying to give space in the storytelling arena to a thousand different, diverse faces these days. No, my issue with Lunatics is that it needed to give me some indication – even the tiniest, subtlest of hints – that it was worthwhile spending any time watching these characters go about their lives, that it would reveal something meaningful about the human condition…or at least make me fucking chuckle.

But it didn’t…and it didn’t.