Melbourne Comedy Fest Faves Score ABC Sketch Series

New sketch comedy show Fancy Boy has commenced production in Melbourne this week, and is due to premiere on the ABC in Australia and Seeso in the USA later this year.

Fancy Boy originated as a live show, with common words used to describe the performance including colourful descriptors such as "crude", "disturbing" and "offensive" (so, naturally, we gave it five stars at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2015). The television adaptation keeps it up, finding comedy in the stranger corners of suburbia: in the couple whose communication breakdown leads to a kidnap; in the artist who loses everything over his obsession with fart sounds; in the mum who struggles to accept her missing teen back into the family, mainly because he returns with a full beard and a foreign accent.

ABC Head of Entertainment Jon Casimir said in a statement: "Fancy Boy made their name as a transgressive and weird live act, willing to go to places others wouldn't. But what really marks their work is not just the boldness of their intent, it's the heart and insight that underpins it. Fancy Boy sketches make you laugh but surprisingly, they also make you feel."

Head of US streaming comedy channel Seeso, Evan Shapiro (NBCUniversal), concurred: "The Fancy Boys are the freshest set of sketch voices I've seen in a long time — they are a whole new level of weird, even by Australian standards."

The show introduces five fresh faces to sketch comedy — John Campbell, Stuart Daulman, Greg Larsen, Henry Stone and Jonathan Schuster — joined by award-winning comedian Anne Edmonds.

Fancy Boy is produced by Nicole Minchin, series produced by Declan Fay, executive produced by Stuart Menzies and directed by Colin Cairnes.

Interestingly, this won't be the first time Fancy Boy makes a transition to broadcast media — it enjoyed a small run back in 2014 as a three-part sketch show as part of the ABC's Fresh Blood iView initiative. See a clip from that inaugural stint below.