The Weekly review: toothless satire lacks bite

Here’s a fun question to ponder: what is the future of Australian culture? With increasingly heavy-handed pressure from governments and lobby groups looking to stifle anything cultural that could be called controversial, and with existing arts festivals being muzzled or collapsing under the pressure to conform, what kind of arts will the rich and powerful accept? What bland, insipid, empty-headed blather will satisfy those who hold the purse strings?

Fortunately, we have an example close at hand: welcome to The Weekly.

The Weekly: world class satire it’s not

When The Weekly began close to a decade ago, the ABC had two other regular satirical news programs on the air: Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, and the short interviews conducted weekly by the late John Clarke and Bryan Dawe. It’s no exaggeration to say both those shows were world class comedy; The Weekly, even on a good day, not so much.

Fortunately for The Weekly, when the Albanese Government was elected in 2022 the ABC quietly but promptly axed all their other satirical programming. Micallef went of his own accord; Mark Humphries’ segments on 7.30, and Sammy J’s work in the former Clarke & Dawe timeslot were both canned and not replaced.

As of 2026, aside from an upcoming one-off special hosted by Tony Armstrong, The Weekly (now in its 12th season) is all there is. As the ABC’s own TV guide listing says, it is ‘the best, and only, satirical news show on the ABC’.

Right from the opening sketch, the toothless tone is set. No doubt there are plenty of ways to make a strong point about the teen social media ban: a musical number extolling the virtues of television as a replacement isn’t one of them. Does anyone think teenagers are watching the ABC? Sure, that was the joke, but talking about television only having five channels? Porn on SBS? These jokes are old enough to buy beer.

The Weekly: low hanging fruit

It’s not that The Weekly goes for low hanging fruit, it’s that the fruit is already rotting on the ground and covered with ants. When your big comedic insight into the announcement of a Royal Commission into the Bondi attack is that Sam Newman has a podcast on which he talks to neo-Nazis, maybe it’s time to dig a little deeper.

So what else is there? Two of the main news stories were on overseas sport, a subject almost as satirically cutting as ‘cute animal does something adorable’. Then regular commentator Andy Zaltzman was on to talk about The Ashes, just in case you were worried sport wasn’t being covered enough. Even when an actual news story was reported on – in this case, X’s new version of Grok that’s being used to create sexual images of children – the punchline was… oh look, it’s Sam Newman again.

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As the listing says, The Weekly is a satirical news show. So news-wise, was there coverage of the meltdown and mass exodus at Adelaide Writer’s Week? The bushfires sweeping Victoria? The shooting in the USA by an ICE agent of an unarmed mother driving her car? Well, no, not that kind of news. There was a story on the US Department of Health dropping the food pyramid though. The only joke The Weekly added to the story? A picture of a Dorito corn chip. Well, it is pyramid shaped, c’mon.

At least that was an actual joke. These days Pickering’s gags are often just observations; it’s amazing just how many times his comments breaking up a segment are literally just restating an element of the news story. No wonder the audience broke into applause at a reference to a 30 year old commercial (‘Peaches Mango Peaches’): maybe that opening segment about the ABC’s ancient audience was more cutting than it seemed.

The Weekly: guests’ segments aim higher

It’s not like The Weekly can’t aim higher. Rhys Nicholson’s segment on Pornhub’s year in review report managed to turn a bunch of wank jokes into something actually insightful – that behind closed doors, people are more accepting of (or just curious about) diversity than you might think. Plus it had a punchline that wasn’t about Sam Newman. Nicholson’s been the best thing on The Weekly for years; giving them a solo show is long overdue.

But if The Weekly can do better with individual segments (Scout Boxall talking about giving up on New Year’s Resolutions also had its moments), why is everything in between so consistently lacklustre? There was a segment this week that was basically ‘celebrity puff pieces we found on News Dot Com’, which is the kind of thing you get the intern to do and then you fire the intern because they’ve handed in something that’s just an ad for News Dot Com.

Making fun of politicians, mocking scandals, exposing hypocrisy, being funny: who needs that when you can make a joke about Rose Byrne’s husband that is literally just putting to air her awards speech? For decades the ABC broadcast some of the sharpest satire in the country. Now all that’s left is Charlie Pickering grimacing at old footage of Sam Newman on a program that exists solely so management isn’t asked any awkward questions about whatever happened to satire on the ABC.

The Weekly airs weekly on the ABC at 8.30pm Wednesdays, and is also available on ABC iview.

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