This was published 7 years ago
For Ronny Chieng sardonic one-liners trump obstacles, every time
The biggest problem facing Ronny Chieng: International Student is also its selling point. The stand-up comic turned senior correspondent for the influential American news satire series The Daily Show has a stinging retort for every situation that his aggressively quizzical eyebrows take in. On The Daily Show, where it's his job to speak sardonic truth to power, that's an essential quality, but on his current ABC sitcom it actually proves limiting.
Ronny Chieng International Student actually suffers by playing to its star's strengths.
As Ronny Chieng, a young Malaysian student starting a law degree at Melbourne University, Chieng is essentially playing himself: in 2009 he relocated to Melbourne University's Trinity College, eventually obtaining law and commerce degrees. The fictional Ronny is good-hearted but acerbic, loyal but exasperated, and instead of fight or flight instincts he has a tendency to inveigle or irritate. As soon as he meets someone and there's a hint of friction, the perfect one-liners start.
"How do you look like Prince Harry and Prince Williams at the same time?" he asks a member of an entitled clique in the pilot, and there are times that Chieng's comic instincts just don't serve his character, or the story, that well. It's one thing to drag Fox News for racism, as Chieng famously did on The Daily Show, but watching Ronny dispassionately lay into the pompous or the petty can become repetitive.
As a backdrop, Ronny's residence International House college, is oddly inert. The show is meant to reveal a little seen aspect of life, which is the experience of Asian students who come to Australia for tertiary degrees, but in flipping any cliches that exist about them the humour is simply derived from exploiting the cliches they have about Australia and their expatriate lives. Some of the stereotypes, such as Ronny's pushy, permanently calling mother (Linda Schragger), get taken to amusing extremes, but others just endure.
Last night's episode, capably directed by Jonathan Brough, was the best to date, moving past the obvious debt International Student has to a hugely influential campus sitcom in Dan Harmon's Community. Beneath the vintage 8-bit computer graphics and game structure was a snapshot of maddening bureaucracy. Ronny's friend and cultural translator, Asher (the terrific Molly Daniels), had to fake a relationship break-up to get an extension, and the evidence required – "open lip kiss on the mouth" pictures – was both mundane and loopy.
Chieng and co-creator Declan Fay are better with male jostling than the budding relationship between Ronny and Asher, although the tone sometimes feels more suited to Comedy Central, the parent network of The Daily Show and the co-financier of International Student, than the ABC. The sitcom was commissioned to series from half a dozen pilots the ABC showcased last year, and a willing international partner may have helped get it over the line.
Australian comedy has actually been a strong suit for the ABC in recent years, with Upper Middle Bogan, The Moodys and the flowering of Please Like Me, but Ronny Chieng: International Student is too tidy and pre-ordained to reach those heights. Playing to its star's strengths may actually have weakened it.
If you want a comedy that finds untoward humour in a cloistered milieu, it's difficult to go past Silicon Valley, the HBO sitcom whose fourth season is currently finding deadpan delirium and absurdist extremes on Foxtel. Proving that the meek will not inherit the earth, the experiences of gifted coder and struggling human Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) provide a distillation of how tech culture is capitalism on steroids and a social Ponzi scheme.
Co-created by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill), the show keeps you guessing whether the actions of its characters – rapacious venture capital bros, conceited programmers looking to make it big, and tech moguls who hire healthy young blood donors for regular transfusions – are a step ahead or actually a step behind the tech industry's rapidly evolving norms.
The signature program about a group of young men in California used to be Entourage, which kept up a steady stream of triumphs in Hollywood for a movie star and his cohorts. But to the north, in Silicon Valley, setbacks are constantly snatched from the jaws of victory. Richard and his crew still haven't got out of the house/incubator of the ludicrously amusing Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) they started in, but thankfully they keep revealing more about the brave new world around them.