How time off air has been kind to Tomorrow Tonight

It’s got a new set, new host, and a reworked format.

4 years after its first season on ABC, Tomorrow Tonight is back, ready to pose more hypotheticals and moral dilemmas for its panel.

Annabel Crabb, previously a panelist swaps chairs with former host Charlie Pickering, now joined by SBS foodie Adam Liaw.

Crabb describes the long gestation, partly as a result of the pandemic, as “a miraculous opportunity disguised as a frustration.”

“Even though it was annoying, it really gave us something that you hardly ever get in TV, which is months and months to really fine tune,” she tells TV Tonight.

“The show that we ended up shooting is actually super-different from what it would have been if we’ve gone ahead when it was first supposed to happen.

“We just sort of pared it back”

“We just sort of pared it back. Essentially the strength of the show, I think, is not the complicated facts & scenarios that we’d built in the first series but these huge, moral questions. We’re digging into them and watching smart, funny people, as their confident moral stances… start to disintegrate over the course of the half hour.”

Two guests appear each week, next week Hamish Blake and Yumi Stynes.

Episode 1 begins by asking Hamish Blake if he were in a successful rock band whether he would ditch his band mates for a new solo contract? It later gravitates to discussions about Deep Fakes.

“We made a conscious decision to have quite a few comedians involved, because comedians are quick thinkers, and they are usually shameless. So they’re prepared to talk about anything.

“But for me, the interesting thing was watching some of these people change and sometimes dropping that mask of comedy, and actually engaging with the moral issue. You sort of watch people being asked questions that they wouldn’t normally tussle with and sometimes it’s very funny…watching Hamish Blake consider how his wife would respond to a deep fake porn movie.”

Produced by Thinkative TV (Kevin Whyte, Chris Walker, Charlie Pickering), whose hits include Hard Quiz and The Weekly, Season 2 will also welcome Christopher Pyne, Narelda Jacobs, Waleed Aly, Jean Kittson, Peter Helliar, Geraldine Hickey.

“They’re kind of hard things to wrap into a half hour package”

Referencing Carl Reiner, Crabb insists there’s nothing more beautiful to see than a brilliant mind in panic -but the show offers humour, smarts and dilemmas for the viewer.

“It’s an ambitious project: we’re going to make a programme about frightening things that might happen in the future, but we wanted to be entertaining and informative. They’re kind of hard things to wrap into a half hour package, right?” she continues.

“Thinkative TV always make television that’s useful in some way. I love to be entertained, but I also don’t love to sit through half an hour of TV and get nothing at the end of it. I’m a time-poor person and I always feel a bit guilty watching TV. So I want there to be something there.

“In the first year, we had lots of packages and escalation, really paying attention to maintaining that.

“But this time, we’ve stripped it right back to, ‘What would you do?’ or ‘How deeply have you thought about your moral stance on cheating, or lying?’

“It turns out that a lot of us lie a lot!”

“The Lying episode is great, because we all start by saying, ‘Lies are bad.’ But we ask ‘When do you lie?’ and it turns out that a lot of us lie a lot! Sometimes for well-meaning reasons.

“I’ve found out so much about Charlie that’s quite extraordinary. Did you know Charlie was assaulted when he was a much younger man? He woke up with amnesia, and he couldn’t remember six months of his life.

“Christopher Pyne on Cheating is just a half hour televisual treat. He’s absolutely off the leash in this show. I mean, I have known him for a long time… he is really at full power, there are reveals that are absolutely shocking, detailing his own tactics cheating at Mahjong!”

“He can really slice through to the heart of an ethical issue”

Adam Liaw also brings his wit, normally confined to his popular social media output, as well as his insight.

“The interesting thing about Adam, he’s got a very lucid insight… he’s got an ability to sum things up and to make observations that really slice through. You see it again and again, on the show.

“He’s got some unbelievably great one-liners, but then he can really slice through to the heart of an ethical issue in a way that is quite striking.

“I’m so pleased that we got him involved in that he was able to take two seconds out from making 500 episodes of his cooking show!”

Tomorrow Tonight returns 9pm Wednesday on ABC.