Forget work from home, Utopia is still a workplace comedy.

It’s been some 3 and a half years since Utopia has graced our screens.

But the comedy set in the offices of the Nation Building Authority is back this week under the watch of CEO Tony Woodford (Rob Sitch) and his merry band of over-achieving under-achievers.

Yet while many shows are eager to return before the cameras, the Working Doug troupe -Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy and producer Michael Hirsh- are more discerning about allocating the time in the creative sandpit.

“We thought we wouldn’t do another series”

“The first time we took a year between series, then we took 18 months, then we took two and a half years and now sort of three and a half,” Sitch tells TV Tonight.

“It’s not out of any clever design. After we did the first series, we thought we wouldn’t do another series. But having opened that can of worms, we kept accumulating ideas. After about nine months, we all looked at each other and said ‘We’ve got more than a series up our sleeve.’ After the second, we thought the same thing.”

But if the pandemic had any silver lining, it was investing the time in developing new story ideas.

“The chances of doing five series are very slim but because of the pandemic, we were thinking about other things but we kept accumulating all the ideas.

“It was a bit like the line from Apocalypse Now, ‘One day the war is going to end’ and we’ll be tired of masks jokes and zoom jokes. So we planned even when we were writing during the pandemic, for it to be a post pandemic series.”

“It’s an office comedy and always was.”

The pandemic has also changed office life, but for Sitch the core relationships of the NBA staff remain. Utopia explores the bureacracy of office life amongst its frustrated characters.

“It’s an office comedy and always was. So half of is not just infrastructure, but it’s about people being in the same professional space driving each other mad. You can do a bit of zoom frustration, but the theme is not Work from Home,” he continues.

“When I start started working, quite a few years back now, I got yelled at. Probably with cause. It wasn’t quite hazing, but you were kind of told off really vehemently or sometimes just yelled at and abused. But you can’t do that in most professional offices now. So there’s all these amazing new etiquettes where you can’t actually take your frustration out on the person causing you to be frustrated. All these new terms like ‘micro aggressions,’ and even the concept of three warnings, is two more warnings than I got! I think the modern office is a very sophisticated, emotionally-intelligent place that drives everyone mad.”

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the workplace comedy has also under-pinned other Working Dog projects including the acclaimed Frontline.

“I think Santo once said, ‘You know, this is an office comedy.’ We said, ‘Don’t say it out loud.’ It was camouflaged in TV and current affairs. Half the fun we had was in office dynamics…. but nobody learned anything, everyone’s the same at the end,” Sitch recalls.

“But everyone’s got mantras. What was Seinfeld: ‘No hugging, no learning’ or something like that? Yes, Minister went into Yes, Prime Minister but you can watch almost every episode out of order. You don’t need to know what went before and what went afterwards. It’s self contained.

“We made it groundhog day every day”

“We instinctively were very wary of putting any long term arc in the series. So the much-used term is, we made it groundhog day every day….you can almost watch Episode One of Series Two, and Episode Eight of Series Five and you don’t have to go back to catch up.”

Returning cast in Season 5 include Celia Pacquola, Dave Lawson, Dilruk Jayasinha, Kity Flanagan, Anthony
Lehmann, Emma-Louise Wilson, Nina Oyama, Jamie Robertson, Mike McLeish and Rebecca Massey.

This season the team is forced to deal with project management teams interested only in talking points. Billion dollars projects announced without a business case or cost-benefit study. Shifing geo-politcal priorites. Rural road constructon held up by a problematc statue. Cyber-atacks and an embarrassing UNESCO report.

“What do you do as a government when you’ve got a million year old coral reef and a multi-century year old problem like climate change? How can you solve it by two o’clock tomorrow?” he asks.

“It’s that kind of mismatch of times we hadn’t done before. Movie studios pop up at one point in time. A lot of subjects we looked at, probably for good reason, we didn’t do in the first few seasons, because we just needed to understand how we go about it better. I think it’ll feel on the surface very similar. But it’s a very fast and dense series.”

For the prolific Working Dog team, Utopia will also be the third project on air in the same week, joining Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Cheap Seats -with a revival of Thank God You’re Here also due later this year.

According to Sitch, “Normally, if we were a government department, one of these would be delayed by two years.”

8pm Wednesdays on ABC.