Ever since the synopsis and first still for Working Dog’s new adult animation Pacific Heat (playing on Foxtel in Australia and Netflix in the US) premiered online, fans of the Emmy award-winning spy show Archer smelt a rat. It appeared that the Australian production company was feeding Archer through the proverbial photocopier.
There are obvious similarities in storyline and structure, with Pacific Heat centred on incompetent wisecracking undercover law enforcement. But what makes a side-by-side comparison of the two programs so galling is that Archer has a highly distinctive aesthetic, which Working Dog clearly imitates. Judge for yourself: here is the trailer for Pacific Heat and here is the trailer for Archer series six.
Reviewers have fallen over themselves to point this out, coupled with what appears to be a consensus that Pacific Heat, to summarise the sentiment generously, falls short of being a thigh-slapping laugh fest.
“Netflix’s Australian import ‘Pacific Heat’ is a half-assed attempt to satirize cop shows (and imitate ‘Archer’),” writes Indiewire. “Netflix’s ‘Archer’ Rip-Off Should Be Avoided at All Costs,” says Collider. The AV Club: “Netflix’s new show Pacific Heat asks: ‘What if Archer wasn’t funny?’”
The title of this Reddit thread seems to sum up the mood: “Is this Pacific Heat thing a rip off of Archer or is it set in the same world/created by the same people?”
The Working Dog crew have presented some attempts at deflection. Pacific Heat is totally A-Team meets Hawaii Five-0, according to co-writer/co-producer/voice actor Rob Sitch. Santo Cilauro has said it’s actually more like Scooby-Doo than anything beginning with “A”.
A Sydney Morning Herald interview contains a sentence arguably more amusing than any joke in the show: “As he thinks it over, Cilauro thinks Pacific Heat might have similarities to Archer.” And now that Charlie Pickering has thought it over, hmm, yes, The Weekly might possibly have some similarities to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
And the Working Dog team have form when it comes to cop comedies. Their short-lived, live-action 1995 series Funky Squad was itself an extended remake of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage film clip from the previous year.
Pushing aside the copycat-from-Ballarat elephant in the room, Pacific Heat (about a bungling undercover unit based on the Gold Coast) actually manages to offend on multiple levels. That’s an achievement of a kind, though perhaps not one to put in Working Dog’s pool room. More like one to wash off the résumé with a high-powered hose.
Special Agent Todd Sommerville (the voice of Sitch) is a vaguely Mike Moore-esque antihero, prone to dumb, blokey observations and inane yakety-yak. The other members of the team are himbo Agent Zac (Santo Cilauro), bimbo Special Agent Veronica Delane (Lucia Mastrantone) and the slightly more intelligent Special Agent Maddie Riggs (Rebecca Massey).
To say the cleavage-spilling female characters have little agency would be one way of putting it. For “the perfect cover” in the first episode, the men convince Delane and Riggs to take off their clothes and pose as employees at a strip club. A flashback to previous situations make it clear this is an ongoing thing. The joke is that the women can be easily talked into undressing irrespective of the situation, from diamond heists to royal family assassination scares.
“We’re sick of going on assignments in our underwear,” Riggs says. Cut to inside the strip club and the two pushovers are on either side of a pole. Delane is upside down, legs spread, when Riggs asks: “How do we look?” Sitch’s familiar voice responds: “Well, you could lose a kilo or two.”
If the sexist gags aren’t to your liking, there are racist ones too. An uncomfortable series of Asian jokes permeates the show. In the back room of the strip club, after a Chinese man’s terse instructions to the women (“Hey new girl, less talk more titty”), the two Aussie special agents punch on with Chinese drug dealers.
Sommerville yells: “Looks like it’s bamboo curtains for you!” Punch! Then: “Talk about saving face!” Whack! And: “Sayonara, sucker!” Bam! When somebody tells him that’s Japanese, he responds: “Same geographic economic zone!”
If this kind of comedy appeals, there’s plenty more where that came from. Scripted with a less witty but similarly comprehensive dialogue slather as Utopia or The Hollowmen, two fine if exhaustingly vapid satires, Pacific Heat’s greatest crime, perhaps, is that it’s just not very funny.
In the aforementioned scene the writers (Cilauro, Sitch and Tom Gleisner) acknowledge that the character is a doofus making racially motivated put-downs, but don’t come remotely close to crafting the joke in a satirical way. Depictions of non-Anglo characters in Pacific Heat feel embarrassingly old hat, like relics from a bygone past.
This is a time that, surely, none of us would want to revisit: the black stains of comedy history that gave us such horrors as Mickey Rooney’s unforgettable, in the worst possible way, buck-toothed performance as Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
That film was released in 1961. A lot, of course, has changed since then. For one thing, the internet now exists, though the reception to Pacific Heat might have caused Working Dog to wish it didn’t.
More importantly, standards and tastes have evolved. Pacific Heat feels like a time traveller from a different era; I’m surprised that the creators didn’t bulk up the material with a few homophobic jokes (or maybe they did: I only made it through the first four episodes).
A reviewer might ordinarily observe that hey, at least the animation looks nice, which is true. But in this context that compliment comes with – how do I put this? – certain baggage.
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