Superwog Season 1 Review

By Jonathon Wilson
Published: October 10, 2018 (Last updated: December 16, 2023)
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Superwog Review
3.5

Summary

A comedy series sprung from YouTube skits doesn’t seem like a winning idea, but Superwog is genuinely funny and daring enough to make it work.

The brainchild of Nathan and Theo Saidden, Superwog is a six-part comedy series that takes aim at smug social wokeness. But unlike other projects that use a perceived opposition to political correctness to excuse and justify abhorrent nonsense, Superwog is trying to instead challenge mainly uptight white Australians on their preconceived ideas about “wogs” – a reclaimed term denoting darker-skinned migrant populations from Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Nathan and Theo play (among other roles) loutish caricatures sporting tracksuits and gold chains – in the first episode, “Breaking Dad”, a son is removed from his violent father and put into the care of a lily-white family who like to swim in speedos with the family crest embroidered on the back. The father, meanwhile, is put through his paces by social services in an effort to determine if he’s a danger, which it turns out he is. (“5mm gyprock is too thin. 10mm gyprock boy learns lesson.”)

The Superwog YouTube channel has almost a million subscribers, and the short videos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. You might imagine the online comedy demographic is easy to please, but on the contrary, there are no harsher critics than anonymous trolls behind keyboards. The Saiddens have navigated that perilous market and built an active, engaged audience who find a lot of value in their skewering of milquetoast Australian suburbia. This is likely why each episode of Superwog airs on YouTube two days before it airs on ABC’s Comedy channel.

It’s a funny show, this, sprung mainly from a lifetime of impersonating their parents and poking fun at Sydney’s suburban elite for being so terrified of their Greek-Egyptian heritage. It’s a comedy show that rails against political correctness not to get away with being offensive, but to highlight and ridicule race and class-based prejudices. But don’t take my word for it: Here’s the first episode. See what you think.

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