Shaun Micallef will return to ABC with a second season of his self-written comedy series The Ex-PM.
Film Victoria has confirmed it will fund 6×30 minute episodes of the comedy in 2017. Season 1 of The Ex-PM originally aired on ABC in 2015, and is currently available for catch-up iview.
The EX-PM tells the tale of our third longest serving Prime Minister, Andrew Dugdale. Once a leader that changed the lives of millions of his fellow Australians, he’s now retired dealing with a family that has plenty of issues of their own, and an inquisitive and over enthusiastic ghost-writer who has an appetite for the truth.
When interviewed by DeciderTV in 2015, Micallef described how he came up with the idea:
“It’s a long time in gestation this idea, it came about as result of a story I’d heard about John Howard,” Micallef explained to me when we caught up recently.
“He’d been out-of-office for about six months. Howard was off shopping with wife Jeanette and he was walking back to his car, both with their shopping, talking and getting along like a house on fire. Both of them got into the back seat of their own car, then twigged that oh that’s right one of us has to drive!”
“I thought that was a lovely story, because he’d actually decided to move back into his old house and to his own electorate. It made me think about re-acclimatizing with the world after so long in office. You’re almost institutionalized. You’ve got all these people around you who feed you and feed off you, then suddenly they’re all gone, what must that be like? “
Meanwhile season 7 of Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell will return in May with 12 new episodes. An airdate for The EX-PM Season 2 is yet to be confirmed.
