Class of '07 locks its reunion in an apocalypse and finds the comedy in the flood

The pitch for Class of ‘07 is so efficient that you could write it on the back of a name tag: a group of women return to their high school for a ten-year reunion, the world floods, and they are stranded on the school’s hilltop campus with limited supplies and unlimited resentment. The comedy comes not from the apocalypse but from the fact that the apocalypse does not change anyone. The same hierarchies, grudges, and power plays that defined Year 12 reassert themselves within hours of the water rising. The end of the world, it turns out, is just school again.

This is a good premise. More importantly, it is a premise that the show (created by Kacie Anning, eight episodes on Amazon Prime Video) actually follows through on, which is rarer than it should be. Australian comedy has a tendency to set up absurd scenarios and then retreat into sincerity by episode three. Class of ‘07 stays committed to the bit. The water keeps rising. The women keep being terrible to each other. The show keeps finding the joke.

The ensemble and the hierarchy

Emily Browning plays Zoe, the protagonist by default rather than by temperament. Zoe is the quiet one, the observer, the woman who spent high school on the periphery and has spent the decade since living a life that is functional but not particularly interesting. Browning plays her with a flatness that is clearly intentional and mostly effective, though there are stretches in the middle episodes where Zoe’s passivity becomes a structural problem. She is the character the show orbits around, but she is not always the most interesting person in the room, and the show seems aware of this.

Megan Smart plays Amelia, who was the school captain and remains, in her own mind, the school captain. Smart is doing something precise with this character: Amelia’s leadership instincts are genuine, but her need to lead is pathological, and the gap between the two is where the comedy lives. She organises rationing systems and conflict-resolution protocols with the same intensity she presumably brought to organising the formal, and the other women respond with the same mixture of compliance and resentment they presumably brought to the formal.

Caitlin Stasey plays Saskia, the agent of chaos, and she is clearly having the best time of anyone in the cast. Saskia is destructive, manipulative, intermittently charming, and entirely unwilling to participate in the survival project on anyone else’s terms. Stasey plays her like someone who realised early that the apocalypse was an opportunity and has been leaning into it ever since. In a lesser show, Saskia would be the villain. Here, she is the person who says what everyone is thinking but has agreed not to say, and her refusal to observe the social contract is both the source of the comedy and the engine of the plot.

The supporting cast is deep. Berlynn Robinson, Sarah Krndija, Emma Horn, Sasha Hartley, and Chi Nguyen fill out the group, and the show is disciplined about giving each of them enough screen time to register as individuals without diluting the central dynamic. This is harder than it looks. Ensemble comedies with eight or more characters tend to either collapse into a hierarchy where three characters matter and the rest are furniture, or spread the attention so evenly that nobody registers. Class of ‘07 manages the balance well, partly because the class-reunion setting provides a built-in social structure that the show can reference without having to build from scratch.

Survival as a comedy engine

The survival elements are played straight enough to create stakes but not so straight that the show becomes a thriller. The water rises. The food runs out. The infrastructure fails. Characters get injured. The school buildings, which were not designed for long-term habitation, start to deteriorate. The show treats these problems as problems, not as punchlines, and the comedy comes from how the characters respond to them: with pettiness, blame-shifting, alliance-building, and the occasional genuine moment of competence that surprises everyone, including the person being competent.

Look, the survival-comedy subgenre has a specific challenge, and it is this: if the danger is too real, the comedy feels callous; if the danger is too abstract, the stakes disappear. Class of ‘07 threads this needle by keeping the danger present but slow. The water rises incrementally. The food diminishes gradually. The show gives its characters time to be funny between crises, and the crises are paced to arrive just as the interpersonal dynamics have reached a new equilibrium that needs disrupting.

How it compares

The obvious comparison is international: The Wilds (Amazon, 2020), which stranded a group of teenage girls on an island with a hidden experimental agenda. But that show was a drama with thriller elements, and its seriousness was the point. Class of ‘07 is closer in spirit to Total Control, not because the shows share a genre (they do not) but because both are interested in what happens when a group of women with competing agendas are forced into a shared space where the rules are not what they expected.

Honestly, the comparison to Total Control is instructive. Rachel Griffiths and Deborah Mailman in that show are navigating the corridors of federal politics, and the power dynamics are institutional. In Class of ‘07, the institution is a defunct school and the power dynamics are personal, but the mechanism is the same: who gets to make decisions, who gets to resist those decisions, and what happens when the person making the decisions is revealed to be no more qualified than anyone else.

Where it wobbles

The back half of the season introduces a plot complication that I will not spoil, except to say that it shifts the show from a pure ensemble comedy into something with a more conventional narrative arc. This is not fatal, but it does change the energy. The first four episodes are propulsive because the situation is the story. The last four episodes are propulsive because a plot is the story, and plot propulsion and situational propulsion feel different. The laughs are still there, but they are competing with a mystery structure that the show has not entirely earned.

The tonal management is also uneven in places. There are moments, particularly in episodes five and six, where the show asks you to care about a character’s emotional breakthrough immediately after asking you to laugh at someone else’s humiliation, and the pivot is too fast. Comedy can contain genuine emotion (this is not controversial), but the transition needs a beat, and Class of ‘07 does not always give it one.

What it gets right

The thing that Class of ‘07 understands, and that a lot of Australian comedies do not, is that comedy works best when the characters are specific. Not quirky, not wacky, not armed with catchphrases, but specific: people with particular histories and particular grievances and particular ways of avoiding their own feelings. The school-reunion setting is a gift in this regard, because it provides a shared history that the show can deploy without exposition. These women know each other. They know each other’s weaknesses. And they have been waiting ten years to use that knowledge.

The show also understands (and this is rarer) that an apocalypse is only as interesting as the people experiencing it. The flood is the premise. The comedy is the women. The show never forgets which one matters more.