Why Are You Like This is the angriest comedy on ABC and it knows exactly who it is yelling at

Look, the title is doing a lot of work here. Why Are You Like This is a question that the show asks its characters, and that its characters ask each other, and that the audience will ask the characters at least once per episode. It is also, if you are being honest, a question that the show is asking its audience directly. The answer, in all cases, is: because the internet happened to us and we have not recovered.

The show follows three housemates in inner-city Melbourne. Mia (Naomi Higgins) is a biracial woman whose commitment to social justice is genuine but whose methods are, to put it gently, counterproductive. Penny (Olivia Junkeer) is Mia’s best friend, equally progressive, equally loud, and equally capable of turning a minor workplace grievance into a full-scale ideological confrontation. Austin (Wil King) is a gay man whose approach to activism is more selective and whose tolerance for his housemates’ campaigns is finite but renewable. Together they form a unit that is less a friendship group and more a small, perpetually outraged collective operating out of a sharehouse in Collingwood.

The show premiered on ABC in 2021 and was picked up by Netflix internationally, which is the trajectory that Australian comedies now follow if they are lucky and specific enough. The ABC develops it, the ABC audience validates it, and Netflix distributes it to the world, where it finds a second audience that recognises the behaviour even if the accents are unfamiliar.

The satire is pointing inward

The critical thing about Why Are You Like This is who it is satirising. This is not a show made by conservatives mocking progressives. It is a show made by people who are, broadly, on the same side as their characters, and who understand that being on the right side of an argument does not protect you from being insufferable about it. Mia and Penny are not wrong about the issues they care about. They are wrong about how they pursue those issues, wrong about the tactics, wrong about the proportionality, and frequently wrong about the specific situation they have decided to make into a cause.

This is a difficult tone to sustain. The show has to make you laugh at Mia’s overreactions without suggesting that the things she is reacting to do not matter. It has to let Penny be ridiculous without implying that her concerns are ridiculous. It has to show Austin’s relative restraint as a contrast without positioning him as the sensible one who sees through the nonsense. (He is not the sensible one. He is just a different kind of mess.)

Honestly, the closest comparison in Australian comedy is Get Krack!n, which also satirised its own audience and also understood that the joke works best when the target is in the room. Get Krack!n aimed at breakfast television and the women who watch it and the women who present it, and the comedy came from the gap between what the format promised and what it delivered. Why Are You Like This aims at a younger demographic, the one that grew up on Tumblr and graduated to Twitter and Instagram activism, and the comedy comes from the gap between what these characters believe and how they behave.

The ABC-to-Netflix pipeline

The show’s journey from ABC to Netflix is worth noting because it reflects a specific moment in Australian comedy commissioning. The ABC has historically been the home of comedies that would not survive on commercial networks: Please Like Me, Utopia, Rosehaven, Fisk. These are shows that require a particular audience, an audience that is educated, metropolitan, and willing to laugh at itself, and the ABC is where that audience lives.

Netflix’s involvement changes the calculus slightly. An international audience does not have the same context for Australian social dynamics, does not know what Collingwood signifies, does not understand the specific texture of inner-Melbourne progressivism. The show works internationally anyway, because the behaviour it depicts is not uniquely Australian. Performative activism is a global phenomenon, and the gap between stated values and actual behaviour is universal. The Australian setting gives it specificity. The universality gives it reach.

Higgins and Junkeer carry it

Naomi Higgins is the engine. Her performance as Mia is physically committed in a way that Australian screen comedy does not always achieve. She plays Mia’s outrage as a full-body experience: the posture changes, the voice rises, the eyes widen. Mia believes every word she is saying at the moment she says it, and Higgins makes that belief palpable even when the words are absurd. There is a scene in the third episode where Mia confronts a colleague about the cultural implications of a team-building exercise, and Higgins plays it with such conviction that you forget, briefly, that the complaint is deranged. Then you remember, and the comedy lands because the conviction was real.

Olivia Junkeer matches her beat for beat. Penny is the accelerant to Mia’s spark. Where Mia generates the outrage, Penny amplifies it, adds theoretical frameworks, invokes systemic analysis, and generally ensures that no confrontation remains at a manageable scale. Junkeer plays this with a precise comic timing that makes Penny’s escalations feel inevitable rather than forced. You see them coming and you cannot stop them, which is also how Penny’s targets feel.

Wil King has the harder job of playing the character who is most aware of the absurdity without becoming the audience’s surrogate. Austin laughs at Mia and Penny, but he also enables them. He rolls his eyes and then he shows up to the protest. He tells them they are overreacting and then he helps them draft the open letter. King plays this contradiction without resolving it, which is the correct choice, because the contradiction is the character.

The Please Like Me lineage

Please Like Me (2013-2016) is the obvious ancestor here, not in style (Josh Thomas’s show was gentler, more melancholy, less interested in political comedy) but in its relationship to its audience. Both shows assume a viewer who recognises the world being depicted because they live in it. Both shows are, in a specific way, about the gap between how their characters see themselves and how they actually are. Josh thought he was coping. He was not coping. Mia thinks she is helping. She is not helping.

The difference is velocity. Please Like Me moved slowly, let scenes breathe, trusted silence. Why Are You Like This moves fast, packs jokes densely, and trusts that its audience can keep up. The episodes are short (roughly twenty-two minutes), the plots are compressed, and the comedy operates at a pace that reflects the attention span of the characters it depicts. These are people who consume information rapidly, form opinions immediately, and act before processing. The show’s rhythm mirrors that behaviour.

What the anger is actually about

Underneath the comedy, Why Are You Like This is about the frustration of caring about things you cannot fix, in a system that rewards performance over action, using tools (social media, public shaming, corporate diversity initiatives) that were designed to create the appearance of progress rather than progress itself. Mia and Penny are angry because the world is genuinely unfair, and they are ridiculous because their response to that unfairness has been shaped by platforms that incentivise performance over substance.

The show does not resolve this tension. It does not suggest that Mia and Penny should care less, or that Austin’s selective engagement is the answer, or that there is a correct way to be political in a sharehouse in Collingwood. It just shows the mess, accurately and with affection, and lets the audience sit in the recognition. Which, honestly, is the most useful thing a comedy can do.