There’s a saying: when a writer is born, a family dies. “I’m that guy,” says Benjamin Law.
Of course, that’s not strictly the case. Law may have turned his experiences of growing up in a large Asian Australian family on Queensland’s extremely Anglo Sunshine Coast into a memoir – and that memoir may have spawned a television comedy series starring characters named after and modelled on his actual family, featuring things that actually happened to them, both painful and amusing – but the backlash has been minimal, at least in real life.
When we meet on set for season two – in a stinking hot warehouse in Brisbane – he has both families to contend with. The real Law family are trickling in for their opening episode cameo – something they did in the first season, too. It’s also the birthday of one of the cast members – Trystan Go, who plays teenage Ben – and the warehouse is buzzing with activity.
In fact, there are so many layers of Laws in the building that I am starting to feel dizzy. The actors playing the on-screen family call each other by their screen names between takes, with the on-screen children calling their on-screen parents “mum” and “dad” in everyday life. When I ask now 15-year-old Go what his real mother thinks about this, he says she’d probably prefer not to comment. But The Family Law family is about to claim her too: the opportunity for a cameo is being extended later in the season to the real life families of the actors.
Law explains the intense meta-family dynamic on set best when talking about when his actual mother, Jenny, who is played on screen by Fiona Choi, recently met Choi’s mother: “It was like a turducken of mums.”
Law’s self-deprecating, colourful and frequently scatological sense of humour first came to public attention when he published The Family Law in 2010. The television show was later picked up by Matchbox Pictures and first aired on SBS in June last year. Law’s heartwarming, hilarious script is remarkable for the careful balancing act it performs between fiction and fact – between using real people’s lives as comedic fodder on screen and genuinely respecting the people and relationships that are at its core.
“It’s a different prospect, a TV show that’s inspired by your family versus a book,” Law says. “A book is almost a more private experience … But then television is really public. It’s a much more exposing kind of process.”
It’s difficult to pinpoint where the real life inspiration ends and the characters begin. The character of Jenny, for example, is forward, often to the point of inappropriate. In the very first scene of the first episode of season one, she describes childbirth as like “squeezing a lemon out of your penis hole”, setting the tone for the show to come. Readers of the memoir would know that this line was in fact a verbatim quote from real life Jenny, whose forthright humour is one of the things that makes her both endearing and embarrassing.
She is hilarious but her character isn’t just there for the comedy: real life Jenny also experienced a prolonged and painful divorce, which confronts her TV counterpart at the end of the first season.
“I feel like [the character] is a love letter to motherhood,” Choi says. “Sure, she’s outrageous and she has no sense of that ... but the thing that really drives her is just that she will do anything for her children.”
The show pivots primarily around the relationship between Ben and his mum – often fraught, occasionally explosive, and frequently funny, but complicated by Jenny’s deteriorating relationship with Ben’s father, Danny.
“Knowing the real Jenny as well, she’s so resilient, she’s just naturally a joyful, optimistic person,” Choi says. “It’s never about her, it’s about the children, so all these tough things that come her way, she takes them on the chin and just moves on.”
Choi spent a lot of time with real life Jenny, who moved to Australia from China in the 70s, getting to know her and perfecting her accent. Choi is sometimes surprised by feedback from people who mention how funny her character is, but attributes much of the success of on-screen Jenny to the empathy and honesty of Law’s writing. “I’ve never played her for laughs,” she says. “I’ve just played the truth of Jenny.”
Law says he didn’t experience much pushback from his family around the TV show and any that did occur was ameliorated when his family read the scripts.
He says that they decided very early on in the writers’ room to script the show as a drama first, with those “emotional truths” at its core, before bringing in the jokes. “If we’re not writing it like a drama, the stakes don’t feel high enough,” he says.
They also decided that they didn’t want to feel beholden to the reality of Law’s experiences. In some ways this was a question of practicality – his book is essentially a collection of vignettes, which doesn’t translate well to television. As a result, the series imposes a narrative arc that condenses into one long, hot Queensland summer what, in real life, occurred over a number of years.
“Real life is messy. But at the same time we don’t want a portrayal of a divorce to be clean on this show either. So series two [asks], ‘What does a post-nuclear family look like?’” Post-nuclear having two meanings: unconventional and, he says, with fallout.
Season two sees the Law family embark on new beginnings, spring cleaning their lives – and contending with new relationships and a new school year. Ben’s dad, Danny (Anthony Brandon Wong), has moved in to his own, slick apartment, sold the Chinese restaurant and opened a new business. Jenny is looking to spread her wings – or, as she calls them, her “flaps”. Eldest sister Candy (Shuang Hu) is getting married to Wayne (Sam Cotton), whose parents live in the “One Nation heartland” of Mount Isa. Meanwhile, Ben desperately wants to be middle-school captain and is still battling with his nemesis and neighbour, the uber-perfect Klaus (Takaya Honda), while picking up the pieces of his friendship with Melissa (Bethany Whitmore).
It’s hard to watch a show like The Family Law without feeling like it was crafted with a lot of love and the cast and production team are so tight-knit that, when I ask about their motivations for the show, their answers are so similar that I briefly wonder if they have been coached. Is it possible, in the age of shows as bleak and cynical as House of Cards, or Fargo, or A Handmaid’s Tale, to create television with genuine warmth and generosity? But it’s only a moment of doubt, because it’s hard to leave The Family Law without feeling like this big, sprawling family has just claimed you as a member, too.
• The Family Law season two starts on SBS on Thursday 15 June at 8.30pm
• Guardian Australia was a guest of SBS
