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Optics
4 stars
ABC, Wednesdays, 8.30pm/ ABC iview

Jenna Owen and Vic Zerbst have been performing as sketch-comedy duo Freudian Nip (with occasional other members) for a decade now, most notably on SBS’s news satire series The Feed. But it was a viral video in 2023 for the Voice to Parliament referendum, costarring Indigenous rapper Briggs, that introduced the pair to a wider audience (their Chaser skit as teenage contact tracers during the pandemic was another hit).

Jenna Owen, left, and Vic Zerbst as Nicole and Greta in Optics.Credit: ABC

Last year, they made their film debut as writers and stars of the Stan Christmas film Nugget Is Dead, and now they’ve teamed with The Chaser’s Charles Firth to create and co-write Optics.

Zerbst is Greta Goldman and Owen is Nicole Kidman (no, it’s never explained), juniors at prestige PR firm Fritz & Randell, run by middle-aged men who exclude them from most meetings.

That is, until CEO Frank Fritz (Peter Carroll) dies during a meeting. Ian Randell (Charles Firth), son of the original founder, assumes he will take the reins, but the firm’s owner Bobby (Claude Jabbour, permanently accompanied by his bodyguard/PA Dod, played by Aaron Collins), has other ideas. He promotes the girls to co-CEOs – “subject to board approval” – before leaving them to deal with a football player who’s been filmed punching a priest.

<i>The Chaser</i>’s Charles Firth, co-creator of <i>Optics</i>, also stars as Ian Randell.

The Chaser’s Charles Firth, co-creator of Optics, also stars as Ian Randell.Credit: ABC

Fritz & Randell specialises in crisis management, minimising damage when celebrities, businesses and sportsmen (is it ever sportswomen?) are caught misbehaving on social media, bullying staff, or being called out for problematic behaviour.

Greta and Nicole – chronically online 20-somethings who can post on TikTok while discussing an entirely different matter in under 30 seconds – have been thrown in at the deep end, but their enterprising strategies, workshopped in rapid-fire banter so fast it’s hard to keep up with the biting dialogue, actually seem to work.

They concoct “Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” – “something the misogynistic medical profession struggles to diagnose” – to save a female entrepreneur (Grey’s Anatomy’s Kate Walsh) accused of bullying; strike a deal with a dodgy regulator to save the face of airline Qalitus (!) and when a Hollywood actor’s skin-collecting “habit” is exposed, they spin the bad press into “kink-shaming”.

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