Ground Up Is the AFL Office Comedy We Didn’t Know We Needed

Look, I didn’t think I needed a show about AFL administrators bumbling through pointless meetings and drowning in red tape — but here we are, and honestly? I’m into it. Ground Up, the new six-part ABC series, is the kind of quietly clever footy content that sneaks up on you like a Magpie forward crashing a pack at the MCG.

What Is Ground Up, Exactly?

Gary McCaffrie’s series sits firmly in the tradition of Australian bureaucracy comedy — think Utopia, The Hollowmen, or the beloved Sydney Olympics romp The Games. If you’ve ever watched any of those and thought, yeah, but what if it was about footy? — well, mate, someone at the ABC was reading your mind.

The show is built around the management of a major AFL event — the kind of big-ticket occasion the League loves to announce with a slick press release and then absolutely loses its mind trying to execute. Cue the labyrinthine approval processes, the endless rounds of buck-passing, the meetings about meetings. Classic stuff.

Sam Pang leads the ensemble cast, and he’s excellent. The man has teh kind of deadpan timing that suits this genre perfectly — he can stare at a whiteboard covered in meaningless diagrams and make you feel every ounce of that existential dread. If you’ve spent any time in a corporate environment, you will recognise every single character archetype on screen within the first episode.

The AFL Setting Is Both Its Strength and Its Leash

Here’s where I reckon the show gets interesting — and a little bit complicated.

Footy is one of those subjects where Australians have incredibly strong opinions. Ask any Pies supporter and they’ll tell you the game is simultaneously the greatest sport in the world and completely mismanaged at the top level. (They’d be right on both counts, by the way.) So setting a workplace satire inside the machinery of the AFL is genuinely fertile comedic ground.

The show doesn’t go after specific clubs or real identifiable figures — it’s not a documentary, it’s not trying to expose anyone — and that’s probably the right call legally and creatively. What it does instead is skewer the culture of sports administration: the language, the hierarchy, the obsession with optics over outcomes. Anyone who has watched the AFL make an announcement, walk it back, then announce it again with slightly different branding will feel very seen.

But that same careful positioning is also what stops the series from absolutely swinging for the fences. It’s safe. Comfortably, pleasantly safe. At times you want the show to grab someone by the collar and really have a crack — and instead it offers you a knowing smile and a shrug. Not a criticism exactly, more an observation.

Sam Pang Carries the Midfield Brigade

Let’s talk about Sam Pang for a second because he is genuinely the best thing in this show.

He’s built a career on being the wryest bloke in any room, and in Ground Up that quality is weaponised perfectly. His character — a mid-level manager who clearly once had ambitions but has since made a kind of peace with mediocrity — is the audience’s entry point into this world. You understand why he hasn’t quit and you understand why he stays. That’s good character writing, and Pang lands every beat of it.

The supporting cast fills out the ensemble nicely. There’s the relentlessly optimistic junior staffer who still believes in the mission. The senior executive who talks entirely in strategic frameworks. The communications person who treats every internal email like a potential crisis. You know these people. They work in every industry in Australia — it just turns out they’re especially funny when the industry is footy.

Does It Make You Laugh Though?

Okay, let’s be honest here. This is not a belly-laugh show. If you’re sitting down expecting something as gleefully unhinged as, say, a late-night footy panel doing bits — you’ll be a bit flat. Ground Up is the kind of comedy that gives you a consistent low-level hum of amusement rather than big peaks. You’ll smile a lot. You’ll chuckle. You’ll probably say “that’s pretty good” to whoever’s watching with you.

There are moments when it properly lands — a budget meeting scene in episode two had me grinning like I’d just watched the Pies kick the winning goal from the boundary — but they are moments, not a sustained assault. The pacing is good, the dialogue is sharp enough, and at six episodes it definately doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The comparison that sits closest for me is The Games — John Clarke and Bryan Dawe’s 2000 Olympics comedy that remains a masterclass in this type of satire. Ground Up isn’t quite at that level of surgical precision, but it’s working from the same playbook and it plays it well.

What It Gets Right About Footy Culture

One of the things I appreciated — and this is coming from a bloke who has spent decades having heart attacks watching the Pies — is that the show clearly loves football even as it’s laughing at the people who run it.

There’s a difference between mockery from the outside and satire from the inside. Ground Up feels like it was written by people who actually understand why we care about this game, why it matters, why the mismanagement is so funny precisely because the stakes feel so personal. When characters start talking about the game itself, there’s a warmth there that grounds (no pun intended) the comedy.

It also nails something specific about the gap between how organisations talk about sport — community outcomes, legacy initiatives, stakeholder engagement — and what the rest of us just want, which is good footy, played hard, on great grounds, without being nickled and dimed at the gate. That tension is real. It’s been real for years. And the show finds genuine humour in it without having to invent much.

Should You Watch It?

Yes. Especially if you’re a footy person. Ground Up is smart, well-made Australian television that treats its audience as intelligent adults. It doesn’t try to explain the game to you, it doesn’t dumb down the jokes, and it moves quickly enough that it never drags.

Is it essential viewing? Probably not in the way that, say, a finals series is essential viewing. But it’s the kind of show you put on, enjoy thoroughly, recommend to your footy mates, and then find yourself thinking about when you’re stuck in yet another pointless work meeting yourself. Hang on, is this show actually a documentary?

Look, it’s not going to replace the footy on a Saturday afternoon — nothing does, and Carn the Pies — but as a six-episode companion piece to the madness of the AFL world? It earns its spot on the couch.

The Verdict

Sam Pang is terrific, the writing is wry and well-observed, and the AFL setting gives Australian workplace comedy some genuinely fresh territory to explore. It won’t redefine the genre, but it doesn’t need to. Ground Up is exactly what it wants to be: a gentle, warm, quietly funny show about the organised chaos behind the game we all love too much. Give it a crack. Six episodes. You’ve got nothing to lose — unless the Pies are playing, obviously. In which case everything else waits.