Benjamin Law Talks Facebook, Family and the Lack of Diversity on Australian TV

For Benjamin Law, it all comes back to family. One of five children born to immigrant parents from Hong Kong, Law made a name for himself as a columnist for Frankie, where he frequently wrote about his large, dysfunctional family. It's a habit he'd continue in his best-selling memoir The Family Law, which in turn became the basis for his brand new sitcom on SBS, the first episode of which premiered last week.

In an unprecedented move, the network chose to release the first episode on Facebook ahead of its television premiere. Yet perhaps even more significant is the fact that the show puts an Asian-Australian in the spotlight — an all too rare occurrence on Australian TV.

In the lead-up to the release of the show's second episode, Law gave us his two cents about the origins of the program, their groundbreaking release strategy and the importance of diversity in entertainment.

ON BRINGING PAGE TO SCREEN

"The book [The Family Law] came out in 2010. It's about growing up gay and Asian in coastal Queensland in the 1990s as my parents' marriage falls apart. It's a classic Australian story! So that came out, and I kind of fret that no one will really get it, because it seems to me to be such an obscure story. But what happens is that a lot of people relate to it for all the reasons that I just talked about. A lot of Chinese-Australian and Asian-Australian people relate to it, a lot of people who grew up in Queensland relate to it, a lot of people who grew up gay relate to it, and a lot of people whose parents' marriage busted up relate to it. So it kind of exceeded my expectations.

"From there it landed in the hands of Tony Ayres, the filmmaker, who has made some of my favourite films of the last few decades. He's just this powerhouse, and as soon as I heard that he was interested I had to stop myself from squealing like a fan-girl. I'd seen his film The Home Song Stories maybe a year before. My whole family did, and we came out of the cinema crying buckets. I was like, if you can make something like that, I'd love to see what you could do with The Family Law. So we signed up with Matchbox Pictures, and Tony curated this incredible production team...[and] we all came together and started working."

ON TURNING YOUR FAMILY INTO SITCOM CHARACTERS

"I think [my family] are always kind of nervous. Hell, I write the stuff and I'm always nervous about their reaction. But I've been writing about them in columns and in my book, for quite some time, and I kind of know where the boundaries lie. And the good thing about this show is that we weren't writing a documentary. All the characters are based on people in real life, but we wanted to write a comedy with a lot of emotional truth, and in order to do that we had to be wildly promiscuous with what actually happened.

"Funnily enough, as time goes on and more and more people see the show, so much of the feedback is, 'Holy crap, that's my family, that's my dad, that's me!' And that's pretty sweet. It's the best reaction you could hope for really."

ON THE WHITE FACE OF AUSTRALIAN ENTERTAINMENT

"The show isn't about race, or race relations, or racial tensions, or finding your racial identity... but we were completely aware and happy to acknowledge the fact that this was addressing something that has been lacking in Australian TV for a long time. One in ten Australians has a significant Asian background, but we just don't see that diversity on television. And it's not just about Asians either. It's about brown Australians and black Australians, and seeing our actual racial makeup. Why we remain one of the whitest TV environments is just baffling. A 2016 show about a Chinese-Australian family is groundbreaking. And I'm really glad that it's breaking new ground, but it's kind of astounding that it's taken so long.

"I think it's more to do with the television landscape and how frighteningly mono-cultural it is. All the commercial breakfast networks are white. The main cast of Home and Away [is] completely white. How many of the panel shows we watch are all white? You start noticing it constantly.

"I didn’t grow up watching any show that resembled The Family Law... and the way that it manifests can be pretty toxic, when you don't see your own face reflected in your own media. I've been reading some essays lately that people have written in response to the show, saying 'I sort of grew up a bit self-hating and wanting to be white, because anything else was undesirable. My own face was undesirable and not legitimised by how we reflect ourselves in media and television and the arts.'"

IS FACEBOOK THE NEW TV?

"SBS proposed it. They'd never done it before, and as soon as they said it, it just made complete sense. Nearly all of us are on [Facebook], it's a part of our daily lives, and it gives the opportunity to click on something and watch a full episode of something that's already in our face. Not only that, but you can share it, you can interact with it, you can tag people and tell them about it. So we put it up there for a really limited amount of time, from Friday afternoon until the end of Sunday. At least two million people saw it, at least 1.1 million people had a good look at it, and thousands and thousands of people watched the episode in its entirety.

"It sounds revolutionary, but when you're doing it you're just watching a show on another platform. Television is so many things nowadays ... so I'm really stoked that we went with that. People were wondering if it would affect our ratings, but I suspect that it might have even boosted them, because we far exceeded the expectations of what the show would rate once the TV broadcast went to air."

Watch The Family Law on Thursday nights on SBS at 8.30pm.