Ed Kavalee’s cop comedy is fast, furious and fun. Is it also a new template for Aussie TV?

If the name hadn’t been taken already, Ed Kavalee might well have called his new film Fast and Furious. That certainly describes the relentless assault of gags in his madcap police comedy Cop This, as well as the frantic pace with which it was made.

On the day I visit the set in late March, Kavalee and his co-director Peter Lawler are rattling through the scenes, typically nailing a shot in just a couple of takes. “We’re shooting the whole thing in 12 days,” the rangy and rather hyper Kavalee tells me proudly, before confessing he could have done better. “The Castle was done in just 11.”

The Working Dog crew who made that film – which readers of this masthead recently voted their favourite of all time – cast something of a shadow over Cop This. Not a gloomy one, mind; if a shadow can also be a guiding light, that’s the case here.

Kavalee got his big break as a member of Working Dog’s Thank God You’re Here, appearing in the pilot in 2006 and going on to be a regular performer in the improv-comedy show over five of its six seasons. This is where he and Lawler first met. Kavalee then went on to do the Fever soccer and sports panel shows with Santo Cilauro and Sam Pang, and he’s been a regular on Have You Been Paying Attention? (hosted by Tom Gleisner) since it launched in 2013.

In short, it’s fair to say the Working Dog force is strong in this one.

Cop This is very much Kavalee’s creation, though. A product of his rapid-fire mind, it’s a tale of police corruption set on AFL grand final day, with a local station about to be closed down to make way for an AI-fuelled robotic workforce.

It’s also very much a product of his years in stand-up comedy and TV panel shows, with 32 speaking roles, almost all of them filled by fellow performers from the world of comedy. Lizzy Hoo, Nicolette Minster, Rob Carlton, Tony Martin, Tommy Little, Celia Pacquola, Dilruk Jayasinha and Anthony “Lehmo” Lehmann among them.

It’s no accident, he tells me, that the shoot coincided with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

“We always had that period bookmarked because interstate comics were there,” he says. “We knew the Melbourne comics would be there, and we knew we could stagger [the shoot] in a way we would not ruin their lives,” he says. “Everyone’s here, everyone’s in the mood, and that was absolutely why we did it then. I’m really glad we did.”

Though Kavalee’s background is in improv – “it’s always been my favourite thing, comedy as a team sport” – he says every line was tightly written with a specific performer in mind, and each of those performers arrived having it down pat. “Comics have respect for the lines because we all live and die on lines. We respect each other’s lines so much.”

Not that he wasn’t open to suggestion, and to giving his cast freedom to try something off-script when it suited. Kavalee’s favourite improvisation, funnily enough, came from one of the few non-comedians in the cast, Gary Sweet.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Ed, I’ve got an idea for an alternate line’. And I’m like, ‘Well, it’s Gary Sweet. Mate, you could just stand there and say whatever you want’. He came up with a fantastic joke and I didn’t tell the others in the scene he was going to do it. It was one of the few times we had to do a retake for people laughing.”

Nicolette Minster, who plays an incorruptible cop about to quit the force in protest at the way it is being managed, describes Sweet as her “absolute wingman” on set.

The veteran of more Australian cop dramas than you can poke a stick at (and having played both sides of the law), Sweet’s experience proved invaluable to Minster.

“I turned to him at one point and said, ‘Gary, I’m a private school kid from the inner-eastern suburbs, I don’t know how to hold a gun’. He said, ‘There’s not a gun that I haven’t held, sweetheart’. And then, of course, he took me through them all, at which point I kind of tuned out.”

Verisimilitude had its uses, but for Minster and everyone else involved it wasn’t the key aim. “The job was to have fun, and to communicate that fun through the lens,” she says.

And did she have fun? “Absolutely. Popping on a police uniform and hanging around with a bunch of clowns – that’s a pretty good day at the office for me.”

It was a pretty good day for Lehmo too. As the chief antagonist in the story – a drug squad detective on the take – he was in more scenes than just about anybody else.

“I would get really excited checking the call sheet for the day to see who else was going to be on,” he says. “It was a great catch-up for everyone there. It’s exciting when you all get together, it creates a little extra buzz.”

‘This is not a model that’s really been done before … Now that we’re really happy with it, [we] definitely want to go again.’

Ed Kavalee

“Tommy Little’s a really great mate of mine, and I really enjoyed doing a scene with him where we got to really hate each other. But also Gary Sweet – I mean, I grew up as a big fan of his, and to work with him was just crazy. He played Don Bradman, for Christ’s sake, and here I am pushing him around. It felt weird.”

Lehmo rates Kavalee as “a great director”, likening him to the Portuguese soccer coach Jose Mourinho. “There’s almost this madcap approach to it,” he says. “But when you examine it carefully everything’s really well-thought-out, everything has a great purpose to it.”

Would he go so far as to say Ed Kavalee is The Special One (as Mourinho liked to refer to himself)?

“Ed would be embarrassed about me drawing this comparison, but yes, go with that,” he says. “Ed Kavalee is the special one.”

Ten will certainly be hoping that’s the case. It would be wrong to suggest there’s a lot riding on this film – it’s a low-cost effort, shot quickly and almost entirely within the network’s Melbourne offices – but if it works, the upsides are potentially enormous.

It is, in many ways, a proof of concept, says Kavalee. Cop This is evidence that it’s possible to make original Australian scripted content for a local audience on a budget that appeals to free-to-air commissioners.

“This is not a model that’s really been done before. Now that we’ve established it can be done, and we’re really happy with it, then absolutely [we] definitely want to go again.”

Ultimately, audiences will determine if that should happen. But having drawn inspiration from the best in the business, and having learnt at their feet for a couple of decades, Kavalee is confident.

“What Working Dog managed to wring out of Utopia and Frontline and The Hollowmen in terms of comedy and character and jokes per page and story, that’s world class,” he says. “That’s very much where we’re trying to sit.”

Cop This premieres 9.40pm on Monday, October 5 on Ten and 10play.

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