Risky Business

 She confesses to just having binged teen romances Heartbreak High and The Summer I Turned Pretty – smiling fondly at the memory of whirlwind plot twists, campy dialogue and tantalising love triangles. These shows keep their audiences engaged. And that’s important.

For Megan, the goal is to write something people can relate to and have fun with, rather than trying to be ‘high brow’. “I remember watching The Mindy Project and I was like ‘wait a minute, this woman is like me!’ Here I was thinking I had to write all this smart stuff, this smart humour. And here she is just talking about pop culture and it’s hilarious.” Megan remembers receiving the note “it’s so dumb, it’s smart” on her work from a fellow writer. “Best compliment ever. Writing good comedy is really difficult, making someone laugh from just reading a script, that takes genuine skill. There’s nothing dumb about dumb humour.” 

She was awarded the FINCH scholarship for such authenticity and witty observations.

Megan got her start in writing through directing. After falling in love with directing through high school drama class, she was nervous about the career possibilities of working within the arts. “I thought, well what am I going to do? So I did what everyone in my family did and got a commerce degree”. But, like many a theatre-kid-turned-commerce-student, she was active in the campus drama club (whose notable alumni include Tim Minchin). The club only did original work so in order to direct, she had to write.

During this time she wrote and directed Time Capsule, an original pop-rock musical that she calls one of her “proudest achievements”. It was a massive feat – two acts, a live band, with an ensemble cast of around 20. “I’ve always wanted to write a big aussie comedy musical. I love hearing Australian accents sing, you hear the lyrics so much clearer, the words hit harder, the jokes are funnier, it’s incredible.”  She went on to take it to the Perth Fringe Festival, selling out the Subiaco Arts Auditorium and winning herself a FringeWorld award. The show, which takes place at a 10-year high school reunion, is indicative of Megan’s tone… irreverent, moving, and always wickedly fun.

She honed this voice at NIDA. As I spoke to her, she was in the midst of working on a screenplay called The Unofficial Rulebook to F**king Your Friends. A tongue-in-cheek comedy about the captain of a mixed netball team who discovers that all the other players are casually sleeping with one another, and writes a rule book they have to follow to navigate their friends with benefits relationships. She describes her Gen Z comedy as Booksmart and Pitch Perfect’s horny Australian cousin, and saw its scintillating pages come to life recently in a staged reading at NIDA.

She thinks there’s a gap in the market for this kind of content for young Australians. “We do really well in Australian kids TV, like Bluey and Round the Twist. When it comes to teenagers we’ve got a couple of things…. Dance Academy, Surviving Summer, now Heartbreak High. And then you get a little bit older and you start getting into your early twenties and it’s like… crickets”. This is leaving young Australians stuck on content from America and the UK. It’s one of the reasons Megan applied to NIDA in the first place “because so many of my friends were like ‘I hate hearing Australian accents on TV’ which is so weird because they hear Australian accents every single day.’”

It’s that very void that young writers like Megan can step up to fill, but only if the industry takes a chance on them. “I’d like to see the Australian industry taking more risks. And when I say risks, I don’t necessarily mean risqué or stories that are super eccentric. Really I just mean taking risks on new writers and new audiences.”

One thing is certain. The kind of honest, fresh perspectives that someone like Megan has to share. Is well worth the risk.