Mother and Son
★★★★
ABC, from Wednesday 8:30pm (new episodes weekly)

Let’s start with a caveat: I’ve never seen the original Mother and Son, the acclaimed ABC sitcom that ran over six seasons from 1984 to 1994. In fact, as a child, I actively avoided it. Like M*A*S*H reruns, it seemed like a relic from another time; a slice of tired Australiana filling up my TV screen while I waited for Degrassi or Vidiot to begin. But now I am old and this playful reboot – starring Matt Okine as the put-upon Arthur, and Denise Scott as his rascally mother Maggie – is, oddly, speaking to me.

Rebooting the series amid the Millennial-Boomer divide is a savvy decision. Here’s a generation with nothing – no housing, no savings, no job security, and a delayed domesticity because of it – suddenly tasked with becoming caregivers to an older generation who, for the most part, had access to it all. The series plays subtly with these skewed generational dynamics.

Newly widowed Maggie (a delightfully ditzy Scott) is the one with freaking undiagnosed dementia, and yet she still has to mother her hopeless 36-year-old son: house him, cook for him, and try to spur him from his apathetic malaise. Meanwhile, Arthur (an ever-likeable Okine) and his hustling sister Robbie (Angela Nica Sullen) increasingly view Maggie as an unpredictable burden, but a necessary one: of course, she’s their mother, but also any inheritance likely holds the key to their future security. I mean, this is what we’ve come to.

I don’t have property in my lineage but, as morbid as it is, I can sympathise with Millennials viewing their deceased parents as a future lifeline. Remember in the cartoons when Sylvester used to look at Tweety and see succulent, steaming fried chicken? Millennials do that to their ageing parents, but see a two-bedroom brick home with a backyard (or at least a 10 per cent deposit). Before you send me emails, I’m joking – but also, this is the headspace this show has put me in.

For a sitcom, this Mother and Son is not necessarily funny; in fact, it’s low-key depressing – that backload hinting at Maggie’s dementia, to the point that her kids, in one episode, decide to track her movements with a GPS dog collar, is dark (not to mention the close pall of death lingering over the whole thing). A lot of the gags sit there without a sharp pay-off, lending the series – at least in the four episodes I viewed (it’s an eight-episode season) – a flat energy that might be the best argument yet for the return of the TV laugh track. But the series feels significant in broaching those icky topics we’d often rather ignore, in a palatable way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed (or, well, even conscious at times).

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The show’s overarching pleasantness is reason to stick with it. Amid all the intergenerational bickering, there’s a family-versus-the-world quality to Maggie and Arthur’s relationship that feels nice to sit with. Largely filmed on location amid the African restaurants, Vietnamese grocery shops and Lebanese shisha lounges of Padstow in Sydney’s southwest, it also captures the vibe of this multicultural city in a way that I’m sure was absent from the original.