‘Class Of ’07’ Is Australia’s Answer To TV’s Apocalypse Boom
The funniest show ever made about the bitches you went to high school with.
Thanks to our fascination with disaster survival and the 20-year-trend cycle, shows about people stranded and trying to survive are making a comeback: this time, with a certain female rage in its belly.
From Paramount’s Yellowjackets to Amazon’s tragically cancelled series The Wilds and SBS’ Alone — the survival is back and even Australia has skin in the game.
Enter Class of ’07, the brand new Aussie dramedy about a group of women who get trapped in their old high school after the world ends on the night of their 10-year reunion. Surrounded wall-to-wall by a biblical flood, they’re miraculously saved thanks to their old Catholic boarding school sitting on top of a hill. Just one problem, though: they’re now pretty much trapped at school forever.
Created by Kacie Anning, the series boasts a gaggle of home-grown talent including Emily Browning, Caitlin Stasey, Megan Smart, and award-winning proud Aboriginal comedian Steph Tisdell. In fact, the show’s cast, director, and writers are mostly women — a very rare thing for Australian TV.
Another delightful Australian element of Class of ’07 is its Aussie music needle drops. (When I tell you that you’ll need tissues for the sequence where a certain Missy Higgins track begins to take hold, ignore my warning at your peril.)
More importantly, it’s the funniest and realest show ever made about being stranded with the bitches you went to high school with. You cry from laughter as you watch the alumni get shit-your-pants food poisoning from eating floodwater fish. Then, try not to cry from heartache as the girls are forced to slowly unearth the trauma they left buried when they graduated.
As much as it’s a show about survival, Class of ’07 is also about how high school haunts us all, even when we don’t want it to.
Because as much as it’s a show about survival, Class of ’07 is also about how high school haunts us all, even when we don’t want it to. Having no friends in your teenage years is just as formative as being popular, and being bullied is as unforgettable an experience as the guilt of inflicting harm. Every character’s unique reaction to being forced to survive the end of the world inside the dynamics that formed them as a teen is a testament to how adulthood itself is the result of surviving teenhood — and not all of us make it out.
That being said, it’s a joy to watch a survival show boasting a distinctly Aussie sense of humour. Where cannibalism in US survival series tends to be treated as a taboo horror with pseudo-satanic undertones, cannibalism in Class of ‘07 is a laugh-out-loud event. When the girls have “boiled their last shoe” it becomes time for the decision to be made. The only way choosing someone to eat can be made…in a Survivor style tribal council elimination, complete with hilariously directed cinematography.
Yellowjackets and The Wilds have remade the survival series in the image of angry complex women. But to see the story of women surviving the wilderness as an allegory for surviving girlhood in a recognisable Australian context has endeared it to my heart as one of the best shows of the year.
Class of ‘07 is streaming on Amazon Prime.