He Had It Coming review – this messy crime-comedy has all the subtlety of a mallet to the crotch

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‘But I can’t get an F,” wails Elise (Lydia West) in the first episode of the Australian campus comedy He Had It Coming, shoulders slumping like soufflés as her tutor peers pityingly at her terrible paintings. “I’m here on a scholarship? I’m here to be an artist?!” Alas, poor Elise. No amount of wounded upspeak can disguise the fact that she is an aspiring artist in much the same way a bag of flour is an aspiring pastry. Her “work”, bless it, consists of daubing clothes on to impressionist nudes – a “protest”, apparently, against the patriarchy and its preoccupation with “ancient bush”. Unctuous Professor Phoenix (Harry Greenwood) is unimpressed. “Hmm,” he sighs, pouting affectedly at Elise’s “feminist reimagining” of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; the picnic’s enigmatic nude now sporting a pair of jeans and oversized novelty spectacles. Mon Dieu! The problem, explains Phoenix, slowly, is a lack of ambition. Feminist art isn’t for amateurs. “Be radical,” he smirks, as Elise quietly broils with rage. “Don’t settle for mediocrity.”

The nerve! “These men are holding us back,” she roars later at new pal Barbara (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), a prickly fashion influencer who is being slut-shamed by the campus jocks for having tipsily humped a stranger’s thigh at a party. “Yes,” agrees Barbara. “Let’s go vandalise something!” And so to the quadrant, where, in the dead of night, a mallet is applied to the genitals of the statue of the university’s hopelessly male namesake.

“FTP!” tee-hees Elise drunkenly. “That means Fuck The Patriarchy!”

The next morning, however, brings trouble with a capital strewth. The body of an alpha-jock has been discovered, sans penis, at the foot of the malleted effigy. “Oh, that poor boy,” gasps Elise’s lovely mum. “And his doodle.” Others are less gracious. “Hell, yeah,” whoops a member of the university’s feminist collective. The victim was, it seems, a rapist and a bully. “He had it coming.” As, apparently, did the next victim – a men’s rights activist whose corpse has been similarly de-doodled. Who, we gasp, dunnit?

He Had It Coming’s tagline is “Bad feminists. Worse detectives”, which makes it sound like an edgy Rosemary & Thyme reboot in which Pam Ferris and Felicity Kendal trample topsoil through a succession of crime scenes while shouting about Mooncups. But this Sydney-set series has loftier ambitions. What happens, it asks, when it is men, rather than women, who are forced to live with the constant threat of sexual intimidation and assault? Among the hot potatoes swept up in the ensuing eight episodes are misogyny, victim-blaming and social media’s complicity in harassment. And yet it quickly becomes clear that this black comedy is not entirely comfortable with the task it has set itself. It seems alarmed, somehow, by its own politics. Like poor Elise’s hopeless paintings, He Had It Coming appears to believe that simply pointing at something bad while going “nyer” is enough to convince onlookers that this constitutes a searing analysis of said bad thing. Which it most certainly does not. Instead, it spends most of its time avoiding the tricky stuff and focusing on its gleefully silly murder investigation, which entails Elise and Barbara galumphing around campus like pantomime horses while neighing quarter-witted theories into their neon-pink walkie-talkies. Consequently, the tone is all over the place. The second episode involves a man’s trousers falling down, a discussion about radical feminism, and a dog that can wink.

All of which ensures that the bits that do attempt to make a serious point land with the finesse of a mallet to the genitals. Still, He Had It Coming is, sporadically, very funny. It’s also much too cartoonish to be in any way offensive. Instead, the series seems perpetually distracted by its own puppyish daftness, wagging its tail as it drags yet another mutilated corpse across the refectory floor. Here, everyone is an idiot. The women are as self-delusional and/or unpleasant as the men, and everyone, ultimately, is offered a chance at redemption.

It’s a mess, but it’s an energetic mess and its heart – if not its doodle – is in the right place.

Not an F, then. But a well-earned C.