“There was a point where it felt like season two wasn’t going to happen,” confesses Nick Boshier over tea in a Bondi café. “It was just taking longer than it should.” The reason for the delay was that major US players – Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Productions and Legendary Entertainment – had circled the possibility of financing Season 2. “Red Hour had made an offer to create Soul Mates: Season Two essentially,” says Nick, “I had a relationship with Debbie Liebling, who was an executive at Red Hour at that time. I’ve had such a professional crush on her that it’s ridiculous. She brought South Park into Paramount back in the day when South Park became South Park. She was one of the early executives on Borat. I’ve seen her in a few documentaries, so when I met her, I was just frothing. When she expressed interest in Soul Mates, I just, I literally, would have done anything.”
“It is hard when you’re a new creator and you get a bit starstruck with the idea of Ben Stiller’s production company making your thing and Legendary,” expands Christiaan. “You meet in their office, and they’ve fucking got the Legendary sign in there, which you’ve seen before Batman movies! We all walked away going, ‘Wow, fucking awesome! Awesome! Awesome!’ And then as soon as Connor and I got there, and we were looking at the script plan and what it would mean creatively, we were kind of like, ‘Fuck, this is actually not the best thing creatively for the show, to have to reimagine it all in another country and not be able to really continue the stories, but also have to reset some of the beats.’ For our Australian audience, which was only small but growing, this would be a jolt as a second season.”
The cavemen in Soul Mates
Connor is Christiaan’s younger brother, who co-writes and directs episodes of Soul Mates. “It was muddy in that it was a little bit of a US version but a little bit of Season Two,” says Christiaan. “They wanted something that worked as a Season One in the US so that they didn’t have to play the original season, but would tick ABC’s box as a season two here. That took a little while to work through.”
Eventually the negotiations fell apart. “We weren’t doom and gloom, but it didn’t feel like a thing,” says Nick Boshier today. “It didn’t feel like the ABC were jumping over themselves to do it, because at that point, the government was putting a lot of pressure on the ABC financially and also in the press. It just wasn’t a time to start investing in new shows.”
“And we also had the creative expectation that we didn’t want to do the second season of the show for the same budget as the first season,” adds Christiaan. “It’s just a momentum thing, and allowing ourselves creatively to grow. We all fucking flogged ourselves in Season One. We did a lot of work and left a lot of areas in which we didn’t remunerate. We just did a fucking lot of work for a very small budget and we said to ourselves with Season Two that at the very least we want the budget to grow so that we can do more. And there’s also just practical things like Screen Australia can’t match the money the second time around.”
The Kiwi Assassins in Soul Mates
Only a couple of weeks after the deal with Red Hour fell through, the Van Vuurens were due to attend an industry function at Cannes. “We had a conference where we gave a presentation on what was happening in Australian entertainment and covered our online history and then we showed Soul Mates,” says Christiaan. “There was a couple of people in the crowd there from NBC Universal and See So [NBC Universal’s comedy streaming platform for the US market] and they’d heard about Soul Mates; they’d heard about Hipsters. Long story short, ABC Commercial had a chance run in with NBCU and See So and just said, ‘Do you want to do it?’”
“Oh man, it was so fortunate,” says Nick.
“There were a few things that were serendipitous,” adds Christiaan. “Basically See So managed to plug the Screen Australia gap, and match the ABC dollar for dollar. It actually worked a lot better than the Legendary set up would have for us creatively, because it meant that we just got to keep making the show the way that we were making the show. We could shoot it all in Australia, and continue the stories more naturally.”
Soul Mates: Season 2 will premiere on ABC1 at 9:40pm on August 3, and in September, Seasons One and Two will become available in the US on NBC’s comedy portal, See So.
Part three our four-part chat with Nick and Christiaan will go live tomorrow. Click here to check out Part One.
