After watching Stan Australia’s latest original series, ‘He Had It Coming’, I thought about how best to describe it. The first and most obvious thing that came to mind was labelling it as a ‘who-dunnit’. The series features an unlikely pair of stand-in detectives trying to solve a string of murders. It’s got mystery, twists, great characters and even better suspects. At first glance, it has all the makings of an old-fashioned piece of hardboiled fiction.
However, you don’t need a magnifying glass to see that ‘He Had It Coming’ has bigger concerns than simply unmasking a killer. Set within the grounds of an Aussie university, the initial murder lights a powder-keg of gender politics that’s all too ready to explode. The campus turns into a warzone between aspiring men’s rights activists and battle-ready feminists. ‘He Had It Coming’ uses its genre framework to explore issues stemming from the patriarchy, including sexism, gender inequality, and social oppression.
If the series sounds like it might have too much going on, rest assured that the case is in more than capable hands. ‘He Had It Coming’ was born from the mind of Showrunner Gretel Vella and Executive Producer Chloe Rickard. Between the two, they are responsible for bringing dozens of productions to life across stage and screen. In 2021, Vella was nominated with her fellow writers for ‘Best Comedy Series’ by the Writers Guild of America for ‘The Great’. Rickard is a partner and chief operating officer at Jungle Entertainment, with series in development with Netflix, Disney, and CBS Studios.
We sat down with the duo to chat about how ‘He Had It Coming’ went from the page to the screen, the chemistry between series stars Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Lydia West, and whose idea it was to include Iced VoVo as a key prop.
Special thanks to Gretel Vella and Chloe Rickard for taking the time to chat. All eight episodes of ‘He Had It Coming’ will be available this Thursday (20/11) on Stan Australia. Below is the series official synopsis:
Barbara is a fashion influencer who posts about #girlpower all day long but is too busy partying to attend a protest. Elise is an awkward English exchange student who’s come to Australia to reinvent herself as a one-woman Pussy Riot but is a bit too scared of getting in trouble. After a chance meeting in art class, and fed up with the men in their lives, the girls decide to take a stand. In the dead of night and drunk as skunks, they deface the University’s Quadrangle, spray-painting it with the words ‘Kill All Men’. The next morning, the girls wake to some startling news: the university’s star rugby player has been murdered, castrated, and plonked right on top of their political statement. Now it’s up to them to erase their ties to the crime and track down the real culprit. Simple, right? They wish. The castrating killer has left the male students terrified, and as more bodies start showing up, the boys have a #MeToo movement of their own. For Barbara and Elise, this isn’t just a who-done-it-before-we-get-blamed-for-it, this is how-do-we-stop-the-gender-riot-we-created-before-it-turns-into-a-gender-war?
