What if science offered you another 50 years of life, starting tomorrow? What if childbirth no longer required a womb? What if you couldn’t lie without being found out? These are just some of the questions Annabel Crabb will put to her panelists when ABC’s Tomorrow Tonight returns for its second season from 9pm on March 30th.
Mediaweek spoke to Crabb about what it takes to peer into the crystal ball of the not-too-distant future.
With a season of the show under its belt, Crabb says that Tomorrow Tonight has become a lot more streamlined as it returns for round two.
“The driving force behind the show was always an opportunity to think about all of the moral questions that are coming at us down the chute at the rate of knots.
“In the first series, we put heaps of resources into building fancy scenarios and putting our guests on a choose your own adventure thing. Then when we were planning the second series, we worked out that actually, the most interesting part of it is to watch human beings be morally challenged or to consider questions that hadn’t occurred to them before. We worked out that we could actually do that without quite so much of the infrastructure, so we’ve really pared it back.”
With so much happening in the present, you can be forgiven for not spending too much time looking into the future. That’s where Tomorrow Tonight steps in.
“There’s so much going on in the present day, so much disaster, so much misfortune, so many changes in our lives, and I think your ability to focus on any particular challenge is really limited in these circumstances.
“Who’s staying up at night worrying about deep fakes? We’re staying up at night worrying about 100 other things. I mean, it’s sort of tomorrow’s nightmares today.
“As a species, we’re not that great at looking ahead and planning because human beings tend to change only at the last minute, and only when there’s absolutely no alternative. So the aim of this programme has always been to get smart people to have a little look into the future and find out where all this is leading.”
Two of those smart people joining Crabb on the show this year are her regular panelists Charlie Pickering – who is also working on the show behind the scenes with Thinkative Television – and Adam Liaw.
“The thing that I really, actually love about working with Charlie and Thinkative Television – and lately with Adam Liaw as well – is that they’re all people who are really committed to making entertaining TV but want it to be worth something as well, and to leave you at the end of the half-hour with stuff that you didn’t have beforehand.”
Crabb has similar praise for the team at Thinkative Television.
“The craft that goes into making television is something I find so fascinating. And the thing that I really respect about Chris Walker, Charlie Pickering, and the team at Thinkative is that they always make television that’s useful. It’s funny, but it’s useful.
“I love television that entertains and then gives you something, and I think that they are better than almost anyone else in Australia making that stuff.”
The first season of Tomorrow Tonight aired in 2018, with production of season two delayed several times due to Covid-19. Crabb says that amongst the delays, there has been a silver lining.
“The weird thing is that we worked so hard, and we whittled it down, and we did so many drafts and workshops and pilots. It gave us that extra time that was frustrating because we wanted to get it made, but also, it gave us something really rare in television production land: an opportunity to just sit with it and whittle it back. So what it ended up being is the sharpest purest version of itself, which is actually has been a real pleasure.”
Overall, Crabb hopes that Tomorrow Tonight will bring a spark of curiosity to its viewers.
“I hope that people feel like their curiosity is engaged. Because curiosity is a magical human feature, and what we’ve got in these episodes is little bits of information that will make you go ‘what!?’”