Aunty Donna’s Taking Comedy Into Their Own Hands & Doing What The Industry Failed To Do For Them

It's hard to think about the current Australian comedy scene without mentioning our beloved Aunty Donna boys Broden Kelly, Mark Bonanno and Zachary Ruane. But it's harder to think throughout their journey, the absurdist sketch comedy group were against the odds of a stubbornly traditional entertainment industry.

"People online were interested in stuff that was a bit more challenging, a bit brand new, a bit alternative … every time we worked with TV producers or TV networks for literally a decade, we were told to move away from that trajectory," Kelly told PEDESTRIAN.TV.

Since 2012, Aunty Donna grew a loyal audience with their YouTube videos, but when it came time to create a TV show — which eventually landed at Netflix — they were repeatedly told by the Australian media industry to conform to their standards.

R.I.P Aunty Donna's Stan show, Chaperons (Image: Chaperons/YouTube)

"We'd often make a pilot, and someone would say, you've gotta think of your dynamic as a trio," Kelly continued. "So Zach needs to want love and Broden needs to want approval. And we're like, 'We've been performing together for so long. We know what we're doing' and people go 'No, no, no,' and want to change it."

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Now that they've broken through the industry, Aunty Donna have taken matters into their own hands. Founded in 2018, their production company Haven't You Done Well Productions are working with fresh and emerging Aussie talent to give them the opportunity Aunty Donna had to scratch and scrape for.

"It was really hard for us to do something different and to be seen, and it's become harder from when we did it," Kelly said. "So our only goal was for us to be able to make things and not receive notes from people who didn't know better than us … where the creatives pretty much had autonomy creatively to make decisions for their better or for their worse."

Every trio ever. (Image: Descent/YouTube)

The company's newest launch is Descent, a high-fantasy sci-fi series written by Ella Lawry, Madi Savage and Millie Holten. The YouTube series stars the Melbourne trio traveling to the bottom of the ocean to save humanity from climate doom.

"We've wanted to create something that was long form, narrative, high concept, with, like, big sets, cool props or costumes," Lawry told PEDESTRIAN.TV. "But like, finding the money to do it [was] very challenging. To have had the support of Haven't You Done Well to make this, we've been pinching ourselves the whole time."

It's unlikely a show like Descent would ever be made for one of Australia's major networks. Kelly says that's a good thing.

"When you look at the Logies and you look at the shows that were put up as the flagship Australian shows, it's nice to make things that I know that people genuinely love, but would never be made for TV," Broden said. "As TV dies and becomes more and more irrelevant. It's a want that people still have a chance to be seen and to be able to make premium content."

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Having built a brand on web-series like 1999 and Glenridge Secondary College, it makes perfect sense why and how Aunty Donna recognise digital-first content as the future of the Australian entertainment industry.

"We'd hate it to become what's happened with music in this country, where it's really, really hard to be seen, or you have to be with a major label and pretty much just be making the same old like product. If we can do that, that would be really, really cool."

Descent is available to stream on YouTube here.