The Chaser Report - When Motherhood Meets Manslaughter | Charlotte George | Miriam Glaser

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Dom sits down for a chat with Charlotte George and Miriam Glaser, creators of the new web-series 'Buried' about what led them to blend together the worlds of parenthood and manslaughter into a comedy production. Also, Charlotte, Miriam and Dom figure out how to navigate the mine-field that is school Whatsapp group chats.You can watch Buried - The Series here!Buried is a mum-noir comedy thriller created and written by Miriam Glaser & Charlotte George, directed by Charlotte George, produced by Fran Derham and starring Miriam Glaser. After single mum Abi (Miriam Glaser) accidentally kills a cyclist on the morning school run, her “to-do” list gets a lot more complicated as she tries to juggle the battle of everyday parenting with the disposal of a corpse. Over the course of one not-so-average school day, Abi must navigate a suspicious rival parent, avoid the police, and hide the evidence – all before 3:30pm pick-up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report. Dom here today and a special episode where we feature a fantastic new web series called Buried, which poses several important questions, such as how do you dispose of a body using only what you can find in your local hardware store? And is sleep deprivation a defence for murder? It's very relatable.

Not so much the corpse part, but certainly the parenting being challenging part. And if you've got young children and you feel like you could kill someone on some days, this is a series that explains exactly what happens next. We welcome from Buried, writer, director and co-creator Charlotte George. Hello. Hi, Dom. Thanks for having me. Welcome.

And also the other co-creator and starring in the role of Abby, it's Miriam. Glazer, hello, Miriam. Hi, Dom. Thanks so much for having us today. Oh, not at all. Thank you for the entirement I got from this. We'll talk about how you made the show and some of the really annoying things about parenting

that the show really nailed right after this. Okay, so talk us through the pitch. Miriam, your character of Abby's having a really crap day, even by the standards of parents of two young children. Yeah, look, she was already having a bad day. She was late for school, and that's just completely amplified when she accidentally kills a cyclist on the morning school run.

And from there, her day, takes a pretty dark turn. And that's a massive understatement. But, you know, she's a mum who has to get shit done. And so her goal becomes not only to do her usual to-do list, grocery shopping, return library books and so on, but also to dismember and dispose of a corpse. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, look, it's a situation I haven't been in myself. I've seen lots of, I guess, noir. Lots of your friends have to. Yeah, that's right. But, you know, lots of noir movies, lots of kind of movies where there's various gangsters trying to get rid of bodies. Why not a single mother? He's just having a bad date? I think it's important, Charlotte, isn't it?

That we meet the cyclist earlier in the piece before the fatal event, and he's very annoying. I don't want to demonise all cyclists, but I know that some of them are a little irritating. Yeah, I mean, hashtag, not all cyclists, obviously. Absolutely. But, yeah, we do establish pretty early on that he's a bit obnoxious, although that's a bit obnoxious. Although that's all you ever learn about him. So, you know, who knows. Beyond that, we never learn.

Does he have a family? You know, who he is. Really, he's a metaphor for the burden of parenting and the fact that not even death will stand in the way of all the shit you've got to do. Your kids don't care. Your kids don't care if you're sick. Your kids don't care if you've, you know, just murdered somebody. There's, you know, they've got their needs.

And as a parent, you're expected to just, you know, put that first. I like that. A lycra-clad symbol for annoying chores that you just. have to do. And no matter what the task is, even disposing the corpse, yeah, the other stuff has to happen. This is one of the things I love about it, that you have to make the drop off. You have to, you know, entertain your child and desperately try and get them to sleep. I'm getting the sense that some pretty significant recent experience has gone into creating this program. I don't know what you mean. It's all we just imagined the whole thing. Nothing

is based in real life. Is it, Miriam? Oh, no, I've committed manslaughter a few times. We don't want like a baby reindeer situation here, so, you know, we have to be careful. That's right. That's right. You've got to be very careful. But yeah, just along the line, there are so many things that absolutely shit me about being a parenting, about being a parent. And the random, I can't speak today. I've just been solo parenting for the past week.

So I'm completely afraid. We get it then. You've got our full sympathy. Yeah, I may have killed people on the school run this morning. I'm not sure. Who knows, yeah. But random strangers giving advice. Why is it that people think that just because you happen to have a baby,

attached to you or an estralla or whatever. That gives them the right to come up, touch the baby, comment on the baby, and judge your parenting. What is that? I'm just so glad others have hit on the same issue. I used to judge parents so much before I was a parent. I'd say, you know, kids on devices and things and think, oh my God, I will never do that. And now that's 100% me. And I'm the mum screaming at her kids in the supermarket. And so I just don't judge anybody anymore. But it still comes at you, you know, like that unsolicited advice, especially, I think, think when you've got a baby, you know, sort of just this, this, like, flashing light saying that you need help when actually most of the time we have it under control.

Absolutely. The first time I left the house with my, then-newborn, and I caught the train. And I was like, you know, it's like, you're getting out of the house for the first time. Yeah. It's all very exciting. And this woman came up to me, she's like, oh, you know, how old's the baby? And I think he was like three weeks or something. And then she said, as she looked down and she looked at my stomach and went, oh, so you haven't managed

to get out an exercise yet. And I sort of went to say, oh, they say not to exercise for the first six weeks anyway, because I have just gone through a bodily trauma of, you know, pushing a watermelon out my body. You know, like it's, you're not supposed to. But also, I was just like, also, fuck you. I don't need to justify myself, do you? I know. I sort of just went, ah, and I just felt a bit deflated and just kind of walked down the other end of the platform and tried to avoid it.

So a big thanks to that person for making your first heroic trip out of the house onto PT. Yeah. an annoying exercise and judgment. No, look, I completely relate, Miriam. I was, I'm definitely an annoyingly judgy onlooker about things like screen time and all and all this kind of stuff. Then I was very lucky because I became an uncle before I became a parent. And so I got to see up close, I got to have a little bit of quality baby time.

And also I remember two or three days into my nephew's life being left with him for an hour just so that my sister-in-law could just get something or other done. And I was so excited. And just the, what the hell do I do? when they start screaming. This all comes out in the series. And admittedly, Abby's got a six-year-old and a recently, I don't know, a couple months old or something, child.

But yeah, it really is. How earth you improvise your way through it? It's almost like improv, isn't it, having to parent sometimes. It is. I mean, separate to working together, Charlotte and I are actually friends. And I just thought of this moment, Charlotte, where I'd had my son, Charlotte didn't have children yet. and she did me this massive favour and agreed to watch my son,

having not had kids herself. And I remember Charlotte that you rocked up with a book and a magazine. And I was like, that is never going to happen. You are not going to open either of the thing. But I loved that you thought that you would. And I'm sure after you had your son, you knew that those things were just going to be put in the cupboard and just seen again in eight years' time.

Yeah, the naivety, the naivety. But, yeah, I think you still owe me for that, though, Miriam. Actually, I'm not sure. Oh, that's... I've got to return the babysitting base. That's true. Yeah, I've, I'm definitely owed some babysitting by my brother. Because, of course, now that he has children, now that I have children, he has the same

children as before. I know, it's pretty inconvenient, isn't it? Very annoying. You've got to get in there first. You've got to get in there first. Or not at all. Or not at all, absolutely. No, I don't know how I got through that first hour.

But in many other things about older children as well, the group WhatsApp and the politics of that. Oh my God, the amount of politics that my school's group WhatsApps have gone through. We had, without wanting to get too specific for anyone from my school who might be listening, situation where a former person who ran all the WhatsApps had no more kids at the school, but didn't want to surrender control of the WhatsApps. Wow. So do you start a whole lot of WhatsApp? Do you try and reason with the person? How do you deal with that? Oh, it's, it's an absolute minefield. And then they're now quite actively policed. So something's off topic, you get in trouble on WhatsApp?

They are. That scene, Dom, in the series with the WhatsApp confrontation, that was actually something that happened to me. Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. I really hope. Well, I'm so busy to the choice of podcasts. But, yeah, I was out trick-a-treating with my kids on Halloween and got accosted by another mum for not including her in a WhatsApp.

You monster. You monster. I know. But I, I truthfully, like, I wasn't even the group admin, you know? Like, it wasn't my responsibility. And I got. Excuses, excuses. Yeah, I know.

I'm really sorry to that well. You knew, didn't you? You knew, Miriam. Come on. Well, she certainly called me as soon as this happened. It was like, I've got a great scene for our show. Oh, that's great. As you know, I rang, after the, after the shock dissipated, I rang Charlotte.

And I was like, we have to use this in something. This is gold. No, it really is. The best story. though, is the one that we will not mention whose story this is, but someone who accidentally put a dick pick on the... Oh my gosh. That's pretty. And by accident, you know, I just thought they were sending it to somebody who, you know, presumably was interested in such things. And then they got kicked

off the WhatsApp and then they couldn't delete it because they'd been kicked on. You would hope that the person they were intending to send it to was a willing recipient. Yeah, my goodness. Yeah, that's the impression that we've been given. But, yeah. That might have to be in our next one. That is extraordinary. I had a thing just like this last week where some genius on the Kendi WhatsApp because I've got a kiddies who's in Year 1, a bit like in the series. Some genius, I don't know whether in Victoria you have this thing called crunch and sip.

Are you across crunch and sip? It's insane. It's a really insane name for a thing. It's basically you have to give your kids fruit essentially. And they all sit together and have fruit around the time of recess and a drink. And for some reason, they police that now rather than in my day. It was just, oh, you've got little lunch. and we'll recess and you eat, whatever it's, and you've got to do crunch and sip.

We've got to prepare all the fruit and whatever, and they all sit and have it together. I've seen it. And so some genius was like, okay, parent crunch and sip, and we all met in the park and had champagne, you know, at the end of our first term of candy to celebrate. That's fruit. That's made from fruit. That's right. It is.

It's a health drink. And, but someone texted on the WhatsApp. It's a fantastic food group. I was saying, we've got to do this again to celebrate, you know, surviving third term of year one. And someone's like, I wasn't invited to that. What was that? What was that? What's that going on?

And oh, the sheer awkwardness. And I was like, why did I mention this thing? Yeah. The shame is real. Yeah, the WhatsApp group politics are just off the charts, aren't they? It's just, yeah, I'm one of those kind of voyeurs who I don't actually ever post anything. Oh, you're a lurker. It's not a bad thing to be.

And also having other friends who are on the same WhatsApp, who you can then laugh at in a different WhatsApp. about the other people. But it does get complicated. You don't want to mix those WhatsApps up or you're being in massive trouble. And that could be where the problems arise, like you just raised, Dom. You know, you put the invitation on the wrong WhatsApp. Some people aren't invited. You know, you've got to be careful.

It's a minefield out there. It's an absolute mind field. I hear you, Dom, though, that slinter group that you've got where you take a screen grab of something that's someone else. Not that I do that at my daughter's school. That's in a different context entirely. None of us ever do this ever. I just need to take a moment to.

to check my recent WhatsApp messages while we play some ads just a second. The Chaser Report, more news, less often. You would be saying, Miriam, that your real life experience with the WhatsApp groups was straight into the series. Where did the idea come from to make Buryd? How did the whole idea evolve? Charlotte and I made a short film together a few years ago, which was about a mum returning to work done in the style of a spy thriller.

So we, I think, really loved that idea of genre bending and putting things together that don't usually go together. We wanted to sort of amp up that idea and push it as far as we could in terms of like putting a show together that explores motherhood and manslaughter, which are two things that don't usually go together. I mean, not enough, arguably. We're going to change that. We're going to change that in real life and on TV.

But I think that I hope that that's where a lot of the comedy comes from is that juxtaposition of this character's domestic life colliding with this very gory situation that she finds herself in. And Charlotte, you know, when she was directing, was always looking for these little moments where we could dial that up. Like, spoiler alert, when I'm burying the body at the end of the series, Charlotte's, we were on set and Charlotte was like, what if you know your baby can't get to sleep? you need to sing them a song while you're burying the body, you know? And so we were just always looking for little moments like that where we could put those two worlds together that have, until now, I don't think, really been put together. Yeah, it certainly reminded me of, I don't know,

many dismemberment problems scenes I've seen in other gangster movies, but then also the way in which parenting completely intrudes and anything else you're trying to get done. I mean, it just trumps whatever the task may be, if something as important as removing them. remains of your crime. And then suddenly... She's not a master criminal as well.

So that's what we kept saying as well. Like, you know, so the crew would be like, oh, you know, do you think she would really do this? Or do you think it's okay that she's got blood all over it when she goes to see her neighbor? It's like, she hasn't noticed. She's not a master criminal. She doesn't know what she's doing.

And also, as a parent of young children, bodily fluids, you know, stranger to that. Forget. No idea you got them. Yeah. Yeah, you just believe you too. It's just really an extension of the spew on the shoulder. Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely. Absolutely. No, there's also that, like what you were saying, Dole about that, like, you've still got to get shit done. Yeah. Like that's in the supermarket where she grabs bleach, rubber gloves, rope. But then also, nappies, because, you know, you're at the supermarket. Yeah, never turned out a chance to get nappies. It's one of the great parenting rules.

You don't leave shopping center without an extra pair of nappies because you never know when they're out of your size. And also, even just it being impossible to fit things into the back of a hatchback, when one of those things, is a corpse. That much harder. That guy, we hardly used a dummy for that. That's a real guy who did almost all of the being shoved into the boat, falling out of the boot, like he lands bump on the bricks. That was, you know, there was a stunt man who he did the actual stunt of being hit by the car and the car door, and then he did all the being dragged on the floor, being shoved into the boot, falling out of the boot, being dragged through the, so he was absolutely terrific. Was there a moment where you were worried you'd killed him? Like falling out of the back of the car? I think Mary of Dead

Miriam was a bit like, oh, I don't know if I can do this. I did feel very stressed in that scene where I had to open this car door and it's all very tightly choreographed. And I think when Charlotte and I wrote that stunt, you don't really think about it, right? You write one line that says, she opens her door and car door is a cyclist. And then you look around on set and you've got a safety officer, an assistant safety officer, a stunt coordinator, a stunt person, a nurse. And you're like, oh, you know, we brought this to me ourselves.

Absolutely. But I was stressed. Lucky I had to look stressed in that scene because I wasn't really acting. I was very stressed. And the stunt people kept being like, just do more, Miriam. Doesn't matter. He's fine. That's great.

Put him out harder. Just shove him around. He'll be alright. He's like, oh yeah, I'll do it. They were amazing. That's fantastic. Well, I mean, look, now that she started on her life crime, Abby, clearly it's an accident.

We don't want to, because we're totally on Abby's side throughout the whole thing. It's one of the lovely things about it. You really want her to win and just get away with this thing because she's been so sleep deprived. But there is. some other people in the series without wanting to name names, if she's going on a spree, some of them, I think, nominate themselves as next in line, I reckon, how that she knows how to do it. So, you know, we have been asked about a second series and you're saying, Dom, that maybe

she could become a serial killer. Well, it might be hard to make a sympathetic. What's your pitch? But there are certainly some people in the series who, you know, if their body did need to be disposed of, I think the audience would be with you. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good to hear.

And I'm glad that you root for her. against your better judgment because that's to be fair he didn't say against his better judgment don't you'll say that look I mean if a Pilates accident went terribly went terribly wrong or something uh who knows anyway look um it sounds as though you have a very rich kind of collaborative process in and you had a great time putting this whole thing together um how do you make a web series like this because it's a huge effort i know having made you know comedy sketches and so on 35 minutes or whatever it is of shooting that's a lot of work i how did you do it in the first place given that this is Australia. And B, how did you do it given it as discussed? You have

children. How'd you get anything done? Well, yeah, so we, the series is funded by Screen Australia and Vic Screen. So, yeah, the first hurdle is putting in those funding applications. I'm sure you've done plenty of those in your time, Dom. They, you know, long and require a lot of detail. But, you know, the good thing is that part of doing that is you get it in your head a lot more as well. And we worked with producer Fran Derham, who I'd worked with before, but Miriam hadn't. So we did the funding applications, and yeah, then it was still, as always, you know, the budget's tight even when you've got money. Like, I think every time you get something, your ambition goes up, you know, like we made

a short film for nothing where we filmed it in one day and it was all pretty much in one location. And as soon as you're applying for funding, you go for something more ambitious, like a stunt in the first episode and children and blood everywhere and all these things make things more complicated. Yeah, so we filmed in six days and we were just lucky to get incredible people, you know, So some of the people who are in our short film are in this as well, Fiona Choi. I've seen her in a bunch of things.

She's terrific. Always terrific. She's excellent. Yeah, she's always great. Yeah, so we started with people that we knew that we'd worked with before. And then we reached out to people we'd never met like Michael Logo and Genevieve Morris. And, yeah, they all just, we were thrilled that they all agreed to be in it. Yeah.

And so now it's just about when you, because it's a web series and it's going up on YouTube and on our website, it's now how do you get people to watch it? You know, there's however many millions of videos uploaded to YouTube every day. So then our next challenge is how we stand out and have that audience find, find our show. Well, that's a perfect segue. How do people find it? It's published today on the day that you're hearing this. It's available.

Where do people go? Yeah. Well, you can search for Buried the series on YouTube or we've got a website, which is buried the series.com. That'll do it. And that'll do it. And yeah, all five episodes are up there, total of half an hour. It's like one sitcom episode, but you get five episodes.

Absolutely. And it's pretty fast. You can just watch straight through. But also magnificently unsuitable for children. I love the extent to which you would not at all watch this with a child, both because of the graphic nature of it, but also it reveals an awful lot about parenting hacks. Like the extent to which you can use screen time to distract your children from anything, even a corpse being into the car with them.

The little girl that we had in the series who played Rosa, she was incredibly, switched on and we you know obviously filmed everything separate to her she didn't see any of the blood and gore and the extensive amount of swearing that's in the show but um i do remember sitting in the car with her and she was like so what does happen to the cyclist and i was like oh you know he just goes to hospital and gets a band-aid and he's right you know not wanting to reveal to her that i'm about to chop him up and make a DIY grave um yeah and then there's the age where kids love that stuff too. I don't know what exactly. It's somewhere between six and 12 kids, kids would be like wanting to collaborate on the ideas of getting rid of the bones or something.

True. My kids actually came on set for a visit and got some fake blood on their hands. Actually, the day we filmed that we were in a, in Kensington where I live, and I was getting completely drenched in blood for this scene. And I didn't quite realize it was 8.30 in the morning and there were all these parents on the way to school drop off. It's a really hard thing to explain to, you know, succinctly. Oh, no, everything's fun. We're just shooting a web series. They're like, sure, sure, sure, while they're speed dialing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just get your service to check that one. Absolutely. Well, look, it's, it's very funny. It really is. Congratulations on blending your, your hard one experience, have had a wrangle young

children and the challenges of it with. I'm hoping something you haven't actually experienced yourselves, but if you did have to, you'd know what to do. It's really great. And I can't wait to see what you're going to do next. I hope there's more projects on the way. Thanks, Dom. Yeah. Well, you know, you've got to get something out of parenting. And if that's a comedy web series, then great. We did that. Charlotte always says, if we don't laugh, then we'll just cry. Oh, what a note to leave it on.

Well, congratulations on getting something made in this country. It's not easy to do. But also, there are many, many laughs. Thank you for them. Thank you. Thanks, Tom. Thank you so much for having you. It's our pleasure.

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