Service: Stan.
Series Year: 2024
Watch: Prime Video
I’m honestly not sure what possessed me to dig back in the archives to watch this series. I originally signed up for some rando New Zealand streaming service called TVNZ+ to watch this thing. I really shouldn’t be this thirsty for a comedy series that absolutely nobody has seen or is asking for. But stubbornness got the best of me. What originally felt like a win soon revealed itself as a fail, as I probably would have had to get some IT specialist in to set up a super-secret VPN to get this going. But, to my amazement, this series popped up on Prime Video a mere month later! I took it as a sign. Because, man, I can’t resist me some nebbbishy Ben Feldman. Just an archetypal representation of my internal voice that I’ve heard echoing around my head my entire life and definitely identified with during his run on Superstore. Notice that I said Superstore and not his incredibly disturbing, but memorable arc on Mad Men. Because that would be psychotic.
But, yeah, I decided to give this thing a chance. Because, again, it felt pre-ordained to be a thing streaming in the background as I did other things. I’d watch one episode, weigh my enjoyment and see if I wanted to carry on. Or would it be just another series added to the abandoned trash heap? Turns out I have a hard time giving up on stuff. Which should really speak to the awfulness of the shows I do actually jettison. This is all to say that this one made it through to completion. Congrats? It did strike me that this is actually the second Stan. show I’ve watched in the past couple months of 2026. Which is weird. Especially given the fact both Population 11 and the other series, The Tourist, take place in the wilds of Australia. And both feature a foreigner — Feldman an American and Jamie Dornan from Ireland — in a whole fish-out-of-water scenario featuring a cast of wacky Aussies and very specific Australian quirks and shit that just happens naturally in a country filled with deadly creatures and a kind of Old West lawlessness that the outback engenders. The overlaps are completely coincidental, but I guess I like what I like.
Here, our fish out of water is a character named Andy Pruden. Not really sure why they chose that kind of innocuous last name, as Ben Feldman is always going to be Ben Feldman. Even when he’s plunked down in the middle of the Australian desert in a tiny town with a population of eleven. He even meets a young Wasian Aussie teen from town at one point named Shoshanna, does a confused double-take and asks, “Shoshanna, is that a Jewish name?” She, of course, has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s a total throw-away comic line, but gives you a little insight into who this character is despite never really being given much in the way of a backstory for him. Andy Feldman, indeed. It’s just say that this show is way more of a sitcom couched in a comedy mystery show than it is a hard-boiled crime drama or even a drama at all. The way The Tourist could certainly be at times. There is a mystery and a crime at the heart of the narrative, but it’s really just window-dressing to frame silly interactions. Plot-wise Andy is in this middle-of-nowhere town to track down his estranged father. His father being a bit of a scoundrel — like many of the folks in this town — who has apparently charmed a large number of the eleven inhabitants out of money or sympathy or friendship while running a scammy UFO tour. But, it seems, his father, Hugo (Darren Gilshenan), has vanished just prior to Andy’s appearance in the town. Where is Hugo? Is he dead? Did someone kill him? Mystery!
The question is why Andy has brought himself out to the middle of nowhere to track down a man he’s had no contact with in decades. Well, Andy and his buddy have been doing some light money laundering back in the US, and some of the money they’d been moving around disappeared from an account Andy had opened in his father’s name. Why he’d use his father’s info is completely beyond me, but it’s a plot device that I suppose could be a thing. Just not a smart thing. Anyhow, Andy is convinced that his father somehow discovered this account sitting out there in his name and managed to withdraw the cash from the account that was meant to be washed for this criminal syndicate that Andy and his co-worker have been pressured into moving. And, yes, if you’re thinking it, this show has a lot of the hallmarks of Ozark. In fact, some of the plot points and the setup are almost exactly the same. It’s tonally different, of course, but the mechanisms are super-similar. But, yeah, like Ozark Andy is on a clock to track down the missing money or the bad guys are going to start exacting payback on his friend back in Ohio and presumably on him should he ever return. But how will he ever manage these local rubes and weirdos to find his father — who may or may not have been actually abducted by the aliens that he based his business on — and get his money back?
Like every sitcom set in an isolated small town, there are characters. In this instance, it’s limited to eleven. Because that’s the population of the village. The show does a decent job of building these personalities quickly and creating the barbs for each to poke Andy with. They do pair him with another outsider female character who is an Aussie, but not a local, which gives her a kind of inside / outside stance. She, Cassie Crick (Perry Mooney), seems to be an ally of Andy, working with him to try to find his father and equally rolling her eyes at the townsfolk, but, as these series go, clearly also has an ulterior motive that is part of the show’s mystery at first. All of which reminds me of yet another one of these big town guy goes to small town series, Bodkin. I did keep waiting for the show to spark some romantic thing between Andy and Cassie, but happily that never happens. They do, of course, have a falling out because of deception first on his part and then on her part, but that’s all par for the course in terms of plot beats. It’s fine. This is all to say that the whole endeavor feels incredibly familiar if you’ve ever watched one of these types of shows, but it’s somehow like 5% funnier and more quirky when you add in Australian accents.
I will say that the crime piece of this — the whole money laundering thing — is pretty stunted. It could just be a case of Andy and his co-conspirator just not being good at being criminals, but their plot is pretty weak. Granted, this is just an upscaled sitcom, so I wasn’t necessarily looking for Dark level plotting here. I’m not going to ruin the mystery of what happened to Hugo or what the heck Cassie is up to, but suffice it to say that you will neither be shocked nor floored by the reveals (which happen much before the final, twelfth episode). They do annoyingly have that one episode where a couple characters are drugged and we have to see the effects of said drug through the characters’ POVs, which is a trope pet peeve of mine that really slows down a narrative, but the show otherwise keeps it breezy and generally rolls along at pace. The secondary and tertiary actors that they’ve chosen do a decent job of filling in the personality of the otherwise barren terrain, and the two leads, Mooney and Feldman, do a great job of playing off each other and keeping things light even when there is occasional violence and a little bit of cringe — mostly a completely unnecessary sexual relationship and some really uncomfortable sex scenes between a couple cops that does nothing for the show. I already knew I liked Feldman’s turnt-up, comedic vibe, but Mooney is really the breakout star here. I’d never seen her in anything, but she really pops off the screen and provides a fresh look and infectious acting style that feels natural, but energizing. At the end of the day, this isn’t an overly remarkable piece of media, but it’s certainly one that you could binge and feel like you hadn’t entirely wasted your life.
