BBC Announces New Comedies for 2023, Including Catherine Tate’s 'Queen of Oz'

British comedies, by and large, have been the province of white male writers. From Monty Python to The Outlaws, most hit comedies from across the pond haven't featured much in the way of diversity, and what little has made it over to American shores, like Starstruck (created by Rose Matafeo, co-written with Alice Snedden, directed by Karen Maine) and I Hate Suzie (created and written by Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper) haven't been marketed very well. Hopefully, that's about to change, as the BBC has unveiled a new slate of comedies for 2023 that put the voices of women and Black comedians front and center.

When asked by Deadline about the slate, BBC Comedy Director Jon Petrie claimed that no one in programming had deliberately planned for the lineup to be so diverse; this was merely happenstance of the best series being put forward coming from artists like Caroline Moran (Hullraisers), Akemnji Ndifornyen (Famalam), Sian Gibson (Inside No. 9), and Adjani Salmon (Doctor Who). And to be fair, none of these shows were greenlit or put to pilot at the same time -- most of them have been in the works since 2021 -- so this may indeed be a happy coincidence borne of the BBC's overall expansion of voices.

The biggest series is the one headed up by the best-known comedian in the group, Catherine Tate. She was already famous for her eponymous comedy series, The Catherine Tate Show, before she became a Doctor Who companion to David Tennant's Tenth Doctor, and has since gone on to star in The Office, plus her own series, Nan and Hard Cell, where she plays multiple characters. Her new series, Queen of Oz, is a topical comedy about the royal family, in which a fictionalized version of the King of England abdicates rule of Australia in order to give his wastrel daughter, Princess Georgina (Tate), something to do with her life.