The Sonny Disposition was born in a Coburg office its boss abandoned, along with the country, during a fraud investigation.
Simon Taylor co-created The Sonny Disposition with Josh Samuels, and all six episodes have been streaming on Stan since 19 October. Taylor directs and stars as Sonny Tyler, a podcast host trying to climb the rankings while his fiancée pushes for a wedding date. Anyone without a Stan login can watch it free on 9Now or catch it on 9Go from 11 November.
The series follows the whole office behind Sonny’s microphone. Oscar Robertson plays co-host Toby Bruckmann and Claudia Greenstone is producer Angie Jacobs, the one left to clean up when Sonny’s bookings go wrong. Desiree Katakis plays social media manager Dani Stephanidis. Maddy Tyers is community manager Maddie Wheeler, and Stefan Ranaja Weerarathna plays photographer Suren De Silva.
The Sonny Disposition
- All six episodes streaming now on Stan
- Free on 9Now and screening on 9Go from 11 November
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Taylor had been catching up with a friend whose marketing company was under investigation for fraud. That friend was already overseas, and mentioned his big Coburg office was sitting empty. Taylor took the door code expecting a quiet place to write and walked into a fully furnished workplace still set up to run, minus the staff.
He rang longtime collaborator Josh Samuels to come and see it. Samuels showed up to find the first scene already written. For days the pair wandered the rooms improvising, building Sonny’s world out of whatever the office already had in it. Six weeks later they’d written, cast, shot and cut a pilot. Funding for a full season came through within a year. Taylor and Samuels run the whole thing like a tech startup, swapping out prototypes until one sticks.
Superman and the guinea pig milk
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Episode one opens with a sponsored guest storming out over an anal wellness joke, putting the podcast’s third-place ranking at risk. Sonny’s only fix is an interview with an erratic UFC fighter. Toby then turns up with a manager who’s trademarked his likeness, so nobody can joke about him on air. Dani outsources her whole job to AI bots and ends up booking Superman, until the team clocks that his Australian rep is the manager they just showed the door.
Sonny’s taste for health gurus brings government regulators down on the show in episode three. Toby takes over the empty studio for a Dungeons & Dragons podcast, is booted by his own players and gets even with dodgy guinea pig milk that lands Sonny back in hospital. Maddie picks a fight with the office’s bargain knock-off air fryer and loses.
Taylor’s Beat Streets years
Beat readers have seen Taylor before. He spent more than four years presenting Beat Streets, Beat’s online show, interviewing the likes of James Acaster and Ronny Chieng at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Channel 31 had him hosting Live on Bowen for three seasons.
A Tonight Show producer spotted his stand-up in Los Angeles, and at 24 Taylor was writing for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, clocking up more than 20,000 jokes across two years. In July 2022 he became the first Australian comedian to do stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, then got waved over to the couch. His writing credits include Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell and Netflix’s Magic for Humans. He’s also written a kids’ book called Sally and the Magical Sneeze.
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