“Bump”, the Australian comedy-drama series featuring Claudia Karvan, Angus Sampson and Nathalie Morris, is set to return for a third season on Nine’s streaming video on demand service Stan.
The series first premiered on Stan on Jan. 1 last year and broke all previous viewing records for the service.
Stan subsequently ordered two more seasons of the show from Roadshow Rough Diamond. The second season dropped on Boxing Day and the third is currently in production.
Claudia Karvan, co-creator, actor and producer, said if the team had known there would be three seasons from the get-go, it may have changed their approach to storytelling.
“We may have been tempted to build in a story engine which it doesn’t really naturally have,” Karvan said at last week’s Screen Forever conference.
“And certainly when we came around to the second series, we’re not manipulative and going ‘Let’s have another baby’, or ‘Let’s have a death’, or ‘Let’s try and keep up to speed with series one’. We just had to bed down with those characters and trust that we’ve got a loyal audience.”
Now that the audience and characters are bedded down, however, there’s going to be a massive shake-up in “Bump” Season 3.
“But then series three, yeah, there is a massive rug pull – which I don’t think is manipulative at all – but it’s really exciting,” she revealed.
“That was really exciting to have series two and series three commissioned at the same time. That was a gift.”
Dan Edwards, producer at Roadshow Rough Diamond, said having the two-series order was a “godsend”.
“I remember being in the room with Clauds and going ‘We need to open up the world. We know how much we love Vince (Loane Sa’ula) and Rema (Safia Arain). Let’s give them some points of view’. I think we started with that in Season 2. They were some of my favourite episodes. I love, obviously, the core relationships and it goes even further again in Season 3.
“It just gives you so much more confidence that you’ve got that run ahead of you.”
Kelsey Munro, “Bump’s” co-creator and writer, meanwhile, admitted that she’s glad she didn’t know the show would continue to a third series when she first conceptualised it.
“I think I would have been terrified, actually,” she said. “I just wanted to make it as good as possible. And I didn’t have any sense of how the public might respond to that. But I think we sort of, by accident or by design, started with a concept that can spin out across series.
“But I don’t think I would have been able to write it knowing that might happen, necessarily.”
In addition to “Bump” Season 3, Stan has also commissioned a spin-off series, “Year Of”.
It will take place at the same fictional school that is featured in “Bump”, which is filmed at Sydney Secondary College Blackwattle Bay Campus..
Edwards said it will have the same “terrific sense of humour” as “Bump”, but will expand its outlook.
“That school is Blackwattle High School in Glebe, which sits right there on the edge of the [Sydney] CBD. And it’s got a very significant public housing population, plus $12 million terrace houses, and just that melting pot in the geography and all those things is kind of what was inherent on “Bump” in that school,” he said.
“And that’s going to carry over, but “Year Of” is going to branch out. It’s a lot more ensemble. The kids are really carrying the story.
“It will still be multi-generational, and I think that’s a big part of “Bump’s” success and I think it’s what John [Edwards] and Clauds have done together on a number of series as well in terms of the multi-generational thing.”
He wouldn’t give much more away about “Year Of” though.
“I won’t say too much more,” he said.