Auckland Flat-Sharing Comedy Flat3: Watch New Episodes Here

When we last left the Flat3 girls, Jessica and Perlina were having a conciliatory slap fight in an attempt to mend a serious breach in the girl code, and Lee was tripping on acid and getting alarmingly close to a giant teddy bear. After a nine- month hiatus, the comedy web series, which focuses on the travails — romantic and otherwise — of three New Zealand-Chinese flatmates, has returned for a third and final season.

Flat3 launched in February last year with a budget of just $1000 — the three leads (Ally Xue, JJ Fong and Perlina Lau) plus writer/director Roseanne Liang threw in $250 each (“That paid for lunch,” says Liang). The rest was down to the generosity of industry friends who donated their weekends to get it made. After gaining traction via niche blogs overseas, they raised around $6000 through a Kickstarter campaign for the second season.

And now NZ on Air have come on board to the tune of $100,000 for season three. “It sounds like a fortune, compared to what we had before,” says Liang. “But it’s about one-fifth what would be spent on an hour of scripted television.”

As budgets have grown, so too has the show’s ambition. “I’ve become more confident about pushing the boundaries of genre as we’ve gone along,” says Liang. “When we started, I was worried people would switch off if it wasn’t funny all the way through.”

While the series has been optioned for a television pilot script, and the team still hold out hope for a Broad City-like journey from web series to TV fame, this season marks the end of Flat3 for now. “Getting a television show was never the reason for making Flat3. We did it because we could, and it was fun. This is the best, most ambitious season and we’d like to finish on a high.”

The first two episodes of Season 3 are below; the remaining episodes will be available to view at flat3webseries.com every Friday from October 3.

 

http://vimeo.com/106778853

 

http://vimeo.com/106778854