Meet the powerhouse women behind Sis the Show, Comedy Central's Polynesian Key and Peele

They made no compromises with their melting pot of Polynesian comedy. ‘We did it our own way,’ says creator Hanelle Harris

The last thing Hanelle Harris expected to be doing while heavily pregnant was lead an intensive three-week film shoot all over Auckland. Yet as someone whose personal motto is “dream big”, she knows dreams rarely manifest at exactly the moment you want them to.

“I think my friends are over it, aye,” Harris laughs. “I’m always coming up with big ideas and they’re like ‘ugh, have a sleep, man’.”

Harris’s latest big idea is Sis the Show, a sketch series that dissects race, religion, gender and pop culture through the lens of three Pasifika women. It’s a spinoff, of sorts, from her previous work, Baby Mama’s Club, a comedy web series that ran for two seasons about a group of women who learn they have children by the same, absent father, and band together to track him down.

The central three characters on Sis – cousins Gee Gee (Hillary Samuela), Miki (Gaby Solomona) and Malia (Suivai Pilisipi Autagavaia) – were initially bit players in Baby Mama’s Club, but they garnered such a strong reaction from fans online that Harris began to entertain the idea of a whole separate show for the women.

“Baby Mama’s Club [season] two was a very male-driven narrative and we wanted to pump up the female voices from the Baby Mama’s Club world … Every time these characters, these three cousins, were on screen everyone was like, ‘that’s such an iconic trio’. It was very clear there was a strong audience for it and we just said ‘let’s run with it, people love it, they want it, let’s go bigger’.”

And bigger they went: the first season of Sis the Show was picked up by Comedy Central – no small feat for any New Zealand or Australian production.

Like a Polynesian Key and Peele, the sketches on Sis the Show are as diverse as the creatives bringing them to life.

They range from high-concept sci-fi commentaries on racial profiling – such as a security guard that tracks brown customers through the aisles of a supermarket like a T-1000 – to a clever Samoan spin on Mean Girls.

And then there’s the meta thread that runs throughout the show of a subtly racist yet self-identifying white ally – played by comedian Tom Sainsbury (Guns Akimbo, Wellington Paranormal) – who has commissioned three Polynesian creatives to come up with sketches for Sis. Among them is Amanaki Prescott, a renowned Tongan dancer, choreographer and fakaleiti (Tongan transgender woman).

Harris, who is Māori, says she was conscious of how “very rare” it is to have a cast and crew as diverse as Sis does – not just in front of the camera but behind it too. Her co-writers range from Samoan to Hawaiian, and Stan Walker and Parris Goebel’s stylist Sammy Salsa is dressing the show.

“It’s a melting pot of Polynesia,” Harris says. “What you’re seeing is a true reflection of the way our generation interacts with each other as Polynesians.”

The effects are already being felt, according to Gaby Solomona, who has been “overwhelmed” with messages from all around the world – including one from a friend who witnessed a group of Pasifika girls excitedly watch the Sis trailer on a Sydney train.

“[I’ve been] flooded with messages, especially from lots of young girls – actually not even young – every age from our Māori and Pasifika communities,” she says.

“It’s really beautiful to see the impact it’s having, which is what we wanted from the get-go. It was always our ‘why?’ – that our Māori and Pasifika women would feel heard and seen. To have that happen is sort of surreal.”

Solomona met and developed a friendship with Harris at the now defunct Pacific Institute of Performing Arts, which they both attended. She worked on the first season of Baby Mama’s Club as a runner before Harris started throwing her in sketches.

Fast forward a few years and now she’s not only one of the faces of the show, but she’s a producer as well – something Harris had been “chasing me to do for years”.

“We wrote our own shit, we produced it, we directed it, we performed it, our commissioners were both brown women: from the top down was brown women and brown people,” says Harris.

That collaboration and sisterhood support is at the core of Sis the Show’s success, its creators say.

“Especially being a mother myself, I never want childcare to be a barrier to why someone can’t work or follow their dreams. We really try our hardest as a production to support everyone in making sure they have a balanced life and work. And I was spoilt, I had people bringing me burgers,” Harris says.

“The thing that we’re most proud of isn’t that we cracked Comedy Central, it’s that we exist on something as respected as Comedy Central and we did it our own way, never comprising, and they took us as we were.”

• The first season of Sis the Show is available to watch now on Comedy Central

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