Please Like Me may well be the only show this year to begin its season premiere with a threesome. The awkward exchange of kisses between Josh, his boyfriend, Arnold, and a handsome interloper is made even more awkward by the knowledge that one of the actors – the show’s creator and star, Josh Thomas – was directing the scene at the time.

“It was Jackson [Gallagher], that boy’s second day on set, and I’m like, ‘OK, so you’re going to kiss me, and then you’re going to kiss him, and I need you to roll around … ’,” he laughs, horrified at the memory. “It’s especially weird when we’re doing so many sex scenes this season. A few times I’d be like, kissing a boy, and then I’d yell ‘Cut!’ into his mouth.”



It’s not Thomas’s first time in the director’s chair (he directed an episode in season three), but season four of the acclaimed series finds him splitting the directing duties evenly with Matthew Saville. Thomas felt confident taking on the role now that the show has settled into a creative groove, though he admits he quickly realised that becoming a showrunner who also directs might have indicated he was drunk on power.

“If it wasn’t working, I would’ve [sacked myself],” he cackles, before adding, “I just wanted to get the experience, and I have learned so much over the last few years. I just really like all the control, as long as things are going well. As soon as they’re not going so well, I can’t turn to anyone and get frustrated.”

In an attempt to put him at ease, I mention an anecdote the actor Barbara Hershey once shared about Martin Scorsese crying on set about how he thought the film was a mess and nobody was going to like it. Thomas seems relieved to hear it.



“There were days like that, where I was just like, ‘Well, this is impossible,’” he recalls. “But I can’t get upset about it because I have to act it; I can’t take on the burden of, say, going into overtime, because the reason that we’re going into overtime is because I’m not doing a very good job of looking happy, you know? So it’s about emotional control, and not taking stress into scenes with actors; that’s the biggest learning curve for me, learning how to not let on if we were fucked.”



If the team was in trouble at any juncture throughout the production, the first two episodes of season four (Babaganoush and Porridge) do a very good job of hiding it. Picking up not long after season three’s eventful Christmas finale, the show once more revels in its trademark melding of the heartwarming and excruciating.



Josh Thomas on directing Please Like Me: ‘I just really like all the control, as long as things are going well.’ Photograph: ABC TV

“I feel like when we show you them driving away on vacation [in Porridge], as happy as they are in the beginning, you know they’re not going to be driving home happy, by now, after 38 episodes! But I read this thing the other day where someone was like, ‘It’s gonna make you sad at the end,’ and I don’t want people to be expecting that every time. So we do have some episodes where that doesn’t happen, and that’s the hardest thing now: trying to be surprising.

“We’ve done MDMA and abortion, we did suicide a few times, and we’ve done underarm hair … Josh has never had a job, but I never find those [potential] storylines very thrilling; I don’t really care about people at work.”



I ask Thomas whether he feels the burden of expectation from viewers who want Please Like Me to exactly reflect their own particular lived experience. “Gay people, all the time, get annoyed at the way gay people are portrayed [on the show], and it’s like, there are lots of bad gay people, you know, some gay people text while driving. We’re not a team; we’re all separate,” he says, wearily.



The show has a big fanbase in China and Russia, where it is downloaded illegally by a brace of fans, many of them LGBT people in fear of persecution. “That’s what you want, you know?” he says. “The gay Australians are like, ‘Oh we’re so glad to get some representation,’ but when the gay Russians get it, you’re like, yeah, that’s legit.”



Perhaps, I suggest, it’s because representation and diversity is so scarce across most Australian television content that the shows that do offer diversity suddenly have to be everything to everyone? “Which we aim to do!” Thomas says, laughing.



Where to, then, for Australian television? “Those networks, I guess, don’t think that people want to watch people that aren’t white, but I don’t know if they’ve ever really checked with anyone. Those TV executives, their job isn’t to take risks and succeed, their job is to not fail.”



It’s a topic seemingly close to Thomas’s heart, and he is genuinely baffled at commercial networks’ lack of creative bravery, let alone their apparent fear of progress. “I feel like reality TV used to be so much better at diversity: Australian Idol and Big Brother, they were the diverse shows, that’s what was so cool about them. But Channel Nine’s Big Brother was just, like, white, hot people. Like, The Block or The Bachelorette – I mean it’s spooky to look at them all lined up in a row.”



i'm not racist but i cannot tell any of these men apart pic.twitter.com/jyDr6P47lu — Bec Shaw (@Brocklesnitch) October 18, 2016

Please Like Me’s success in the US might suggest Thomas could be en route to further success but as yet he’s not convinced Tinseltown has much to offer beyond The Player-esque self-parody. “I go to LA and do these ‘general meetings’, where you go in a room and sit and ‘meet each other’ and chat for half an hour, which is not a good thing for me to be doing because I’m not good at ‘chatting’. Especially with Americans, because they’re so earnest and they don’t really understand that I’m joking, ever. (I really don’t know what they get when they watch the show.) They all say, ‘Well, we’d love to work together!’ every meeting, so it’s impossible to get a gauge of who’s interested.”



Part of Thomas’s circumspection may be due to the fact that the US cable channel Pivot – Please Like Me’s co-producer with the ABC since season two – recently ceased operations, something that Thomas announces without fanfare. “We don’t know definitely that we’re not doing another season of this show, but our [US] network shut down, so that doesn’t seem like a good omen. I don’t know … ”



Then he laughs again, that trademark Thomas giggle. “Are there any jobs going at the Guardian?”

• Series four of Please Like Me starts on ABC TV on 9 November at 9.30pm

