ABC comedy Dog Park gets it fundamentally correct – it’s about the human dramas

They say it’s hard to make new friends as an adult, and that big cities are filled with lonely people disconnected from everyone around them.

But there is one type of community that is filled with people from different backgrounds with varied temperaments and interests, thrust together with a daily frequency.

It’s the dog park group.

I belong to one such cabal of canine lovers. Every afternoon at roughly 5.30 until 7, otherwise different adults shuffle with their pooches to the centre of our neighbourhood park.

The dogs run off and play, or just chill and beg for treats from whoever starts rustling in their bag. There are retirees and Gen Z-ers, people with desk jobs and others who work in the arts, those who moved in only a year ago and others who have lived there for decades.

The dogs are the reason but they’re also the excuse for this regular moment of human connection - a gossip sesh, a cold bevvy and collective moaning about a planned Maccas up the road - coming at the end of the work day and before the drudgery of cooking and household admin.

Any holiday – Christmas, Halloween, birthdays – is an excuse for a potluck party with cheeses, freshly baked bread, barbecued haloumi and homebrew, and you can always find someone to dog-sit your furbaby.

Now, it would be a lie to say that it’s all kumbaya. When you force together any group of people, and ones you see so often, there are going to be personality clashes.

Some will voice political opinions that make you squirm, others will spin tales that trigger questions of whether they’re a fantasist (even more wild, it was all true). One person will hoard 20 rolls of poop bags in the bushes.

There will be people-pleasers and provocateurs.

My dog park group has a Whatsapp chat with more than 70 people, which means the posts are a mix of useful information about local traffic issues and offers of freebies, but also all manner of memes, earnest well-wishes and other inanities. It’s best to keep it on mute.

There are also sub-groups, side-chats and factions. Some people are better friends than others, which means not everyone gets invited to every dinner party or pub night. Sometimes feelings are hurt, tears are shed, and you can’t keep up with who was supposedly, perhaps even unknowingly, rude to someone else.

Like any community group, there are dramas, often whispered about, but rarely any all-out wars.

An outsider might observe such behaviours and think the world has gone to the dogs, but it’s not really about the pooches. It’s always been about the humans.

That’s what the ABC’s new comedy series, Dog Park, fundamentally gets right.

The six-part series debuts this Sunday evening, right after the return of Muster Dogs, and, while there are some very, very adorable pups, it’s about a man who reluctantly becomes part of his local dog park group when his wife goes overseas for work.

The show was co-created by Leon Ford, who plays Roland, the curmudgeon who would rather stand on the sidelines with his earpods in than to talk to strangers, until he is forced to interact by Samantha (Celia Pacquola), who’s open-hearted and an optimist.

That was Ford, and when he would tell his creative partner Amanda Higgins about his little gripes about the world, including his annoyances with his adorable but clingy Shih Tzu-Maltese pup, she realised this was the perfect character to use as a springboard into a dog park.

It’s a rich vein to explore – how can someone who’s isolated himself learn to accept the embrace of a community he didn’t choose?

“I hear so many stories about from (dog park communities) about ‘these are the people I tell more intimate things to than anyone else’ and ‘these are the people I see more than my partner’, because it’s a regular thing,” Ford told The Nightly.

“It’s beautiful. The non-cynical side of me that I’m trying to tap into more and more is, ‘what better place for a slice of our community?’. They’re not all from the same workplace, they’re not all from the same socio-economic or cultural background.

“It’s a real microcosm of how the world could just get on, and all because dogs just want to be there and play.”

In these communities, the dogs are the social lubricant for humans. That was certainly the case on the set of Dog Park.

There were moments when it would take 15 minutes just to get a canine actor to sit properly, and there were always half a dozen people hiding out of shot behind trees with treats.

But the effect of having the pups on set was all upsides.

“It should be all the time, even if it’s not a dog show,” Ford said. “Because the effect they have on people, it puts so much into perspective. It calms people down, it makes you realise you shouldn’t get upset at the silly thing because look at these dogs.

“What do they to humans is just so beautiful. It’s on another level.”

Dog Park is on ABC and iview from Sunday