Find yourself.
Upright is a 2019 Australian road trip Dramedy that originally aired on Sky Atlantic in the UK and Foxtel in Australia.
Lachlan "Lucky" Flynn (Tim Minchin), a slacker and failed musician, is transporting an upright piano to his childhood home in Perth. Meg Adams (Milly Alcock), an abrasive, headstrong teenager, is running away from her small country town and alcoholic father. Brought together by a car accident in the middle of nowhere and with only one vehicle between them, Lucky and Meg embark on a chaotic road trip adventure, form an Odd Friendship, and slowly uncover the secrets and traumas that drive them.
Series 2 picks up four years later, when Meg unexpectedly blows back into Lucky's life with a request: she wants his help to track down her long-lost mother. It soon becomes clear that for both Lucky and Meg, this journey into the tropical jungles of far north Queensland is as much about running away from the wreckage of their personal lives.
Tropes related to Upright:
- Abuse Mistake: An on-edge, irritable Lucky snapping at a teenage girl with a broken arm is understandably pretty concerning for the doctor they’re talking to. Made worse when they lie very unconvincingly about how she broke it.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Inkeeping with the nature of the show, Meg’s first reaction when finding out about Lucky’s dying mother is to make a joke – fortunately Lucky finds it hilarious.
- Esme’s reaction when she finds out Lucky’s name after she’s essentially kidnapped him and forced him into a fight that may well kill him.
- A Family Affair: Lucky and Suzie, his brother’s wife, drunkenly sleep together. They agree to not tell Toby, but it’s implied that once Suzie realises she’s pregnant, they come clean with disastrous results.
- The Alcoholic: It’s hinted at in Season 1, and then way more heavily in Season 2, until it’s outright stated in 2x04 – Lucky has a drinking problem.
- Alcoholic Parent: As of Season 2, it seems both Meg’s parents fall under this trope.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lucky’s mum does, of course, die soon after he gets there. It also seems like he won’t get to tell Billie the truth about being her father, and it’s left unsaid whether he ever got over Suzie. But he got to see his mother and spend time with her before she died, has reconciled with his brother, and has met and bonded with his daughter. He also helps Meg reunite with her father who seems to have realised that he needs to change for his daughter.
- By the end of the season two, this trope is averted. Toby, Suzie and Avery have forgiven Lucky, he and Meg have grown close again, he’s newly sober, and Billie knows and is happy with the truth.
- Bitter Wedding Speech: Lucky gives an embarrassing and drunken Best Man speech at Toby’s wedding that barely hides his resentment over Toby getting married and leaving their band. Plus, we later discover that he’s also secretly in love with Toby’s wife Suzie.
- Black Comedy: It’s suprisingly hilarious for a TV show whose main characters consist of a teenage girl who is running away from home after her brother killed himself and her father turned to drink to cope and a man who is travelling home to see his dying mother and a brother who hates him.
- Blatant Lies: Meg and Lucky, constantly. Special mention to everything they say in the commune.
- Bluffing the Authorities: Meg insists on telling the police who pull them over that she’s Lucky’s daughter to avoid suspicion.
- Brick Joke: In 2x03, Meg mocks Duncan's overly dramatic way of talking, asking if he has to say lo and behold or if he can just say lo. He irritably brushes past it in the moment, but in 2x04 he seems to have taken it on board:Duncan: And lo, there next to her is your stupid fucking traitorous head!
- Brutal Honesty: One of Meg’s defining character traits. She is not afraid to tell Lucky – or anyone – what she thinks of him. Which makes it all the more surprising when we find out the many things she is lying about.
- Butt-Monkey: Over the two series, Lucky is abandoned in the desert, bitten by a snake, arrested, forced to participate in an illegal fight club, shot with a harpoon gun, and repeatedly knocked out. Among other things.
- Character Development: Both Lucky and Meg become more compassionate and less selfish over the course of the series.
- Cooldown Hug: Lucky gives Meg one when she hits a baby camel and breaks down over the death of her brother.
- Despair Event Horizon: Lucky comes very close to this when he receives a text that he believes is telling him his mother has died. Fortunately Meg is there and is able to find out what really happened while he is almost incomprehensible with grief.
- Didn't Think This Through: Almost Once an Episode – pretty much every single one of Meg’s actions is this trope personified.
- Even pre-series she was doing this – for example, stealing her brother’s ute and running away from home with nowhere to go at the age of 13.
- Double-Meaning Title: “Upright” refers to the piano Lucky is trying to get to Perth – but also, according to
Word of God, to Lucky trying to get himself back on his feet and his life back on track. - Drowning My Sorrows: What Meg’s father has been doing since her brother killed himself.
- Driven to Suicide: The fate of Meg’s brother, although we only get hints as to why.
- At one point Lucky believes that this is also the fate of Meg, and races to stop her. Fortunately it’s just a case of Poor Communication Kills.
- Dysfunctional Family: Both Lucky and Meg come from one of these. Lucky is a little more to blame for his than Meg, however.
- Establishing Character Moment: In the first scene, Lucky tries to take some medication with one hand whilst still driving, nearly causing a crash. He thinks better of it and pulls over to take the meds – then pulls out without checking his mirrors and instantly totals his car.
- Meg, a teenage girl on her own, gets out of her ute to completely bitch out the guy who hit her, so furious she doesn’t even realise she’s broken her arm.
- Everybody Knew Already: In the series 2 finale, the Flynn family decide to reveal the truth about Billie's parentage... only to discover that Billie has known for months, since receiving a posthumous letter from her Gran.
- Fiery Redhead: Meg is this to a tee, but Lucky also joins when provoked.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Lucky and Meg become this by about halfway through the series due to everything they go through and the terrible decisions they make together.
- Foreshadowing : Several of Lucky and Meg’s misadventures are alluded to before they actually happen.
- In Day Five, Lucky is picked up by a woman putting up signs warning of camels on the road, who complains that tourists steal them, so drivers aren't prepared.
- Also in Day Five:
Joselito: 800 kilometres, only one bend. It's amazing how many people miss it.- A very subtle one in Day Two - when Meg throws Lucky's car keys away from him, he complains that she's "being a child". There's a reason for that.
- From Bad to Worse: Happens several times over the course of the show, but notably in Day 7 – Lucky realises Meg has been lying about her mother, tries to find her, gets arrested, gets handed over to The Queenpin of the town by the police, and is taken to an illegal fight club in the middle of nowhere to fight for his freedom and repay his debt to her.
- Functional Addict: Lucky claims to be one of these in 2x06.
- Gallows Humour: Meg and Lucky are pretty good at finding the humour in their situations.Meg: Come on, let’s go!Lucky: Whoa, what’s the hurry?Meg: Your mum’s dying.Lucky: Right.
- So is Joselito, the trucker who picks up Lucky after he’s been bitten by a maybe-venomous snake.
Lucky: Joselito…what if I don’t wake up?Joselito: Then I guess it was a western brown! - Grumpy Old Man: Lucky is only in his 40s but Meg clearly sees him as this, and almost references the trope word for word in some of her rants against him.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Meg definitely has one of these.
- Hate at First Sight: Lucky is initially apologetic for hitting Meg’s ute with his car, but she is openly hostile and they spend the entire first episode having vicious arguments.
- Heroic BSoD: Lucky has one after receiving a text that he thinks is telling him his mother has died. Even after Meg works out she’s only in a coma, he’s almost completely unresponsive until they get another text to say she’s woken up.
- Hidden Depths: A terrifying biker gang surround the ute – and Lucky runs up to find one of them sitting at his piano happily playing Heart and Soul.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each episode of season 1 represents a day of their road trip, and is named accordingly.
- Insistent Terminology: It’s a ute.
- Lucky says he has a picture of his daughter playing football to prove she exists to an enraged Duncan. Duncan takes one look and angrily insists that she's playing AFL and that is not footy.
- Ironic Nickname: You could definitely make an argument for Lucky having one of these. Esme certainly seems to think so when he tells her his name after she tells him he’s going to be participating in her illegal fight club and no, he doesn’t have a choice.
- Jaded Washout: Lucky’s family clearly see him as this, and so does Lucky, to a point. Lucky and his brother’s fairly successful band broke up when Toby gets married, and Lucky never really moves on, continuing to be a musician on his own without any real success.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Both Lucky and Meg could qualify as this – both are outwardly abrasive, selfish, unsympathetic and rude, with very few qualms about committing petty crime if it’s in their interests, but both prove themselves to be genuinely good people several times throughout the series.
- Love Confession: Lucky drunkenly admits to his brother’s wife that he’s in love with her when she pushes him to tell her why he’s such a jerk towards her.
- Manchild: It’s clear that Lucky’s whole family see him as this, and Meg outright says it in 1x08, but she seems to be framing it as a compliment.
- Mood Whiplash: A staple of the series – justified in that it’s a comedy dealing with themes such as suicide and terminal illness.
- Never My Fault: Both Lucky and Meg like to pull this one out a lot after the inevitable consequences of their more stupid decisions.
- Noodle Incident: The hitting, mercy-killing and subsequent burying of the baby camel is showing signs of becoming one of these in-universe, considering the reaction they get whenever it’s mentioned.
- No Sympathy: Early in the series both Lucky and Meg are so wrapped up in their own problems neither of them really care about the other, with Meg openly mocking Lucky’s panic attacks and anti-anxiety medication, and Lucky showing the bare minimum of concern for the minor that he caused to have a car crash (once he’s got her to a hospital).
- Not What It Looks Like: In Season 2, Lucky already has a pretty terrible image in the press, and then immediately after a public fight with his girlfriend he's caught on camera yelling at a teenage girl about not telling him she was pregnant. Obviously, people jump to conclusions.
- Odd Couple: A 40-something nihilist slacker and an aggressive but chipper teenage girl go on a road trip and are actually a pretty good team. Mostly.
- Oh, Crap!: Many throughout the series:
- When Meg realises she’s left her wallet in a toilet in the middle of nowhere, containing all their money and her photo of her dead brother.
- When Meg realises she’s put the wrong kind of gas in the ute. While they’re driving away from a gang whose car they smashed up.
- Lucky has a big one when he finds what he thinks is Meg’s suicide note after he yells at her.
- Meg is the source of a lot of these for Lucky – he has another when he realises Meg has been lying about finding her mother.
- Lucky has a very slow one in Day 7, as he watches the reactions of the locals to the name Esme and it dawns on him whose horse float (and consequently, whose horse) he stole.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Lucky and Meg constantly snipe at each other, but Lucky never actually yells at her, even when she’s deliberately trying to get a rise out of him – except when he’s having a panic attack in the doctor’s office. She shuts up immediately.
- In Day 4, while Lucky and Meg are staying with a group of campers for the night, the normally fiercely independent and chipper Meg tearfully tells Lucky she “doesn’t feel right” and asks to leave. He ignores her, leaving her to drink alone and wander off. Even though she later tells him she never intended to kill herself, it’s pretty obvious what could have happened with a drunk, depressed teenager and a tall cliff.
- In Day 6, Lucky and Meg hitchhike with a friendly elderly couple after Meg crashes their ute. Lucky is as polite and friendly to them as he is capable of to make up for Meg’s characteristic rudeness, despite being under a lot of stress – until he gets a text that he thinks is telling him his mother has died. He screams at them to stop the car – and Meg, who he’d been falling out with up until that point, immediately backs him up.
- Papa Wolf: Even fairly early on, Lucky is this towards Meg, jumping in to defend her when she gets in a bar fight, and even more as the series progresses. This trope fully comes into play in Day 7; he goes back to Kalgoorlie to get her even when he’s racing to get home to see his mother before she dies, and then begs the police to go out looking for her even after he’s been arrested.
- In 2x07, he outright tells the leader of the commune that if he lays a hand on Meg, he'll burn it to the ground.
- Poor Communication Kills: Several times:
- Lucky doesn’t tell his brother he’s trying to drive to Perth from Sydney, making Toby think Lucky isn’t going to come when their mother is dying and alienating him even more.
- Toby sends a seriously ambiguous text to Lucky in Day 6, making him think their mother has died and causing him to have a complete breakdown.
- He still doesn't seem to have learned his lesson in season 2, appearing to be completely unable to properly explain to Avery Meg is, or where he's gone, or why he can't leave her, or any real details about the situation, despite her being on the brink of breaking up with him.
- Rapid-Fire "No!": When Lucky finds what he thinks is Meg’s suicide note.
- Again when Lucky sees the crashed ute and piano by the side of the road.
- Really 17 Years Old: Meg tells Lucky she’s 16 – not an adult, but old enough to drive and be out of parental supervision. In Day 4, he works out that she’s actually 13.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Abrasive, mouthy Meg is the Red Oni to Lucky’s usually more level-headed Blue.
- Road Trip Plot: The entire series takes place as the main characters attempt to drive the 4,000km from Sydney to Perth.
- Running Gag: Almost Once an Episode, Meg does something reckless and/or illegal, and Lucky has no choice but to go along with it.
- Sanity Ball: Due to their respective issues, Lucky and Meg spend the whole series tossing this between them, taking it in turns to be the most stable and make adult decisions.
- Sanity Slippage: Lucky comes very close to losing it on Day 5 when he’s stranded barefoot in the middle of the Australian desert, hungover, with no food or water. Complete with alternating between screaming at a snake and asking it for advice, and hallucinating his mother.
- Shout-Out: Lucky spends the majority of Day 5 barefoot.
- A Simple Plan: Two people agree to drive from Sydney to Perth together to share the drive time. What could possibly go wrong?
- And again in season 2 - fly with Meg to Queensland to help her find her mum? It'll take two days, tops!
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Both main characters, but particularly Meg. Justified in that one of the writers is the notoriously foul-mouthed Tim Minchin.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Meg gives a good one to Lucky’s family in his defence in Day 8.
- To be fair, Meg is also a fan of handing these out to Lucky, giving him a particularly brutal one in 2x05 that actually leaves the usually backchatting Lucky in stunned silence. She does try to take it back later.
- Took a Level in Kindness: By the end of the series, Meg has softened considerably, looking after Lucky’s daughter and taking her away to play so she won’t see Lucky and Toby fight, and fiercely defending Lucky to his family.
- Trauma Conga Line: Meg and Lucky go through a lot, especially if you include what happened to them before the series even started.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: It’s never stated outright that Billie is Lucky’s daughter. The audience is expected to have picked this up to follow what’s going on in the final episode.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: By the end of the series, Meg and Lucky are this; they don’t stop constantly winding each other up, but now they seem to enjoy it.
- Wham Line: When talking to a random small child at the commune about finding Meg's mother:Meg: We need to find Willow. Do you know who that is?Barley: Yeah. She’s my mum.
- Jen dictates a letter that will tell the truth about Billie's true parentage to someone offscreen.
Jen: I’m very tired…. and I think Meg’s fingers are about to drop off. - Wham Shot: Throughout the series, Lucky watches a video his mother sent him in which we can hear a piano playing in the background, but always pauses it (or falls asleep) before we see the end of the video. In Day 7, we finally see the end: Lucky’s mother shows the player of the piano to be an 8-year-old girl, heavily implied to be Lucky’s daughter.
