And so, with a virus-afflicted planet devolving into sickness and chaos, we perched ourselves in front of our screens and explored the world vicariously.
While cinemas closed left, right and centre, streaming platforms and TV channels were boosted by content-hungry audiences with oodles of time on their hands. The Australian television industry produced various notable productions throughout this unusual and uncomfortable year. Here are the 10 best.
10. Wild Australia: After the Fires (ABC)
I tossed and turned about whether to include director Cian O’Clery’s hour-long, Hugo Weaving-narrated documentary about the Black Summer bushfires on this list – not because it isn’t well made and insightful, but because it’s a terrible example of burying the lede. The words “climate change” are mentioned for the first time 46 minutes in, which is an egregious mistake: context is important, as is understanding the nature of TV (i.e. that not everybody will watch until the end).
Otherwise, the production is insightful and compelling, in a very sad way, effectively comprehending the scale of what was lost during the worst wildlife disaster in modern history. Tempering the feeling of terrible emptiness is a desire to rebuild, with scientists, conservationists, volunteers and others cleaning up, studying the remains and hoping for a better future.
9. Hungry Ghosts (SBS)
There are hackneyed elements in SBS’s four-part supernatural series, such as stilted voice-over proclamations dropping lines like “sometimes the power of one event can change everything!”. But director Shawn Seet and his writers reinvigorate the moth-eaten supernatural genre by setting the show in Melbourne’s Australian-Vietnamese community during the annual Hungry Ghost festival, the prism of a cultural study freshening up various shorthands for spookiness – i.e. curses, tombs and bleeding from the eyes.
These genre flourishes drag the series back to formula, while the cultural elements and the characters nudge it towards more interesting topics – including considerations of grief and trauma. The story involves a cranky spirit that crops up around protagonist May Le (Catherine Văn-Davies) and her family.
8. The Secrets She Keeps (Network Ten)
Jennifer Leacey and Catherine Millar’s direction of this six-part adaptation of Michael Robotham’s 2017 novel is occasionally so heavy-handed it becomes borderline trashy, jeopardising even its best assets – most notably Laura Carmichael’s wrenching portrayal of a single woman desperate to have a baby. Her performance does however prevail, and the drama has real kick and impact.
Supermarket employee Agatha (Carmichael) has envious feelings towards an also pregnant, more successful and seemingly more together new friend – blogger and social media influencer Meghan (Jessica De Gouw). Is Agatha dangerous or just weird? The tone is lurid, but eight months on I can’t shake from my head some of the show’s scenes and images. Particularly Carmichael’s face: in my mind she’s staring at me, giving me the stink eye, and hatching some kind of plot...
7. Informer 3838 (Nine Network)
The Underbelly franchise has been pumping out hot-headed productions about Australian gangsters since 2008. Some of them are very bad, like the gratuitous Underbelly Files: Chopper, but this four-part miniseries focusing on Nicola Gobbo (Ella Scott Lynch) aka ‘Lawyer X’ is compulsively watchable, edited with a highly energetic style that never takes the audience’s attention for granted.
A confessional voice-over invites viewers into the turbulent life of its protagonist, who double crosses her clients – some of the most notorious figures in Melbourne’s gangland wars – and outrageously becomes an informer, marking an indefensible collaboration with the police. Ella Scott Lynch is impressive as Gobbo in a tough amoral role; you come away neither liking nor hating her but certainly always compelled. It’s the editing however that really impresses, the familiarity of the content perhaps spurring on the directors (Geoff Bennett and Ben C Lucas) to create something that really sizzles in its form and presentation.
6. The Gloaming (Stan)
This mist-slathered, Scandi-noirish mystery series from creator and writer Vicki Madden contemplates strange goings-on in Tasmania tied to various kinds of jiggery-pokery. Emma Booth and Ewen Leslie play detectives who investigate a murder linked to a death that occurred many years ago, during their youth, which dramatically affected their lives. Ah yes: the old ‘this time it’s personal’ chestnut!
Operating within the police procedural framework, some dialogue feels overly written and a couple of plot events come across as borderline goofy (such as one involving a fall down an open mine shaft). But Madden and the directors (Michael Rymer, Greg McLean and Sian Davies) succeed very well in capturing an enigmatic mood, an eye-watering look and an ongoing, thrilling air of suspense. That air feels thick and gluggy, like you can cut it with a knife.
5. Freeman (ABC)
There’s a lot going on in director Laurence Billiet’s documentary about Cathy Freeman: among other things it is about the psyche of an athlete; the importance of black history and Indigenous Australian role models; the relationship between sport and national identity; and the idea of athleticism as a form of art and expression.
The latter is represented through dance performances by Lillian Banks from the Bangarra Dance Theatre, who plays “the spirit of Cathy” and is seen (too seldomly, given how rich and alluring her scenes are) manoeuvring her body in a darkened tableau, attempting to channel the energy of the superstar athlete and Kuku Yalanji woman through interpretive movement. The tight 58 minute running time is a mixed blessing: there’s not a flat minute in it, but it’s over far too soon.
4. Mystery Road season two (ABC)
Aaron Pedersen has played the hard-bitten, Akubra-wearing outback sleuth Jay Swan four times and counting: in two Mystery Road feature films and two TV series. This one was directed by Warwick Thornton and Wayne Blair, continuing both a very genre-y narrative but also a meaningful character study reflecting on how Swan reconciles his Indigenous Australian heritage with a modern white person-oriented society.
A headless corpse in the fictional town of Gideon leads Swan to penetrate a local drug syndicate. Other plot tangents register with more personal and social significance—including the protagonist’s interactions with his ex-wife (Tasma Walton) and a situation in the community involving an archeological dig.
3. Rosehaven season four (ABC)
I must admit, when I watched the very first episode of Rosehaven back in 2016 I was far from smitten: very little happened and I wondered what the point was. It didn’t take long however for me to be completely taken in by the tone of this wonderful show, which is set in the titular, sleepy Tasmania town and follows best friend real estate agents played by Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor (also the creators and co-writers).
The increased frequency of cuts in films and TV over the years has fastened narrative time, viewers these days effectively speed reading their motion pictures. Rosehaven is a lovely counter to that, resting on well developed characters and, again, that overarching tone, which makes returning to this world an ongoing pleasure.
2. Stateless (ABC)
Narratives incorporating parallel crosscutting have proved compelling since the early years of cinema – notably D W Griffith’s great 1916 film Intolerance, which oscillates between thematically connected stories separated by thousands of years. The four key threads of ABC’s gripping six-part series Stateless, directed by Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse, are bound by one key location: an Australian immigration detention centre situated in the middle of nowhere.
Some characters are prisoners and others are employees – the former including an Australian flight attendant (Yvonne Strahovski) and an Afghan man (Fayssal Bazzi) who was duped by a people smuggler. This intensely absorbing and very skilfully constructed series takes its time to collaborate moral dilemmas, treating its six-part structure as a large canvas; like one very long film.
1. The Beach (SBS)
Even the people most talented at creating visually rich images struggle to define the word “cinematic”. The director Warwick Thornton told me, half-jokingly, it simply means “fuck, it looks good!” Thornton’s latest production – based in and around a rustic shack where the filmmaker prepares meals, talks to his chickens and goes on long walks – does indeed look very good. But this sublimely made show is much more than pretty postcards, evoking a striking sense of presence and place and a feeling of profundity that comes on slow and never leaves.
Warwick presents a romantic view of self isolation (before it was cool, or compulsory) and uses his beautiful setting as a safe space to comprehend his own struggles and shortcomings. Because so much of this great series comes down to mood, every written description of it will fall short. To quote old mate Morpheus: you have to see it for yourself.
