For decades, UK viewers have dismissed Australia as a benign TV backwater, good only for soaps where sandy-haired women in bikinis shout things like: “Kirk! I love ya, but the salon’s on fire and Sheila’s trapped – again!” But in 2011 The Slap brought us knotty urban relationship drama; then Chris “Summer Heights High” Lilley showed us Australia could match the best of our bad-taste character comedies. Now we’re in a peak-TV era where digital channels and streaming services grab content from across the world, Oz has stepped up its game again. The latest intriguing import is Deep Water, a crime drama starring Noah Taylor and Orange Is the New Black’s Yael Stone.
Here are five more rippers…
Please Like Me
Every review says this is the Aussie new wave’s answer to Girls; sometimes the obvious comparison is correct. Josh Thomas is the auteur behind a dramedy about millennials adjusting to adulthood, which – in the case of Thomas’s alter ego Josh – includes his mother’s mental illness and his acknowledgement that he’s gay. As well as showing thirtysomethings what twentysomethings are like, Thomas shares with Lena Dunham the ability to force the serious and the trivial together, and to create episodes that distil a whole indie movie’s worth of unconventional narrative into half an hour. The latest episodes from season four continue on Amazon Prime each Thursday.
The Code
The apparently isolated incident that sparks this conspiracy thriller also reveals its strong sense of location and national identity: in the handsomely filmed outback, two indigenous teens have a mysterious road accident that goes unreported until a journo and his autistic hacker brother put a video up online. As plot strands twist inextricably together, the contrast between whizzy cybercrime and the effects on a rural community of a biotech cover-up is an effective one. Move fast and you can see the second series – where a double murder in West Papua leads to an investigation into dark-web sex trafficking – on BBC iPlayer.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries
A cracking caper set in 1920s Melbourne, rendered with a jolly period opulence into which Poirot or Jeeves might conceivably float. Instead, in swings razor-bobbed, flapper-frocked private detective Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis). She effortlessly bests the killer of the week and the plodding local police with her worldly smarts and forthright sassiness, never pausing to give a hoot about the social norms of the time. Easily stylish and funny enough for us to gloss over its rudimentary whodunnit plots, Miss F is refined teatime indulgence. Series three, which opens with a magician’s assistant being beheaded by a sabotaged guillotine, has just hit Netflix.
Cleverman
Like The Code, this drama jabs at Australians’ justified guilt about what their 21st-century society has been built upon. Here, though, we’re in fantasy territory, in what initially plays as an allegory for the fear of the other: zombies or vampires have been replaced by “hairies”: people whose darker skin and elemental strength causes such violent prejudice they exist as brutally oppressed second-class citizens.
But soon, Cleverman reveals the scope of its ambition, and becomes a lot more interesting, when it introduces supernatural and superheroic elements, based on indigenous myths. A BBC3 buy-in means that it’s all up on the iPlayer.
Rake
Ah, the Australian male: bristly, twinkling, drunk, sleeping with his best mate’s wife. Richard Roxburgh downs that stereotype in one as Cleaver Green, a defence attorney whose brilliance relies upon him empathising with people who might technically be guilty; outside court, however, he gets away with being a flaming rogue, keeping the women in his life in a constant state of exasperated arousal. It’s retrograde, but Roxburgh carries it with conviction and the episode synopses, eg “Cleaver defends a doctor accused of having sex with the family dog”, are hard to resist. Seasons one to three are on Netflix.
Deep Water is on BBC4, Saturdays, 9pm
