Who would win in a fight to the death between Rebecca Gibney and Liam Neeson? Your media consumption to date has, perhaps, gravitated you towards the latter. You are undoubtedly recalling the grizzled alpha male’s famously crotchety face and I-eat-puppies-for-breakfast demeanour. But I am here to tell you that it would be Gibney by a country mile.
Don’t believe me? In Channel Seven’s Wanted (which premiered its second season last week) the proof is in the pudding. If you didn’t catch the first season, it is necessary viewing for anyone partial to a pulse pounder: a lean, punchy, pressure-cooked on-the-run action thriller following two seemingly ordinary women who evade dangerous goons and crooked cops.
Gibney, also a producer and co-creator (with fellow showrunner Richard Bell), plays Lola: a badarse supermarket employee. We don’t grasp the extent of her badarsery until she discovers herself at the centre of a frenetic, blood-splotched cross-country trip, whooshing from Sydney to Queensland in a hot car with tonnes of money in the back that isn’t hers.
Lola’s companion is timid office worker Chelsea (Geraldine Hakewill); their chalk and cheese personalities give the show an Odd Couple-style twang. It would be wrong to say Wanted, which had an average combined audience of 1.85 million viewers, is paced as fast as an action movie. It’s much faster than that. Season one concluded with a cliffhanger; a rather brusque phone call from a criminal snarling, “Did you think this was over? We have your son.”
The second kicks off with Lola and Chelsea travelling to Bangkok to rescue said son. Thus there’s a touch of Bangkok Hilton, involving the Thai underworld instead of the justice system. In the second episode, a character responds to a head honcho’s grisly directive by asking, “Do we really need more bodies?” If an answer in the affirmative guarantees more Gibney-delivered arse walloping, the answer is yes. A thousand times yes.
Anchored by the presence of two hotheads behind the wheel of a car, fanging it cross-country – the police and others on their tail – comparisons to Thelma and Louise were perhaps inevitable. Gibney and Hakewill’s casting is nevertheless gender-blind: their characters are not written to be women, but rather happen to be women, and there’s a big difference between the two.
Photograph: Channel Seven
You could call this progressive – but given the (near-complete) extent to which these kinds of tough, ultra-resilient roles have been taken by men, necessary might be a better word. The show’s unconventional casting could also be a reason sections of the media don’t seem to know how to deal with it. For example one journalist described Wanted as a “dramedy”.
In one of the quieter scenes in the first season, Lola lures a cold-blooded killer through a cornfield. When he gets out of it he delivers a slightly hammy monologue (“We are the same, you know, we have both taken life … ”), before he notices something smells funny about the ground beneath him. Its a trap! Lola has covered it with petrol. Gibney bends over, lights the earth on fire, and the would-be assassin goes up like a scarecrow at Burning Man, screaming as his flesh sizzles.
If Wanted is a “dramedy”, Snowtown is a life-affirming musical.
The second season ups the ante by introducing a globetrotting element. The action remains on-the-run but Lola and Chelsea’s challenge is ultimately intellectual. When the principal characters solve one problem, they are quickly confronted with another, and then another. At its core Wanted is about the power of resourcefulness in the most challenging of scenarios.
The approach of the screenwriters (Timothy Hobart, John Ridley and Kirsty Fisher) hinges on asking two questions synonymous with the “writers’ room” problem-solving-esque approach, applied to great American programs such as Breaking Bad. 1. What are the characters thinking; and 2. What happens next?
The power of those simple but crucial questions, and the discipline involved in never ceasing to answer them, cannot be underestimated. It is one of the reasons Wanted is, if not a masterclass in sustaining pace and momentum, then certainly a gallingly good case study for the wider Australian television industry.
The writing alone makes it the kind of program we should be making more of. As does the casting. In an interview, Gibney commented that she “wanted to create a character that wasn’t invisible”. That, surely, is the least of her achievements.
• Wanted aires at 8.40pm on Mondays on Channel Seven
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