The fifth and final season of ABC TV’s ever-sparkling comedic drama Rake encompasses all manner of familiar political crises: celebrity-buffoon politicians, corrupt banks, sexting scandals and swift decapitations of sitting prime ministers.
And yet the political melodrama contains nothing quite as inflammatory as the current reality of #Auspol – and a parliament where defamatory, racially loaded and sexist remarks by elected leaders are now the norm.
“The white Australia policy and the final solution. Yeah, great,” says Rake co-creator and star Richard Roxburgh, with the mix of world-weary sarcasm and incredulity familiar to audiences from his decades-long career. We’re speaking a day after Katter’s Australian party crossbench Senator Fraser Anning called for outwardly discriminatory migration, in comments condemned even by Pauline Hanson.
It brings into focus a central paradox of creating comedy today: when the world itself is a meme, and politicians hold facts and human dignity in blatant disregard, how do you satirise such a dark and self-satirising political culture?
Rake’s new season, which premieres on Sunday, shifts the show away from NSW politics to the national realm. Roxburgh’s creation, Cleaver Greene – the brilliant, dissolute barrister who stoked controversy in his dubious legal career (based loosely on real-life defence lawyer, and one of the show’s other co-creators, Charles Waterstreet) – is now a key player on the crossbench in the Australian Senate, having successfully campaigned on a uniquely honest promise to achieve nothing.
It’s this new setting – decrepit, ineffectual parliament – that allows Cleaver to emerge as an unlikely everyday anti-hero in an age of far-right resurgence.
“We did toy with the idea that he would go into state politics,” says Roxburgh, “but we thought, bugger it. If you’re gonna do it, do it properly. So he gets voted in, and why not?
“If you can have Fraser Anning standing up and talking about the final solution and the white Australia policy, Cleaver really would be a calming, rational voice in the Senate.”
Just as Rake in its early days was never just a legal procedural, or just a show about NSW politics, the current season finds its own way to frame the absurdity of Australian government. “We don’t really think of Rake as a satire; we create our own Rake universe,” says Roxburgh. “The other senators who populate the place apart from Cleaver, they’re slightly recognisable – but they’re not clear pastiches of senators we know.”
One such character is Penny Evans (of the Penny Evans Party), shrewdly played by Jane Turner (Kath & Kim) not as a moron but as a canny manipulator of the public’s disenchantment with the major parties. “But she’s not [Pauline] Hanson and she’s not [Michaelia] Cash,” says Roxburgh. “We give a hint, but a clear satire would’ve been a bit too easy.” As such, the character calls to mind the kind of marginal pariah who poses as a voice of the overlooked regular or rural citizen; the kind who can easily find a place in the Australian Senate while making headlines for race-baiting and far-right nationalism. The kind of politician, in other words, of Senator Anning’s ilk.
Once operating on the ethical edges of the law – defending such indefensible figures as cannibals and suicide bombers – Cleaver is now marooned in a political culture that’s sliding to the right. To see him living in a beige Canberra townhouse, or clamped in an Akubra while chatting to farmers for a dismal parliamentary subcommittee, is to see an adroit indictment of the theatre and charades of politics.
But as comic great Armando Iannucci told Guardian Australia recently, “fictional versions of what’s going on at the moment wouldn’t match what’s transpiring in reality”. And so at other times, Rake abandons reality and tips into wholehearted farce.
“We were really up against it to try and even jump up as high as the hoops of the current Senate. Where can you start? What is rock bottom now?” asks Roxburgh. “Especially in the big scheme of American politics. You have an administration that is clearly peopled by, variously, incompetents, lunatics and the corrupt. Each day there are more revelations, and yet people still cling to them as the life-raft of the Grand Old Party. A new madness is overtaking politics where the rulebook has really been torn up.”
In that sense, Rake’s new federal setting also allows the screenwriters to upscale the program’s ambitions to the whole frenzied world. US president Donald Trump is never mentioned by name – but there’s no need. Who else would want “to nuke Switzerland because his watch wasn’t working”?
Always a highly verbal show, Rake now attunes its humour to the flagrantly dishonest language of the political class – crossbenchers’ manic mantras of defending “ordinary people” from the “ever-clasping, ever-grasping clutches” of Chinese business-owners; and the creation of a new “level 7, extremely certain” terrorist attack warning. Language – and the misuse of it – can normalise terrifying new realities; Anning’s recent comments may be egregious, for instance, but they’re of a piece with immigration minister Peter Dutton’s own comments. Rake’s co-creators are coming from a place of privilege far from Anning and Dutton’s firing lines, but their careful satire acknowledges the real power of rotten words.
The show’s courtroom scenes have been replaced by legitimately hilarious parliamentary sittings, in which manipulative figures of Australian politics hold court with say-nothing speeches. “They were so much fun to do,” Roxburgh says. “It’s that awful thing of staying on topic but still somehow managing to be completely circumlocutory and full of shit. I mean, how do they achieve it? It’s a kind of miracle that politicians can say so many words and mean so little. You feel you’ve had brain cells extracted from you if you listen too long. They’re like Harry Potter’s Dementors – they come in and suck your intellect out.”
Given the subject matter and the mood of the modern world, it would be easy for Rake to fall into the trappings of cynicism, and yet in the hands of its creative team – including veteran director Rowan Woods, and original writer and co-creator Andrew Knight – the story remains loyal to the show’s sensibility of kind heartedness, without a shred of mean-spirited humour.
Cynicism “is something that we always wanted to steer away from,” says Roxburgh. “Cleaver operates in very tough, very dark worlds. The world of defence law can be very scary. And God knows the same can be said for politics. But it was always important for us that we had a heart, that the show has a heart, and that you concerned yourself with the plight and the obstacles of the characters. You find Cleaver stumbling blind. He never really knows what his moral world is until he stares into something that might be the opposite of it, and then he can see clearly what he definitely is not.”
The show’s articulation of widespread frustration with a broken political system comes into full focus by episode three. Cleaver cries out, “Why do we put up with all of this? From these morons?”
I put the question to Roxburgh himself, who laughs. “Sadly, we never come up with an answer to that question,” he says. “That … is an abiding mystery.”
• Season five of Rake premieres on the ABC on Sunday 19 August at 8.30pm
