An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

The post Roaring back appeared first on Inside Story.

On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Born to laugh appeared first on Inside Story.

In Australia it is available only on YouTube, with sometimes hilarious computer-generated subtitles. As long as viewers bear in mind that “the cavalry in the birch wood” means “Captain Ma in the town of Hualin” the story will carry them effortlessly along from its gentle beginning to its bitter-sweet ending.

The Long Season is based on an even bleaker novel, Yu Xiaoqian’s The Cutting Edge of Winter. The story centres on an elderly man’s dogged search for whoever killed his son nearly twenty years earlier. The cold case investigation, with its post-industrial social criticism and #MeToo edge, mixes grim subject matter with moments of levity and ends with a message of hope. Imagine the cast of the BBC’s New Tricks in a Ken Loach movie and you’ll get the picture.

The setting is a rustbelt town in northeast China called Hualin, hometown to our ageing hero, Wang Xiang (Fan Wei), and the site of an ailing steel factory. The series is filmed in split time, the events of 1997–98 shown in flashback from 2016. Wang, once a “model worker” who drove a freight train for the factory, is now a taxi driver. His college-educated brother-in-law, Gong Biao (Qin Hao), used to work in the factory’s office; he drives a taxi too. When a chance event involving Gong’s taxi leads Wang to suspect that his son’s killer has resurfaced, the two men join forces with retired cop Captain Ma (Chen Minghao), who investigated the original case.

Much of the series’ popularity rests on the relationship between these three characters. Their dealings with each other range from bumbling strategising to resigned philosophising. Variously single, widowed and on the edge of divorce, they are in the process of coming to terms with the lives they’ve had. Their pursuit of the case, and its link with Gong’s taxi, seems at one level like a dramatic realisation of this process.

They all struggle to maintain control over their lives. Wang has prostate problems. Gong is diabetic. Health problems among people in the town and the cost of treating them make up a minor but persistent refrain. Director Xin Shuang’s father was dying while he was making the series. His close observation of the challenges of old age and the cost of hospital care may have informed his treatment of these topics.

Juxtaposed with the character-driven treatment of the three men — middle-aged in 1997, getting old in 2016 — is a plot-driven story about the younger generation. Wang’s son Yang (Yitie Liu) is a budding poet. The girl he loves, Shen Mo (Teresa Li), is a medical student with a troubled background who plays piano in a nightclub to support herself. Shen’s deaf-mute brother and his business partner run a home-made cinema showing videos on a clapped-out television. Their lives interact, often violently, with those of other young people adrift in the ruins of socialism.

Confronted with the fraying of the social fabric, the parents cling desperately to the known world of lifetime employment in a factory where workers were the masters. In one of many references to that disappearing world, episode six has Yang’s mother, Meisu, reflecting on how different life was for them.

“Our generation was used to being organised,” she says. “At home, there were lots of children, and we obeyed our parents in everything. In the collective when we grew up, we had to listen to our leaders. We’ve always felt that there’s a circle surrounding us. All our lives we just walked in that circle and no one stepped outside of it for any reason, not even to put a foot on a coin.”

By 2016, the lives of the young people have either come to an end or come to nothing. With its focus on older men struggling on in a landscape significantly devoid of women and children, the series forces reflection on what the society has done to itself.

Out of this Pandora’s box hope wings its way in episode twelve. There is justice — the corrupt manager of the steel factory gets his comeuppance — and there is a woman, a former factory worker, who offers Wang the possibility of someone with whom to “pass the days.” In a remarkable scene performed by the accomplished Fan Wei, Wang talks to her indirectly about that possibility, glancing at her occasionally in the rear mirror of the taxi he is driving.

There is also a child: Wang’s younger son, born in 1997, his origins unexplained until the very end of the series. And there is a future that lies in (where else?) Beijing, China’s centre of wealth, culture and politics, as Wang more than once states. The long-dead elder son never got there but the younger son will.

Reviewing the series for Foreign Policy, James Palmer asks “how did this brilliant Chinese rust belt noir get made under Xi?” The answer surely lies in its redemptive conclusion. At the end of the final episode the camera returns viewers to the cornfields that greeted them at the beginning of the series. The narrow-gauge railway along which the factory train once ran is still there. Wang stands by the track with a beatific visage as the train once more chuffs into view, his younger self at the controls. “Look forward,” old Wang calls to him. “Don’t look back!”

The media in the People’s Republic of China has tried to make this the central message of the series. For the Global Times, The Long Season “meets Chinese people’s demand for quality productions that deliver positive messages, such as the theme of the show: ‘Move on, don’t look back.’”

Yet the ending doesn’t feel quite right. With its series of betrayals, the story’s logic points to an alternative conclusion, the one Yu Xiaoqian wrote for the novel. There, readers discover that decades earlier, on the very day he was to be nominated a model worker, Wang witnessed the sexual abuse of a minor. Like a time-delayed bomb, his failure to report the crime precipitated the series of events that led to his son’s death. The novel ends not with him smiling in the cornfields but being forced to jump to his death.

Viewers can be grateful to the scriptwriters for leaving them with a gentler final scene. But the benign ending suggests, if not the hand of the censor then at least a process of self-censorship.

The fact that Yu Xiaoqian himself was one of the scriptwriters brings to mind the fate of Lao She’s 1939 novel Rickshaw Boy. In 1945 this profoundly pessimistic story about the failure of Republican-era Beijing to meet the modest aspirations of a rural migrant was issued in English translation with the unauthorised addition of two extra chapters and a happy ending.

Lao She was disheartened by the bowdlerisation of his work in the United States, but worse came when the Chinese-language original was savagely redacted during the revolutionary upsurge under Mao in the 1950s. The 1955 edition omitted one and a half chapters of the original, all sexual references, and some other incidental material. Lao She approved these alterations and apologised for the novel’s lack of optimism.

Optimism — “joyful socialism,” as it has been termed — is a hallmark of Chinese communism. On the small screen it is better expressed by China’s top-rating series in 2022, Daughter of the Mountains, the dramatisation of the true story of Huang Wenxiu, a village girl who makes it all the way to university in Beijing before returning home to participate in programs of poverty alleviation.

Unlike in The Long Season, where the Communist Party is hardly evident, in Daughter of the Mountains it is front and centre. Huang is a party member who rises to the position of local party secretary. She meets her death tragically in a car crash on a mountain road, one of the many slated for repairs under infrastructural plans for the region. But this is by no means a devastating finale, for Huang leaves a legacy of hope for a better future. In real life, her father paid tribute to the Communist Party for all the opportunities it had offered his daughter.

That two such very different series should have received equally high ratings in China says much about the divided self that China is today. •

The post Life and death in China’s rustbelt appeared first on Inside Story.

As recent summers go, this has been a relatively successful one for Australian cricket. The test matches have kept fans’ attention, the crowds have been good and the television audiences robust. But the season also brought with it the most ominous sign yet of an existential threat.

The team South Africa sent to New Zealand to play the test series was very much a second eleven. Why? Because it wanted to give priority to its own relatively new Twenty20 competition. South African officialdom ordered all players with deals to play in the SA20 to stay home. They cancelled a one-day series with Australia a year earlier for the same reason.

Twenty20 matches have been played since 2003 between countries and domestically, but the format took what turned out to be a radical new turn when the Indian Premier League, or IPL, emerged in 2008. That league’s ten city-based franchises bid against each other for players’ services, with each team allowed several international players. It has become by far the richest cricket competition in the world: last year the media rights for 2023–27 sold to Viacom18 and Star Sports for US$6.4 billion, making the value of each match US$13.4 million. Its contracts with leading players dwarf their payments from official sources.

(Most women’s contests, by contrast, have been short-form matches, and nearly all cricketing nations have well-established domestic and international Twenty20 calendars for women. The franchise model — Australia’s Women’s Big Bash for instance, which began in 2015 — is also popular, although only in 2023 did a women’s competition become part of the IPL; the prices paid for leading players immediately soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a welcome boost for traditionally underpaid players.)

None of IPL’s fast-multiplying imitators — including Australia’s Big Bash League — has reached anything like its heights. Age journalist Greg Baum says that at least twelve domestic Twenty20 competitions now exist, not only in South Africa but also in the Caribbean, Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Many of these competitions have teams owned by IPL franchises: all six South African teams, for example, and three of the six teams in the UAE’s ILT20. As IPL franchises set up more satellite operations, they may gain even more commercial leverage and be able to offer multi-competition or even year-long contracts to players.

For the players, these competitions offer new and lucrative opportunities. For several — especially from poorer countries where official payments are much lower — the competitions promise a lucrative twilight for their career, tempting them to retire from test cricket earlier.

But they are also shaping players’ careers much earlier. Already some players — from the West Indies, for example — give priority to the new competitions over test cricket. Increasingly, they can have a professional career while only occasionally interacting with the sport’s established structures. Australia’s up-and-coming twenty-six-year-old, Tim David, will play in seven different competitions in 2024, four of these non-Australian. Former England batsman Alex Hales is on the books of six clubs around the world; in those circumstances, being loyal is playing for only one club in any given competition.

The accelerating profusion of franchise-based competitions presents challenges for the mainstream cricket industry, which has already faced and only partially overcome two other challenges.

The first of these, already alluded to, is the balance between the format that brings in the most income and spectators — limited-over “white ball” cricket — and higher-status “red ball” test cricket. The second is the increasing dominance of audiences for international sporting events over those watching domestic competitions. Even though domestic competitions are crucial to the viability of the sport, some have suffered a decline in both audiences and income. Australia’s Sheffield Shield is a dramatic example: its crowds are a fraction of what they used to be, and it receives only fleeting attention in the media.

Cricket Australia’s response has been less than convincing. The Sheffield Shield now plays five rounds from early October to the beginning of December, has a nine-week hiatus, and then plays five final rounds in February and early March. A final eventually comes, anti-climactically, in late March, only to be broadly ignored by the nation’s media and a sporting public by now focused on football. It must rank as one of the most bizarre professional sporting fixtures in the world.

Australia’s answer to the IPL, the Big Bash League, has two fundamental weaknesses compared with the original. The first is that the best and best-known Australian players are rarely able to participate because of overlaps with test matches. David Warner, for example, one of the biggest drawcards in Australian cricket, didn’t play in the BBL for nine years, has played far more IPL than BBL matches, and has almost certainly made far more money playing for the IPL than for Australian teams.

The second structural problem is that overseas stars come and go depending on the other financially rewarding commitments they have, and are often missing at the season’s crunch time. Already this year, Brisbane Heat captain Colin Munro and teammate Sam Billings and the Sixers’ James Vince have all abandoned the BBL, and missed its final round, to join their ILT20 teams in Abu Dhabi.

Discontent with such weaknesses has even been expressed by the sport’s broadcaster. In 2022, in an unprecedented legal action, the Seven Network sought to get itself out of its $450 million broadcast deal by arguing that Cricket Australia had failed to deliver the BBL at the contracted quality and had thus depressed viewer numbers. Peace has apparently since been restored.

Cricket Australia is certainly subject to conflicting cross-pressures, but the fixtures for the Sheffield Shield and BBL strongly suggest that it has failed Sports Scheduling 101. Its main response has been to pack the cricket calendar ever more tightly, loading it up with too many events of little significance.

After the fifty-over World Cup finished in 2023, Australia played India in a series of Twenty20 matches. But most of each team’s best players were rested. It was still called an international fixture, but I wonder if any cricket fans can remember, or care, who won. Quantity is no substitute for quality; what’s needed is not more matches but more structured, meaningful contests.

What makes the challenge even more difficult is the fact that cricket’s problems are occurring amid rapid changes in the larger media–sport complex. The ever-increasing growth of gambling is the first of these problems: especially online gambling, which can cross national jurisdictions. In just three years from 2018 to 2021, legal sports wagering in the United States grew from less than US$5 billion in bets placed to US$57 billion. More than a million gambling ads were aired on Australian free-to-air TV and radio last year, with an unknown number more on pay TV and streaming services.

Apart from the human problems associated with gambling, cricket has had particular problems with corruption — namely match fixing and spot betting — associated with illegal gambling. In private leagues with weak checks and balances these problems could easily increase.

The second recent trend is “sportswashing,” a term that was selected by the Language Council of Norway as its 2021 word of the year. Sportswashing refers to the effort to improve one’s image, or redirect public attention away from human rights abuses and other shortcomings, by sponsoring global sport spectaculars. Wealthy Saudi Arabia, a noted human rights offender, has made significant inroads into tennis, golf and soccer. (The Saudis might also be using their financial muscle to create continuing profit flows from these sports.) So far the major Middle Eastern involvement in cricket has come from the United Arab Emirates.

The media part of the media–sports complex is also in flux. Streaming services increasingly assert themselves in what was the preserve of free-to-air and pay TV services. Amazon recently reached a deal with the International Cricket Council for the exclusive broadcast rights to ICC games in a deal spanning 448 live games in 2024–27. None of these games is on Australia’s anti-siphoning list, which primarily covers games played in this country. But Australians — probably along with people in the other participating countries — will have to pay to watch the next cricket World Cup. It may make the broadcasters and the ICC money, but it could substantially reduce the viewing audience.

Tackling this mix of problems will require concerted international action by the cricketing nations, but here too obstacles exist. Test cricket seems to be viable in England, Australia and India but much more fragile elsewhere. Moreover, one country, one vote doesn’t prevail in international cricket policymaking. India now accounts for 80 per cent of international cricket revenue, so any solution must be acceptable to it; equally, though, any lasting solution must also see funds flowing to the poorer countries.

In the immediate future the proliferation of franchise-based domestic Twenty20 competitions will play havoc with cricketing schedules. While past and present champions will solemnly declare their continuing commitment to test cricket, cricketers from other countries and those not quite in the top echelon will vote with their feet.

Within these manufactured contests, the dynamics are yet to become clear. How much team spirit will be generated in a group of players brought together by commercial opportunity? Despite the profusion of fan merchandise, how involved will spectators be in competitions between recently created franchises? Rather than traditional rivalries built up over decades, these may be soulless contests. “Ever since I was a child I wanted to play for the richest franchise” doesn’t quite have the same resonance as “Ever since I was a child I wanted to represent my country.”

All these competitions are essentially parasitic structures (as indeed was Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket in the 1970s). Feeding off the talent nurtured by the representative institutions, they offer undreamt-of riches to the most marketable stars. But they do nothing to build the future of the game. If the balance of power — financial and political — between the representative institutions and the franchises swings too far, the problems are likely to be more severe than the sound of members at Lords spluttering into their gin and tonics. •

The post Ashes to ashes appeared first on Inside Story.

The theme served three purposes. First, it was memorable — hearing the music all these years later, I still think of the masked avenger before the Swiss freedom fighter. Second, television programs went to air at a certain time of the week (The Lone Ranger, for me, was Saturday tea time) and the music served as an alarm call. It even began with a fanfare of trumpets and French horns that could summon you from another part of the house. Today, when many people watch “linear” television only for news bulletins, news themes still often begin with some sort of fanfare.

The third purpose of the Rossini was that it was cheap, and this was a hangover from radio days. It was some time after the advent of radio before anyone thought to employ composers to write themes or incidental music, and it was the same with television. In the short term, much of the music came from stock recordings, and they weren’t always of the highest quality — the trumpets and horns were never quite together at the start of The Lone Ranger. Burlingame’s book tells us that sixty-seven of the eight-nine cuts of incidental music in the series were classical pieces by the likes of Liszt and Tchaikovsky together with a library of generic “Western” music by uncredited studio composers. Most of it had been recorded in Mexico in the 1940s.

By the mid 1950s, television drama was taking music more seriously and this involved drafting film composers to ply their trade in the new medium. Accordingly, Bernard Herrmann, who had composed the theremin-heavy score for The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951, was invited to supply the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone eight years later and came up with a score consisting of drifting minor-key harmonies and dreamy harp arpeggios, not unlike his contemporaneous score for Vertigo.

But this is not the theme most people associate with The Twilight Zone, the one with the famous four-note ostinato on an electric guitar. That came the following season (the theme was changed to underline the fact that these were new episodes) and was the result of someone editing together two scraps of library stock. Their composer, the Frenchman Marius Constant, was unaware his music had been used, let alone edited, let alone turned into a theme, and his name never appeared on the credits. As Burlingame explains, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the composer realised how significant his music had been. Having dinner with some American friends, he dropped into the conversation that he had written the theme for The Twilight Zone.

“There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by an enthusiastic outburst,” Constant recalled; “it was as if I had confessed to having written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The anecdote alone demonstrates how important TV had become in people’s lives.

Burlingame’s excellent book, which is full of such stories, is a nostalgia trip, no doubt about it; but it is also what its author intended: “a history of a vastly underappreciated realm of American music.” Divided into television genres — Westerns, detective series, sci-fi, drama, comedy, news, cartoons and so on — it charts the rise in importance of the sound of television and the role of the composer. As soon as composers were attached to projects, music began to establish, from the outset, the pace of the show — the powerful swagger of Fred Steiner’s Perry Mason theme, say, or the five-in-a-bar hell-for-leather of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible. With words added, the theme could prime new viewers with details of a show’s dramatis personae; it could even provide the backstory. This was particularly true in the case of comedies.

“Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!” was the viewer’s invitation, in 1960, to “have a gay old time” with “the modern stone-age family.” Many thousands of years later (in 1963), the family of the future was afforded more specific introductions: “Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy… Jane, his wife.” In the 1970s, prime-time cartoon comedies went out of fashion, but when they returned with a vengeance in the form of The Simpsons (1989–) the opening sequence was a nod to both those earlier shows. Danny Elfman’s theme, though it had dispensed with lyrics, borrowed the rising melodic line of “Meet George Jetson,” while, in a pointedly ironic reference to the Flinstones’ trip to a prehistoric drive-in, which is how that show began each week, we saw the Simpson family rushing home to sit on the couch and watch themselves on telly.

“Come ’n listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed,” was the first line of a song with words and music by Paul Henning, the creator–producer of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71). The banjo-accompanied song told viewers, at the start of each episode, why and how “a poor mountaineer” and his family had ended up in a Beverly Hills mansion, without which knowledge the show wouldn’t have made much sense. As another producer, the screenwriter Sherwood Schwartz, remarked, “a puzzled audience cannot laugh.”

Schwartz himself was obliged to come up with the theme song for Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) ahead of CBS’s commissioning the show because the president of the company believed it was impossible to give enough backstory for a new viewer. Schwartz was no songwriter, but he stayed up late and wrote a calypso-style number (the island, after all, was in the Caribbean) that at least satisfied the studio. Later, working with composer and music director George Wyle, Schwartz developed the familiar shanty-esque song — “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale” — that provided an introduction to all the characters and a recap of the “fateful trip” that had led to their predicament.

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady,” was the start of a hyper-efficient lyric that explained how the “lady” in question and her “very lovely daughters” had grown acquainted with “a man named Brady” and his sons, and in no time at all (in fact, fifty-eight seconds) become The Brady Bunch (1969–74). You could start watching any of these shows mid-season and know all you needed to know by the time the opening credits are over.

In The Addams Family (1964–66) we scarcely needed the “kooky/spooky/ooky” words to let us know what was going on because lined up on our screens, as if for a family photograph, was the family itself. They weren’t smiling, they snapped their fingers ominously, and really that, together with the sound of the harpsichord, did the job. Perhaps most radical, though, was All in the Family (1971–79), in which Archie and Edith Bunker (Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) sat at a piano each week and sang their theme song (“Those Were the Days”) to the studio audience and to camera. The longer she did it, Burlingame relates, and the more laughs she got, the more raucously off-key Stapleton would sing.

When the first edition of Burlingame’s book appeared in 1996, it ended with a lament that the great days of television were gone, while hoping they might one day return. Almost on cue, cable TV hit its stride, with streaming not far behind. In some ways it seemed as though television music was starting again from the same place.

The Sopranos (1999–2007), eschewing the score its creators believed would manipulate the viewer, opted for existing music (not classical this time, but pop). Stock music was also back, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–) using a twenty-five-year-old library track he had first encountered on a California bank commercial. But composed music was changing, too, the new widescreen televisions taking us closer to the characters and drawing subtlety from composers, even in signature themes. With no need of fanfare-style tunes or (in the age of bingeing) songs that filled in the backstory, David Carbonara’s mesmerising Mad Men (2007–15) theme, the creeping menace of Hildur Guðnadottir’s score for Chernobyl (2019) and Siddhartha Khosla’s wittily compelling music for Only Murders in the Building (2021–) would all have seemed a little underdone in TV’s first golden age.

Is the second golden age already fading? It could be. Certainly the theme is now at the viewer’s discretion, for as the opening credits roll on your favourite show, the streaming service on which you’re watching it will invite you to “skip.” If it’s your third or fourth episode of the evening, you might well be tempted. •

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Across four seasons, with the fifth commencing this month, Fargo has created conventions of its own, one of which is to mix up the psychological profiles typically associated with violent acts and spin counterintuitive narratives accordingly. If the stories aren’t true then they could be, in the way truth is often said to defy the limits of credibility imposed on fiction.

To begin with, we have a cast of characters from a small regional community where it is important to be nice. “Minnesota nice,” as we’re informed at the start of the first episode of season five, is the term for a code of manners characterised by “an aggressively pleasant demeanour, often forced, in which a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get.” Nice people like to live regular, comfortable lives. They don’t like to take risks. Even the state’s distinctive accent, with its soothing, predictable intonations, communicates security.

People like these are naturally going to attract predators set on exploiting their inability to anticipate bad things happening. At least that’s the premise. As with all crime stories set in local communities, the predators come in two kinds: the home-grown, and the ones who cruise in from elsewhere, bringing new kinds of trouble. And the attraction between the predator and the prey cuts both ways, which is where the dynamic becomes perverse. The people who should be the victims in Fargo never quite turn out that way.

It’s this mutual engagement between predator and prey — or, perhaps more provocatively, between the sinister and the naive — that drives each season. Standard psychology would suggest that the more calculating, determined personality is going to be the catalyst, with an ingenuous counterpart co-opted as a mere pawn in the game, but that doesn’t account for fate itself, which is always an overarching influence.

Some killers know exactly what they intend, and plot accordingly, but others, the more interesting kind in this absurdist world, haven’t the slightest idea of what they are about to do until they’ve done it. Like season one’s failing insurance salesman, Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), seemingly intimidated by everyone he meets until his wife goads him more fiercely than usual and the hammer he’s holding develops a will of its own.

Questions of causality are always unresolved. When fate is the determining agent, the hammer might well be its instrument and Lester a mere channel. But Fargo also has real villains, affording opportunities for charismatic performances like those of Billy Bob Thornton as Lorne Malvo in the first season, David Thewlis as V.M. Varga in the third, and now Jon Hamm as fundamentalist cowboy sheriff Roy Tillman.

Apex predators might have cunning and sadism woven into their DNA but their blind spot is an incapacity to believe in anything other than the force of their own will. Fate, ever a trickster, has the capacity to outwit any of them.

Season five, under the direction of series creator Noah Hawley, opens in a school hall festooned with Halloween pumpkins for a presentation by the Fall Festival Planning Committee. For whatever reason (if there is one, we aren’t to learn it at this point) the meeting has turned into an all-out brawl. A terrified woman cringes in her seat, trying to shield her child from the melee.

Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) is a diminutive presence, seemingly fragile and surely “nice.” She makes pancakes for breakfast and meatloaf for dinner, serves on the school library committee, knits in front of daytime TV and is adored by her nerdy husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl). Under threat, though, she whips out a taser or turns a hairspray can into a flame thrower.

After fighting her way out of the school hall Dot undergoes the embarrassment of police arrest and is released just in time for a formal dinner with her wealthy mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Lorraine, a formidable matriarch, kicks off the festive season with a photoshoot for the family Christmas card in which she and her inner circle pose with automatic firearms. Over dinner, she makes carping remarks to her daughter in law, who plays Minnesota nice.

Somewhere out of town, around a table in an open paddock on a vast cattle ranch, another family meal is being presided over, this one by Sheriff Tillman, who leads the company in saying grace with joined hands. True to the stereotype, he rides the property in a ten-gallon hat and supervises the training of horses in a massive barn. But that’s not all he supervises. His employees include a couple of hired killers and a mistress who engages in hardcore roleplay on demand.

Tillman’s obsession, though, is his missing wife, who suddenly appears after ten years when her photo is registered on the state law enforcement database after she is fingerprinted following the school hall riot.

Between that vengeful ex-husband and her gun-toting mother-in-law, Dot has her work cut out for her. She goes about it assiduously, creating a household defence system involving a lot of crushed lightbulbs. As if the dice are not already sufficiently loaded against her, an apparently supernatural being arises during a Gothic Halloween ritual and stalks abroad, bloody from head to foot.

What kind of story are we in here? Figuring that out is detective work for the audience.

If the mix of ingredients is verging on the preposterous, the dramatic tension is always in sure hands, with a terse and witty script from Hawley and Lee Edward Colston, wonderful cinematography from Dana Gonzales and his team and, as always with Fargo, actors of genius in the lead roles. •

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Two high-rating television series devoted to the volatile lives of celebrity newsreaders show how the role has transformed. Morning Wars (Apple Plus) presents the contemporary newsroom as a chaotic epicentre through which producers, presenters, assistants, camera operators, technicians and guests make rapid transit as they attempt to head off a breaking story and give it their own spin.

ABC TV’s The Newsreader takes us back to the less frenetic media world of the 1980s, but acceleration is already a central theme, with presenters Helen Norville (Anna Torv) and Dale Jennings (Sam Reid) constantly running to front the camera as the latest rapidly unfolding story threatens to leave them in its wake.

It’s instructive to watch the two series in tandem. As a symbolic indicator of the growing stature of the presenter in the twenty-first century, the desk in Morning Wars has grown to absurd proportions, and the high voltage personalities who preside over it exercise dynamic influence. Promoted as celebrities in their own right, they become the brand that sells the news and know that their own survival is at stake in the cycle of evolving crises.

As the third season opens, the network, UBA, is the target of a takeover bid by maverick tycoon Paul Marks, whose love of high-speed vehicles — from cars to space rockets — evokes obvious associations. Played by Jon Hamm, he’s nicely matched with Billy Crudup as Cory Ellison, UBA’s own corporate Machiavel. Playing squash together, they plan a publicity stunt in which one of the star presenters, either Alex Levy (Jennifer Anniston) or Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), will take a trip in the space shuttle, live to air.

Each of these four principals has a different kind of leverage in the power play. What unites them is a determination to upstage any real-world news with their own storylines. It’s a risky enterprise for each of them, subject to sabotage by the others and by external players. When a hacker takes the network down mid-show and then threatens to release a cache of embarrassing communications, strategic realignments happen at lightning speed.

Some of these moves produce compelling items for the daily broadcast. The chair of the network’s board, Cybil Richards (Holland Taylor), is outed for a racist text and forced to do a mea culpa interview with the target of the slur, new presenter Chris Hunter (Nicole Beharie). In a ruthless encounter, both parties vie for new levels of frankness: Richards through candour and contrition, Hunter to force a reckoning for a whole suite of offences on the part of management.

The scene makes compelling viewing, not least for the culturally diverse staff gathered in the studio, whose reactions are shown in close-up. Perhaps they’re relishing it a bit too much, and there will be other kinds of repercussions. Until someone fronts the camera to give the wheel another spin, what happens next is anyone’s guess.

The Newsreader portrays a contrasting world in which television reporters are still chasing actual events rather than creating a hyperreality revolving around themselves. Compared to its US counterpart, the Australian series is a scaled-down production, reflecting the simpler enterprise of current affairs reporting at the time as well as the constrained budgets of today’s Australian producers.

The cast is smaller but strong, and director Emma Freeman makes the most of a talent pool that includes — as well as Torv and Reid in suitably charismatic lead roles — William McInnes as the irascible boss and Robert Taylor as the problematic eminence grise who has been forced to cede the anchor role to the next generation but is looking for payback. Michelle Lim Davidson suppresses her comic talent to play an earnest young producer crossing the cultural divide from a migrant family to the evolving multicultural environment of the television business.

Well-researched storylines draw on landmark events, including the July 1987 federal election, Melbourne’s Hoddle Street shooting a month later, the impending break-up of Charles and Diana, and the 1988 bicentenary. The ABC has released a weekly podcast hosted by Leigh Sales and Lisa Millar detailing the background to these events. Interviews with journalists involved are correlated with perspectives from members of the cast and production team.

In the second podcast, journalist Steve Carey, who was part of the original media response to the Hoddle Street massacre, recalls the experience as one of utter chaos, in which the reporter was just one more figure on the scene, as confused a witness as anyone else. On-screen, writer Kim Ho effectively grounds the episode in the detail of recollections such as Carey’s, while spinning a personal story for Norville, who makes a spontaneous decision about coverage of the fatalities just as the families are receiving the shock. The interwoven lines of tension make for a tightly constructed script.

For all its relatively modest production values, The Newsreader at its best gains dramatic traction of a kind that eludes Morning Wars, where the constant borderline hysteria palls and the ethos of hyperreality lacks genuine urgency.

So what is it that fascinates us about the news presenter as a public figure? Following their interview with Anna Torv, Sales and Millar recall Jana Wendt as a defining presence: the glamour, the command of the medium and the capacity to identify the running edge of a story.

But things have changed since Wendt’s prime years on 60 Minutes (1982–87) and hosting A Current Affair (1987–92). Judging from social media, the public are more frustrated than fascinated by those who tell the stories that make news. No doubt in an attempt to tackle this problem, Sales has compiled a collection of some thirty interviews with colleagues in television journalism, inviting them to reflect on the particular skills and qualities called for in their profession.

Storytellers features such distinguished contributors as Chris Reason, Marian Wilkinson, Robert Penfold, Stan Grant and Niki Savva beside younger talents who offer insights into newer problems and challenges facing reporters and presenters. Disability reporter Nas Campanella talks of the importance of voice quality in creating an empathic relationship with viewers. Bridget Brennan, who has become the ABC’s Indigenous affairs editor after a period as Europe correspondent, focuses on the selection and genesis of stories.

The interviews are brief, occasionally revealing, but not probing; together they seem too random an assemblage to offer any overarching perspectives. If there is a consistent theme that threads through the collection, it is the nervous challenge of holding the story together in a wide range of entirely unpredictable situations. As Lisa Millar says, “You never know what might happen.” •

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The Red Riding Hood persona is surely tongue in cheek, but Crabb is taking a real risk by evoking a fairytale figure who proved terminally naive: quite literally, since she was swallowed alive. Whether or not there’s a wolf in the house, Crabb can expect savage attacks in the surrounding media environment.

In another reversal of traditional symbolism, rather than discovering a wolf in the guise of a trusted human, she is about to use a cheerful domestic setting to reveal the human who, in political guise, may have inspired fear and loathing. “Every single politician we elect has a backstory that dictates the way they behave in politics, and whether you love or loathe them, it’s always worth knowing that story,” she says.

Given the temperature of responses to the program, that has proved a too-easy assumption. This week’s episode with opposition leader Peter Dutton showed, not for the first time, that Crabb’s enterprise serves only to inflame the ferocity. For Charlie Lewis, writing in Crikey, the “cosy and humanising profiles of people responsible for variously sized portions of national shame” come across as “a prank on everyone involved.”

Amy McQuire’s excoriating review in New Matilda, prompted by the season five episode featuring Scott Morrison, was circulating again on social media in the lead-up to the Dutton appearance. McQuire calls the program “ridiculous, sickening,” “junk food journalism.”

The chorus on Twitter, where #KitchenCabinet has been trending since the start of the new season, has been virulent. A photoshopped image shows Crabb lunching with Adolf Hitler, whom she describes as “good company” and “funnier than I was expecting.” Other posts focus on those who have suffered the consequences of Dutton’s political decisions: the Biloela children, Reza Barati and others held in long-term detention, communities in Melbourne vilified in response to his “African gangs” claims.

These and other highly charged issues, including Dutton’s current campaign for the No vote on the Voice, are raised over a lunch of chowder cooked by the opposition leader in the kitchen of his beautiful old Queenslander house. He seems to take Crabb’s insistence that some of his public remarks are straight-out racism in his stride, without seeming riled, excessively defensive or especially embarrassed.

Crabb encourages him to talk about his life before politics, including the experience of attending violent crime scenes as a police officer. In answer to Crabb’s suggestion that he might suffer from PTSD, he says that probably most police officers do. That exchange triggered his antagonists, who saw it as a bid for sympathy put forward by Dutton himself.

Distortions like that are par for the course on social media, where criticisms of programs and presenters often take the form of personal abuse. The problem has been serious enough for Leigh Sales, Stan Grant and Hamish Macdonald to leave political roles at the ABC, and has led to the broadcaster’s recent decision to withdraw its program accounts from Twitter.

While the personal abuse is intolerable, the reactive high dudgeon is often too sweeping. Professional journalists, especially if they have a television profile, are prone to characterising social media users as a rabid species, demented by a diet of disinformation and immune to reason or civility. But something of vital importance gets missed: behind the apparent savagery lies an essentially human response that warrants serious attention. Seen collectively, the attacks on Kitchen Cabinet are not in the vein of criticism or argument but are manifestations of a visceral moral outrage.

This is what Crabb in her smiling Red Riding Hood persona has failed to take account of. “Sometimes people who disagree with each other, and even people who agree with each other on some things, do not have conversations with each other,” she says. “And I think that’s madness.” Is it? Suggesting that the reaction reflects a pathological refusal to have conversations across lines of disagreement is missing the point by a country mile.

“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”: the poet William Blake might not have written that line if he’d been around in the age of social media, but it remains a succinct and unforgettable evocation of wrath as a moral force, and one that may be collectively generated. Blake himself wrote under its influence in response to the social cruelties and political degeneracies of the industrial revolution.

We in Australia may no longer send children down mines or up chimneys, but we do put them into solitary confinement, isolate them in island compounds, and subject their parents to prolonged and abject misery. As we’ve learned from the robodebt debacle, we drive people to suicide through government-initiated programs of extortion. We create pariah communities through the racial stereotyping that is sometimes explicitly promoted by elected politicians.

Is it really so incomprehensible that many people take offence at being vicariously invited by the national broadcaster to have a chatty meal with those seen as instrumental in perpetuating these kinds of torments? Or if we do decide to spend half an hour in this way, and we find the company genial and good-humoured, and the host quite a decent bloke, where does this leave us?

Kitchen Cabinet started out as an experiment in genre-crossing: equal parts reality TV, chat show, cooking program (the dessert recipes are posted on the ABC site) and political inquisition. Crabb’s deliberately ingenuous persona was presumably intended to push the dial to the lighter end of the spectrum, but she was an experienced enough journalist to know how to introduce more serious registers as the conversation rolled along.

Guests have been chosen from across the political spectrum, with a predominance of women, and they do tend to open up in unexpected ways, offering new perspectives on the personalities and motivations of those in power. But personal trust in politics is a high-risk investment.

In season one, lunch with National Party senator Nigel Scullion, Indigenous affairs minister at the time, involved a trip up river in the Northern Territory to catch crab and giant prawns that he cooked on a makeshift barbecue. “How do you fit into the Senate?” Crabb asked. The Australian people shouldn’t be represented in parliament just by lawyers, he responded; there should be tradies and fishermen too.

He sounded like a good bloke. Referring to the Warramirri people as “my mob,” he talked of his responsibility for finding better ways to address disadvantage in Indigenous communities. Barnaby Joyce, too, sounded like a good bloke when he weighed in against “back-pocket politics” and “the clever club” of lobbyists, mining companies and foreign investors in season two.

Five years later Scullion was in hot water with allegations he’d given Indigenous funding to his own former fishing-industry lobby group, and Barnaby Joyce had resigned as leader of the Nationals over an affair with a former staffer, with attendant allegations of nepotism over the appointment of his new partner to an unadvertised position. In retrospect, the good bloke talk does seem rather… disingenuous.

Many of the other guests on the program no doubt really are good people who maintain ethical standards and principled positions in situations of evolving complexity. But it would be impossible to draw a line between those who should and should not be featured in this pseudo-innocent format. Might the best thing therefore be to draw a line under it? There was, after all, a seven-year gap between this season and the last.

True, we’d have missed out on engagements with some of our most interesting and dynamic female politicians: Dai Le, Linda Burney, Anika Wells, Lidia Thorpe. The diversity of the current parliament, according to Crabb, was the compelling case for another season. Perhaps, though, it’s a sign of a lack of new ideas at the ABC, and a compelling case for a different kind of program. •

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This Oppenheimer makes no appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which ends in the era of McCarthyism, when the national hero credited with bringing the war to an end was targeted in an ugly security hearing. Cillian Murphy’s portrayal gives us a different personality, with little of the physicist’s wry wit, and a more fragile sense of authority based on scientific brilliance rather than intellectual breadth.

Sam Shaw’s 2016 television series Manhattan gave an almost antithetical view to Nolan’s, with the great scientist, played by Daniel London, making only occasional appearances as a terse and inscrutable man who delivers peremptory rulings over the heads of those doing the hard grind of calculation and experiment at Los Alamos.

The story of Oppenheimer, like that of the Manhattan Project, can be told from different angles, but the angles don’t fit together. How did such breadth of hindsight fit with such constrained foresight? How did the party-going womaniser reconcile with the moral philosopher obsessed with questions of responsibility? How did the vocation of a gifted theoretical physicist map onto the overwhelmingly horrifying consequences of his work?

As with the inch and the light years, the cognitive dislocation has to do with matters of scale and distance. If the figure of Oppenheimer himself  has all the cohesion of a Picasso portrait, this has surely to do with the fact that his mind was working in dimensions not accessible to most of us. “He’s complicated, capable of understanding and holding in his head contradictory ideas,” says Kai Bird, co-author of the biography on which the film is based.

Seen in hindsight and impersonated by a fine actor, as he is in the film, he may resolve himself into some kind of coherence, but hindsight is selective, easy to blend with invention and mould into narrative lines. Justifiably praised as it has been, Nolan’s Oppenheimer ultimately owes more to Hollywood than to history. The modern myth of the persecuted genius shows no signs of fading.

Shaw’s Manhattan skirts the heroic prototype altogether, and in many other respects forms a counterpart to the film. Shot on location in New Mexico, it recreates the township of Los Alamos with dedicated accuracy. For the cohort of scientists drafted in with their families, this “cross between a prison camp and a university campus” is not an easy place to live. In contrast to the string of dramatic moments Nolan creates across time and space, the episodic structure of a television series allows sustained attention as these people wander around the dusty, makeshift town in their city clothes.

The township is populated with invented characters: minor players in the project, their families and the workers brought in as servants from Mexican communities whose land is being occupied. While the men are at work the women make unsuccessful attempts to socialise in a setting where none of them are permitted to know anything about what is going on.

A divergence of views on the underlying physics of the bomb plays out in an alpha-male clash between two men: the hard-bitten Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey), leader of a dissenting team working on the implosion principle, and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zukerman), a prize-winning Harvard doctorate who arrived in July 1943, with load of tickets on himself, as part of the larger Oppenheimer-backed “Thin Man” cohort.

Manhattan’s script is designed to show how social and psychological factors are interwoven with theoretical convictions. You don’t have to follow the maths to pick up on the tensions generated by conflicting paradigms or the dual timelines measured on the ticking clock.

In a race to assemble the data before Oppenheimer leaves for the next briefing in Washington, Winter works through the night, interrupted by a giant scorpion marching across the wooden desktop as he scribbles equations; driving out into the desert to experiment with the accelerations of a golf ball under the car headlights. Meanwhile, the days crawl by for his wife Liza (Olivia Williams), a highly qualified botanist who has put her own career on hold, and their daughter Callie (Alexia Fast), desperate to escape to college in New York.

Stresses of another kind begin to escalate as bored military officers, on hand to enforce secrecy provisions, become overzealous, going through rubbish bins and opening personal correspondence. Things get ugly with the arrival of a plain clothes interrogator played by Richard Schiff (familiar to some viewers from The West Wing). With a relaxed manner and husky delivery, he assures his suspects: “Technically you’re nowhere, talking to no one.” Errors of judgement, betrayals and tragic consequences follow, and the town is subject to a regime of obsessive surveillance resembling conditions commonly associated with Stalinism.

All this is an important corrective to Nolan’s decision to depict the postwar witch-hunt against Oppenheimer without any attention to the precedents. Being accused of espionage was an occupational hazard for anyone who worked at Los Alamos. “It seems half of America’s physicists just disappeared,” says Winter at one point. “Pouff. Like the Rapture.” Curiously, Nolan casts Christopher Denham, who plays a member of Winter’s research cohort in Manhattan, as the real-life spy Klaus Fuchs, seen on the fringes of scenes in Oppenheimer as if he’s having a pretty easy time passing as one of the team.

The security theme has both political and social complexities: how is it possible to conduct any high-profile covert operation without attracting espionage? The film shows Oppenheimer as too trusting, or simply oblivious, as he focuses on technical matters while Fuchs hovers behind him. In Manhattan, he comes across as too ruthless to care what happens to those working under his management.

With audience numbers declining, Shaw’s series was terminated after season two. Watching it again now, it’s easy to see why, despite a uniformly excellent cast and the authentically evoked milieu. The characters lack edge and wit, and their obsessive sexual liaisons become tedious. Frank Winter, always dour and frustrated, just doesn’t have sufficient range to sustain the amount of screen time devoted to him. The bomb itself is never effectively conjured into presence, something Nolan manages unforgettably with a display of IMAX wizardry.

Both dramatisations provoke ethical questions by divorcing the story of what went on in Los Alamos from its consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But how, even hypothetically, could those two pictures be brought into meaningful dramatic relationship?

Here the older Oppenheimer serves as a fiercely articulate commentator. Speaking at the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1958, he began with the admission that “we are in trouble,” and proceeded to dwell on the sense of disharmony and imbalance that characterised the postwar era.

“Everything has got enormously bigger,” he said. “There are more people. The units of human activity have gotten bigger.” The scale of our enterprise as a species had defied our comprehension; the joint between tradition and innovation was “inflamed and in bad shape” and an “almost total collapse of valid communication” was evident in the public domain.

The words still ring true. And no matter how big the screen, we biological humans are perhaps only capable of seeing part of the picture. •

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With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

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Central character Tony Woodford (Rob Sitch), hapless CEO of the Nation Building Authority, is enduring a pile-on of humiliations. These range from the trivial, when the office’s new smart fridge turns his lunch into an iceblock, to the overwhelming, when he cops the blame, in a spray of media coverage, for an aborted scheme whose failure was caused by a website malfunction. Then, when the tables are turned and he’s featured in a glossy magazine shoot in the following episode, even that turns out to be a demeaning experience.

The creation of Sitch and his Working Dog collaborators Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner, this sophisticated satire on contemporary working life has always had a ruthless edge, but now an element of melancholy seems to have got into the mix. The resilient Tony, whose capacity to keep calm and carry on while all around him goes haywire, is looking older and more at risk of being beaten down.

Chirpy personal assistant Katie (Emma-Louise Wilson) replaces his coffee with chamomile tea and freezes his computer by changing the wallpaper to soothing pastels. The more assiduously the rest of the staff go about their work, the more difficult it is to get anything done. This is the essential comedic principle of the series, and in previous seasons it generated a mesh of finely crafted absurdities as everyone engaged in their own specialised form of obstruction.

The new season kicks off with a typically ludicrous example: the matter of a farewell tea for a staff member. The guy has only been around for a year and is moving on to another position, so there are no complications, at least until HR goes about the business of finding them. The crisply spoken Beverley (Rebecca Massey) sails into Tony’s office with a spring in her step and a glint in her eye to raise a few questions. His idea of a jocular impromptu speech won’t do — he must submit a draft for checking. Word-by-word vetting ensues in consultation with the legal team, and that’s not the end of it.

Workplace health and safety, media briefings, team-building requirements, liability concerns, contractual technicalities: it’s more than a full-time job serving the dictates. Yet it’s clear that many of Tony’s colleagues delight in shuttling between imperatives and embargos, implementing rules and protocols that not only defy common sense but also render it an impossibility.

This season is not as exuberantly crazy as its predecessors. Workplace pathologies are viewed with a steadier gaze, prompting questions less about the politics of the situation (this is, after all, an organisation that functions at the behest of government) and more about the shame of so avidly thwarting human intelligence at every turn. Perhaps, fundamentally, the humiliation lies in the time wasted — which can be a lot given that most of us, as Terkel observes, spend more time working than doing anything else.

Terkel, who strove to bridge the communication gap between working people and those who make the decisions that affect their lives, once suggested that any American president delivering the Labor Day address might count themselves fortunate to be spared an encounter with the spot-welder, the washroom attendant or the cleaner whose stories he recorded.

The forty-fourth president, Barack Obama, has a different sense of being fortunate. Released from the work schedules of the Oval Office he went in search of workers across the spectrum for a four-part Netflix series, Working: What We Do All Day. He serves as executive producer and narrator as well as engaging the subjects in conversation, following them into their workplaces and their homes. Terkel’s study, which he came across as a student, is his inspiration.

“What if we pick up Studs’s project for this era?” he proposes. “What if we start at the bottom and work our way up, from the service entrance to the C suite; what would it tell us about how we’re connected, about our own place in the world?” He looks at how the economic hierarchy plays out in the industries of home care, technology and hospitality in three different locations: Manhattan, Mississippi and Pittsburgh.

With this focus on connection, directing attention to the human in the role, Obama flips the humiliations theme in Terkel’s account and offers the other side of the coin from what we see in Utopia. Wry, incisive and with a personal warmth no generic training could spoil, Obama is in many ways the perfect guide. He clearly has spontaneous liking for the people (“folks,” as he prefers to say) he’s engaging with.

When he goes round the supermarket with a home care worker, he wheels the trolley with her toddler perched in the seat. As they talk, the questions about wages and costs, aims and barriers, wishes and disappointments come across as a private conversation rather than interview material. When the second episode opens he is delivering lunches to office staff at their desks — potentially the kind of appalling idea Utopia’s media manager Rhonda (Kitty Flanagan) might come up with, but it’s hard to detect a shred of pretence or image-consciousness in his manner.

Obama has been justifiably criticised for going too easy on the bosses in the series, choosing businesses that are the exception rather than the rule in their considerate attitudes to those they employ, and for generally being too relaxed and bland about working conditions. Humorous he may be, but there’s not a skerrick of cynicism here. After all, President 44 was the Hope guy, the “Yes We Can” campaigner. It’s also arguable, though, that his ease of manner encourages people to open up and offer personal reflections only elicited by someone who is so on the level.

It does leave me wondering what he and Tony Woodford would make of each other. That’s an encounter I’d like to see. •

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Wrangles between the Roy family and their inner circles had become ever more intimate and intense, alternating with large-scale public scenes: chaotic election-night coverage from a major news network; a high church funeral for magnate Logan Roy (Brian Cox) attended by a newly elected president; a showdown in the boardroom as members voted on a takeover bid from a Scandinavian tycoon.

As in previous seasons, the story’s central arc continued to be shaped by the question of who in this close but warring family would succeed Roy as head of Waystar Royco. Following the death of the patriarch, and with the prospect of a takeover, the question had reached peak urgency as the last episode went to air.

My money was on Connor (Alan Ruck), Logan’s son by a first marriage. He had never been in contention and, after a misfired run as a presidential candidate, was hanging loose on the sidelines, looking for a job. According to the conventions of the whodunnit, which apply similarly to narratives of “the chosen,” surely it has to be the one who was always around but never drew suspicion?

The devious president-elect had been courted unsuccessfully by Logan’s younger son Roman (Kieran Culkin) and was clearly unhappy with the prospect of dealing with Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the most likely candidate after his commanding impromptu speech at his father’s funeral in the previous episode.

From a political point of view, who better to head the populist news network than a self-regarding airhead? If the takeover went through, the reckless and probably clueless new owner Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) would find Connor a much  more congenial choice than Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook), who had been pushing a bit too insistently for the position of CEO.

That’s not how it turned out, of course, though the actual choice of CEO in the wash-up meets the same criteria. In a more unpredictable strategy, Armstrong’s script for the almost movie-length episode allowed the quarrels between the trio of siblings to take over, so much so that the larger arc warped and finally buckled.

In a display of ensemble virtuosity for which the three actors have become renowned, the quarrelling went from verbal rapier fights to shrill slanging matches to physical brawling, in each phase offering different kinds of entertainment to the viewing audience. At one point they all came together for a midnight reconciliation in the kitchen of their mother’s villa in Barbados — “the only hellhole in Paradise” — and regressed into a childhood game of fridge raiding, throwing bread at each other and mixing mad potions.

The scene culminated in a mock coronation as Kendall, perched on the counter, was doused in the viscous contents of the blender. Did this finally resolve matters? Kendall believed so. Don’t these three always believe what they want to believe? It didn’t occur to him that the Carnival King is crowned only for a day, and by tradition subsequently assassinated.

Performed by three actors who are brilliant clowns when occasion requires, the scene was a reminder that the series has always been about childhood. The opening credits present images of a lost world in which privileged children take elephant rides, play tennis, and pose in the doorway of the family mansion. These idyllic evocations mask the permanent damage each of them will carry into adulthood. If their father is (as he openly declares) disappointed that they have all failed him as potential successors, he has failed them as parent of three people who will never be real adults.

Kendall, wearing the parental lack of faith like a poisoned cloak, talks vapidly about being “a good person” and immerses himself in the sea as if in search of baptism, though as his mood darkens, the suicidal tendencies are obvious. Roman prattles obscenely, displaying his infantile sexuality in a kind of verbal diarrhoea. Shiv, who has learned mistrust from an early age, is not to be trusted by anyone; betrayal has become second nature to her.

As all this surfaces again, so starkly, the effect is to steer each of the three into a narrative cul-de-sac. Perhaps part of the strategy is to foreclose any second thoughts about another season. However much viewers may wish for one, there should be finality here. Why, in the first place, did we want to watch these awful people ruining their lives? That’s the paradox. The ruined humanity of the corporate world is a story of our times, and Succession has brought home its reality. •

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As well as fielding calls from colleagues, answering journalists’ questions and authorising a short video response by embassy spokesperson Aaron Snipe, Hartley held a meeting with series star Keri Russell. Seeing they play the same role — Russell appears as ambassador Kate Wyler, mirroring Hartley as the first female US ambassador to Britain in fifty years — there must have been lots to talk about.

What prompted all this attention is a widespread fascination with the ambassadorial role. Ambassadors are people we usually only hear about when they appear on symbolic occasions, or are recalled or dismissed in a crisis. Everything else happens behind the scenes. So who are these people, and what do they really do?

The gulf between reality and dramatisation is usually a matter of intensity. Events in drama must be denser, more fraught and more personality-driven than in reality — though, as we know in our media-centric political environment, those in government can steer into situations that are more bizarre and dangerous than anything a showrunner would be likely to come up with.

But a showrunner as canny as The Diplomat’s Debora Cahn knows that the suspense factor depends on the engineering that supports the arc of the story as much as on the main plot points. The West Wing (1999), for which Cahn was on the writing team, proved that pace could be created by walking and talking speedily along corridors and that a killer sarcastic remark could make a more effective climactic moment than an outbreak of violence.

But that kind of effect calls for a thoroughly embedded familiarity with what happens 24/7 behind the political mainstage. Cahn, who was also a writer–producer on Homeland, is a firm believer in having the right consultants on a series and keeping them close to the action. The Homeland team, including the lead cast members, were required to attend “spy camps” with fourteen-hour days of intensive briefings by former CIA operatives, diplomats and security advisers.

Some of those advisers returned as consultants on The Diplomat. Indeed, says Cahn, the inspiration for the series came from a former female ambassador who advised on Homeland. This woman, with her mild and unassuming manner, explained how she had negotiated with warlords as bombs fell around her. “Those stories hadn’t been told and deserved to be,” says Cahn. Some featured married diplomats, known to insiders as “tandem couples,” like the fictional Wyler and her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell).

During the development period for The Diplomat Cahn and other members of the production team interviewed more than sixty people with specialist knowledge and experience, including diplomats and their staffers, intelligence analysts and protocol advisers. Six were contracted as staff consultants to advise on episodes in the making.

But significant inaccuracies and distortions somehow got through these filters. Hunt-the-errors has become something of a game on social media in recent days, with people with insider experience converging to provide verdicts on authenticity.

A former deputy chief of mission, Lewis A. Lukens, told the New York Times that an ambassador would not be involved in the kind of sensitive geopolitical security matters in which Wyler becomes embroiled. The reality is that top-level exchanges proceed directly between the secretary of state or the national security advisor and their British counterparts. An ambassador is not in the loop until a decision is made to provide them with a (usually highly selective) briefing.

But this fits with the premise of the series: a peremptory decision to appoint Wyler to the London post in preference to a more experienced hand like her husband Hal, who has held the position before. Some matters, it is suggested, are best kept from the incumbent — in this case, given the potentially catastrophic geopolitical fallout from the bombing of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf with forty-one fatalities.

Is the culprit Iran? Or Russia, in a spillover of the Ukraine offensive? Or is there a murkier scenario in which blame is to be deflected onto the obvious suspects in order to serve more complex agendas? From a dramatic point of view, it’s a situation rich in possibilities, and one in which boundaries and protocols are likely to be breached as minor players refuse to be pawns in the game.

What matters from here is the chemistry created by the actors, and Cahn has assembled a superb cast, primed to weave sharply nuanced behavioural language between the lines and keep the paradoxes evolving. Is prime minister Nic Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) — bumptious, peremptory and full of himself — a buffoon or a Machiavel?

Rufus Sewell as a wryly self-styled “ambassador’s wife” evokes Bill Clinton: three steps ahead of everyone while presenting as relaxed, cheerful, unconcerned. The chemistry between him and Russell is obvious, and much is made of it, but equally engaging is the dynamic between Russell and David Gyasi as foreign secretary Austin Dennison. Gyasi creates a figure who inhabits elegant formality and procedural sternness with apparent ease, but for whom there’s a whole lot more going on.

Messy humans reside inside these carefully etched personae. As Cahn puts it in interviews, it’s like the art of spinning plates — each hand has its own rhythm and momentum. Humour is a predominant element, manifesting mental agility and the quickfire diversity of perspectives these political plate-spinners must keep in play.

The psychological and behavioural aspects of authenticity matter most in a drama, and they can’t be captured unless the dialogue has credible points of focus and the action develops within real-world parameters. In that process, in The Diplomat at least, the involvement of consultants with extensive field experience has proved vital.

Succession, now nearing the end of its final season, has also depended heavily on consultants. In the latest episode, “America Decides,” showrunner Jesse Armstrong ramps up the ambition by simulating live presidential election coverage from the studios of a major television network.

On an accelerating roller-coaster, everything veers off the rails. A huge swag of votes goes up in flames during a fire in Milwaukee, and suddenly the impossible outsider is in a winning position. While the parallels are obvious, the whole point is that this is not the 2016 Trump election: it takes place in a parallel universe, but the stakes are just as high.

For Armstrong and director Andrij Parekh the challenges of this episode were formidable, and began with finding the right consultants. Ben Ginsberg, who has practised election law for thirty-eight years and been involved numerous game-changing situations, including the Florida recount in 2000, was well placed to advise on the procedural eventualities. On the media side, Jon Klein, former president of CNN and executive vice-president of CBS news, helped clarify the roles of studio producers, presenters and statisticians in building up to the vital election call.

Who decides? As the evasions and ambiguities of the players melt away in the heat of the moment, that question is too fierce for irony. Behind the scenes are everyone’s by-now favourite dysfunctional family of billionaire media moguls: Roman, Kendall and Shiv Roy. By the end of the night, they’ve left the plate-spinners looking at a floor covered with broken shards. •

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The Moro affair is a good example. In March 1978, the former Italian prime minister and man most likely to become the next president, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, a far-left terrorist group, in an attack that left five bodyguards dead. After fifty-five days, Moro was assassinated and his body left in the boot of a red Renault 4 parked near the headquarters of both the Christian Democrats and its rival Italian Communist Party.

The Red Brigades had good reason to want him out of the picture. As chairman of the Christian Democrats he had been chipping away at what became known as the compromesso storico — the historic compromise that would have brought the communists into something like a government of national unity. It would have been a globally significant feat: for the first time European communism would have been locked into the democratic process rather than brooding on the fringes of political discourse as the menacing bridgehead of Soviet-style authoritarianism.

But the Red Brigades were a revolutionary movement and anything short of the complete destruction of the regime was unacceptable. Then again, they weren’t alone in opposing the compromise. The Italian Socialist Party argued against it, and so did smaller centrist parties. The right wing of the Christian Democrats was concerned about the ideological impact of wedding the party to the secular and democratically dubious communists. As for the Americans — they hated the idea.

This is where Italy’s penchant for dietrologia — the study of what lies behind surface events — kicks in. There’s no doubting the Red Brigades carried out the kidnapping and assassination. But who else wanted Moro dead? Could authorities have done more to free him?

Once you add to the mix the names of the two Machiavellian Christian Democrats who managed the crisis — prime minister Giulio Andreotti and interior minister Francesco Cossiga — the speculation escalates. Did they stand to benefit from Moro’s assassination and its likely scuttling of the compromise? And where, inevitably, was the CIA in all of this?

Marco Bellocchio’s thrilling series Exterior Night, now streaming on SBS, flirts with many of those conspiracy theories. There’s the sunglasses-wearing American secret service agent who offers Cossiga bad advice on how to bring Moro home alive, and there’s the inscrutable Andreotti, whose impassive response to the Moro family’s pleas that he negotiate with the terrorists offers a nod and a wink to those who believe the true story of the kidnapping has yet to be told.

Ultimately, though, the series comes down on the side of the more reputable historical account of the fifty-five days in which Italian democracy appeared to be hanging by a thread. Of course the Italian government could have done more to secure Moro’s freedom — but that doesn’t mean it should have.

Both Andreotti and Cossiga were reportedly distraught by the decisions they were making, yet they appeared to understand that negotiating with terrorists at a time of crisis, or any attempt to find a middle ground with people who wanted to overturn democratic institutions, wasn’t an option. The damage to the Italian state would have been irreparable. Even the Communist Party came out against cutting a deal.

Moro’s family came to understand that their adored husband, father and grandparent had become the sacrificial lamb and were understandably outraged; the Exterior Night episode focusing on Moro’s wife Eleonora Chiavarelli, played by actress Margherita Buy, is one of the most moving of the series. The realisation that her husband’s political friends and allies weren’t prepared to do everything necessary to get him back is gradual and ultimately heartbreaking. The increasingly strident pleas for help from Moro, whom the terrorists encouraged to write to his colleagues, ended up sealing his fate. The prisoner was asking for the impossible: an accommodation was out of the question.

As television, Exterior Night is far from perfect. Some of the politicians come across as caricatures: Andreotti, with his hunched back and thick-rimmed glasses, hovering around with his trademark lack of empathy; Cossiga’s ostentatious Sardinian accent and his misplaced trust in the security charlatans who listen in to thousands of phone conversations without gaining a shred of insight into the terrorists’ operations.

But there’s plenty Bellocchio does get right, including his portrayal of a country ravaged by political violence from both the far right and the far left. I arrived there at the end of 1978 and what’s on the screen looks all too familiar — the machine-gun wielding officers and soldiers, the blood-stained Alfa Romeo police cars on the evening news, and the terrifying, violent graffiti sprayed onto the walls. (The vandals often spelt Cossiga with a “K” and two “SS” symbols — suggesting some kind of continuity with Nazi Germany.)

It’s hard to describe life in a country that had endured ten years of brutal terrorism. It wasn’t just the fear of physical violence; it was the very real concern that institutions would collapse — that the terrorists would win. Italian democracy was fighting for its survival. The image of Moro in captivity, holding up a newspaper with the five-pointed star of the Red Brigades behind him, was horrifying not just because of what it meant for the hostage but also for the impact it was having on the country.

In the midst of the turmoil, Italy’s silent majority was fatigued but also ready to be inspired by acts of bravery in the face of intimidation. The names of Moro’s five bodyguards — two members of the Carabinieri, the force that reports to the Ministry of Defence, and three policemen — were published and venerated, and when the prosecutors and investigators ultimately brought the fifteen members of the Red Brigades to account they helped restore at least some faith in the justice system. As Italy moved into the 1980s it became clear that Moro’s assassination had been the high-water mark of the “years of lead” and that Italian democracy, with all of its flaws, had won its fight against extremism.

Yet the enduring divisiveness of the Moro affair means any attempt to tell the story is bound to face scrutiny. Bellocchio is a filmmaker of the communist left — a fact that wouldn’t be lost on Italian viewers. Some would argue that the filmmaker has humanised a pack of cold-blooded assassins by giving the terrorists their own chapter in the story and attempting to define their motives.

But how could it have been otherwise? It’s hard to know how the terrorists could be depicted without the viewer being reminded of how relatably Italian they were. From the places where they live, the words they utter, the food they prepare for both themselves and the hostage, their petty obsessions about being taken seriously, their denied but undeniably bourgeois social backgrounds — Bellocchio’s terrorists emerge as the embodiment of the very country they want to undermine.

Indeed, the untold story of the tragedy is how petulant the terrorists were — something Moro appeared to allude to in the more than fifty letters his captors allowed him to write. The Christian Democrats bristled at the tone of Moro’s letters — the undignified pleading, the insistence that the Italian government negotiate for his release. But Moro was playing for time; he knew that for as long as he could produce content that dignified his captors by presenting them as worthy interlocutors for the Italian state he would be worth more to them alive than dead.

The more the hostage crisis went on, though, the firmer the resolve of both the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party not to negotiate. (The Italian Socialist Party, oddly, became the party of flexibility, urging the government to embrace a “humanitarian” approach.) In that sense, Moro’s family was right to conclude that Andreotti and the government had given up on the former prime minister. But that’s a far cry from suggesting the Red Brigades were merely pawns of Christian Democrats who had somehow outsourced the elimination of a common foe. As brutal as the terrorists may have been, there can be no doubting they were ideologically driven and the Christian Democrats topped the list of their enemies.

But there’s an even more convincing explanation for Moro’s ultimate assassination: the rampant incompetence of Italy’s law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Bellocchio alludes to it, pointing to Cossiga’s exasperation with the intelligence he was receiving from his top brass. But the filmmaker barely scratches the surface of the mistakes made before and during the violent kidnapping in Rome’s Via Fani on 16 March 1978. To do so would have required another ten episodes.

The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia first examined the Moro assassination in his 1979 essay L’affaire Moro; he later became a member of parliament and was on the committee that investigated both the kidnapping and the failings in policing. His dissenting minority report, which is included in recent editions of the essay, was breathtaking in its account of how those whose job was to keep Italy safe messed up at almost every turn. The failings are too many to recount in full, but a few of them stand out.

The particularly determined carabiniere who headed Moro’s detail, Oreste Leonardi, reported before the abduction that he had been followed, and warned this might indicate a kidnapping was planned. He was particularly concerned by a suspicion that Moro was being closely monitored at the university where, as a professor of law, he lectured. This information dovetailed with the intelligence available to the government at the time, suggesting the Red Brigades had indeed been planning to target a key member of the Christian Democrats.

But Leonardi’s warnings went unheeded: Moro continued to travel in an unarmoured car; and his underequipped and inadequately trained bodyguards continued, fatally, to use the same routes to move around Rome.

Once the kidnapping had occurred, the police operation was clumsy and driven by public opinion. Initial intelligence had identified a printer in Rome used by the terrorists, but the manpower required to place both the printer and other key associates of the Red Brigades under surveillance never materialised. Instead, law-enforcement agencies engaged in what a senior policeman would describe as “parade operations,” with more than 4000 agents mounting roadblocks and carrying out raids that yielded no actionable intelligence.

The one piece of information the police did have, the word “Gradoli,” was dismissed after a cursory glance at a street directory. They concluded there was no street by that name and started to examine a small mountain town called Gradoli. They were wrong — Moro was being held in Rome, at number 96 in the very real Via Gradoli.

Even more astounding was the reluctance to parse Moro’s letters for hints of where he could be found. What became clear when the parliamentary committee examined the correspondence years later was that Moro was outsmarting his Red Brigades censors and continued to provide hints right up until his mock trial by the “people’s tribunal” and his subsequent execution. First, he offered repeated hints that he was still in Rome — his use of the word qui — “here” — was strategic. One sentence Sciascia highlights — mi trovo sotto dominio pieno ed incontrollato (I find myself in a complete and uncontrolled domain) — must have been interpreted by the terrorists as an unusually poetic and illogical reference to his inner turmoil. Even a modicum of lateral thinking could have understood it as “I’m in a condominium that has yet to be checked by police.”

But Sciascia’s version of events, based on hours of hearings, would make for grim viewing; it’s also less palatable than the many conspiracy theories (most of them debunked by the parliamentary review) that are still out there.

None of this should stop us from considering the counterfactual: what would have happened had Moro survived and the historic compromise succeeded? There’s an argument to be made that not much would have changed — by the time the Berlin Wall came down, the Italian Communist Party had already begun to transition towards Europe and democracy. Whether having the Communists inside government for the last years of the “First Republic” would have altered the course of history is difficult to determine.

Instead, the wounds of the Moro affair remain open and, as Bellocchio’s TV series suggests, its handling continues to divide the country. The graffiti of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the ubiquitous Cossiga boia (Cossiga executioner), have long gone; the memory of those dark, terrifying days will remain with Italians for years to come. •

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The link: over a period exceeding fifty years the two have collaborated on five volumes of biography, four of them dealing with the same man. One a decade. Big, fat books, each a thousand pages or more in length. Doorstoppers.

Outside work, they have little contact. They aren’t particularly close. Each lives a quiet life, working, sleeping, seeing his family.

That’s it. That’s the story. That’s the movie.

And yet from these unlikely materials, Lizzie Gottlieb has made a wonderful film, Turn Every Page: a witty, loving portrait of two lions in winter, one of whom — Gottlieb — is her father.

In some ways the two men are quite similar. Urbane New Yorkers, each with his memories of reading books as a child in Central Park. And yet they are very different men — Gottlieb is opinionated and dripping with self-regard; Caro is quiet, thoughtful and modest.

Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker. He’s been responsible for hundreds of books and a stable of authors that has included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Bob Dylan. He’s fun, charming.

Caro is the winner of multiple Pulitzers and National Book Awards. He has written just five big books (along with a slim memoir); each of his bigger works is incredibly detailed, immersing its reader in particularities of times and places, and describes in great detail the ways in which talented, driven individuals — US president Lyndon Johnson and New York planner Robert Moses — made things happen that would not otherwise have happened (or that would perhaps have happened more slowly, and slightly differently).

This ability — of making things happen — Caro calls “power.” It is for his deeply informed and sensitive analyses of the particularities of power — intoxicating, deeply evidenced, personality-driven — that Caro is famous.

The title of the film nods to the lengths Caro goes to in researching his books. “Turn every page,” his first editor told him; certainly, that is the advice he has followed.

The accusation can be made — reasonably in my view — that Caro’s work sometimes verges on “great man” history, because it focuses so heavily on the acts of pivotal individuals, of men who sat at the heart of formal power structures, and pays too little attention to structural shifts and history-shapers that lie further out of the focus of state archives.

This criticism is not entirely fair; Caro’s greatest strengths lie in the deep effort that he puts into contextualising the lives of his subjects and explaining the cultural and political constraints — the power blocs, institutions and hidden barriers to change that locked in the status quo — within which these ingenious and creative people worked.

Caro is very popular; and the way he breathes life into these topics — which can seem so abstract — is the reason for that popularity.

Turn Every Page is at its best when it seeks to show how Caro went about adding this texture and depth to his research.

It describes, for instance, his decision to move from Manhattan to the Hill Country of Texas so as to better immerse himself in the world from which Lyndon Johnson came. It shows Caro and Ina, his wife and lifelong research partner, visiting the LBJ Memorial Library, home to forty-five million pages of documents. The two are filmed poring over document boxes as Caro talks of how happy he and Ina are working there, bathing themselves in presidential minutiae.

Interspliced through the whole is (wonderful) archival footage — snapshots of a past when these men were handsome, young and ambitious. When they were shapers of the future, rather than survivors from the past.

The film’s pathos lies in how it captures these elderly men continuing — fighting against the dying of the light — to live deeply analogue lives. One scene involves Caro and Gottlieb wandering around their publisher’s office looking (in vain) for a pencil. In others, we see Caro, dressed as always in a full suit and tie, sitting at his desk writing longhand drafts, before transcribing them, two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter.

We see him stuffing carbon copies into a cupboard for safe keeping.

Perhaps the best insights the film has to offer are at the level of craft. “He’s a word painter… he paints with words,” says Gottlieb of Caro. Gottlieb is certainly a man who knows a little about word artistry, and what he says is true.

Caro talks of finding writing hard, of how he struggles to get the details right. Of how important that struggle is. Non-fiction that lasts, he says, is non-fiction in which mood, setting and context are given as much attention as they are in the best novels.

Turn Every Page is a great little film. Nearly two hours long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I watched it on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, ears hidden under big noise-cancelling headphones, and I laughed the whole way through. •

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed by Lizzy Gottlieb | Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services

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But that was a while ago, and there’s nothing especially topical about Straight Man, the novel behind Lucky Hank (streaming on Stan). The commercial viability of this series rests almost entirely on the shoulders of its star, Bob Odenkirk, who took on the role as light relief after six seasons heading the cast of Better Call Saul, with Emmy nominations for all but one of them.

Odenkirk started out as a comedy writer for late-night television, then gained traction as an actor when his cameo appearance in Breaking Bad, a series sorely in need of lightening up, extended to forty-three episodes. As his character, Saul Goodman, evolved through the prequel, though, the shadows deepened until his adventurous defiance of fate was almost defeated. Almost.

With this new series, the bandwidth for adventure is narrower: there is no escaping one situation to create another, and Saul’s reckless mental energy is missing. As Hank negotiates his way through a series of semi-farcical debacles in the English department, his occasionally displayed anarchic streak is usually reined in.

This makes for some nicely managed comedy, bordering on farce. A contretemps with a student in the first episode almost leads to Hank’s removal as head of department, but just as he reconciles himself to the seeming inevitability his colleagues defeat their own purpose with a series of clueless stratagems, and they all find themselves back at square one.

“The English department is hilarious,” as showrunners Aaron Zelman and Paul Lieberstein observe. Having done time in a few of those myself, I can vouch for that, and for the agonies typically interwoven with the hilarity — though the stereotype of self-obsessed eccentrics clinging to an anachronistic comfort zone was already dated when the novel came out twenty-five years ago.

As the story progresses, a larger and more ruthless contemporary world impinges on Railton College. Hank’s dynamic wife Lily (Mireille Enos) has her eye on a career change that means a move to New York. A new college president (Kyle MacLachlan) introduces the neoliberal playbook with promises of swingeing cuts to teaching staff offset by lavish spending on publicity stunts and visits from celebrities.

These are ingredients for nicely executed vignettes. But presumably something more than the prospect of a minor diversion made executive producer Mark Johnson — whose credits include both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul — hang on to the novel’s screenplay option for a quarter of a century. As some critics have observed, Russo has a way of drawing larger dramatic elements onto a small canvas.

A hint of this comes on the series poster, where the head of a wild goose impinges on an image of Hank posing for a somewhat staid portrait in front of the college. It’s a juxtaposition with particular resonance for devotees of television drama. In the opening episode of The Sopranos, the mafia boss has a panic attack as he watches a family of wild ducks fly off his swimming pool. One of the most quoted scenes in recent television history, it captures the paradox of a central character who’s as bad as they come yet finds himself called out by the innocence of animal life in a way that turns his world upside down.

It’s a flock of wild geese that provides the pivotal moment of psychological reckoning for Hank, and he experiences the impact in reverse. As a middle-aged family man — a small-town college professor with so little social authority he can’t even influence his students — he might be Tony Soprano’s polar opposite. Yet when the goose attacks, he fights back.

In both cases, the birds serve as avatars, bringing sudden awakening to a man estranged from his moral nature. When Hank goes on television to threaten a murderous campaign against the geese in retaliation for cuts to his department, it looks for a while as if he too might be breaking bad, but that’s not the genre here.

As Russo’s first-person narrator declares at the outset, “I’m in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, ‘I just want to be entertained.’” And, he adds, he is almost never entertained by what entertains other people. Which is all very well in a novel, where we temporarily take up residence inside the narrator’s head, but where does it leave the writing team on a screen dramatisation? What’s the register here? What are we laughing at?

There’s pathos with strong undertones of melancholy, offset by more than a touch of wackiness. And the episodes are built around comic situations of genuine originality, most of them devised by the scriptwriters with only a loose relationship to events in the book. Russo’s storylines run through the novel as a continuous braid, with little inherent dramatic structure, so it was necessary to take a free hand in the adaptation.

Among the things that don’t happen in the book is a visit to Railton by the celebrated writer George Saunders, which makes for a cleverly devised episode early in the series. The prospect of a public conversation with Saunders (who curiously isn’t played by the writer himself) provokes Hank’s sense of inadequacy along with some justified contempt for the world of celebrity authorship in which his own father played a significant role.

“What is it about writing that attracts so many dickheads?” he asks, but when the famous writer addresses the students, it is Hank who gets a lesson in the deft handling of egos. The staged conversation he has been dreading ultimately cuts through layers of accumulated resentment to moments of shared humour and insight that captivate the audience.

This fits brilliantly with Russo’s thematic references to Occam’s Razor — cutting directly to the heart of the matter — which Hank has adopted as a guiding metaphor. In subsequent episodes, the question of what will or will not cut it is subject to diverse comedic exploitation. It’s a subtle exercise from the showrunners’ point of view, but not so subtle as to frustrate viewers who just want to be entertained. •

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Sarandos responded to the question with a mix of caution and confidence. The company was operating in a volatile and complex environment, he said, with ambitious competitors, rapidly developing technologies and changes in tastes and viewing habits. But Netflix had always prized skills in reinvention: “We’re the ultimate disruptor.”

Ratings and subscription income were not the driving forces at Netflix, Sarandos was at pains to emphasise. An obsession with ratings was destroying the quality of television by forcing program-makers to strive for instant success, when many landmark series only gained significant following over time, even well into the second season.

This isn’t the first time people have talked about a golden age. In the mid twentieth century, the postwar spread of household TV sets led to a burgeoning entertainment culture made and transmitted via commercial and public broadcasters. The latest golden age — defined by a quantum leap in the quality and sophistication of drama series — came when Netflix and other major players became both streaming platforms and production companies.

HBO, which launched its streaming service in 2010, had been producing ambitious dramatic series long before then, setting new standards with The Sopranos, premiered in 1999. Quick to identify an opportunity, movie companies had begun moving towards television, with Warner Brothers launching the first season of The West Wing in the same year.

At the heart of the renaissance, according to Sopranos showrunner Matthew Weiner, who went on to write the pilot for HBO’s Mad Men in 2007, was long-form storytelling. Like Sarandos, he stresses that “you cannot have the audience’s voice in your head, or you will be paralysed.” Sustained courage was required to maintain the inventive spirit over thirteen episodes. It was a new kind of marathon, “like a thirteen-hour movie.”

But perhaps a better comparison would be with the heyday of the Victorian novel, when writers like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope published their stories in instalments in magazines. Serialisation helped them explore how the lure of suspense could be made more potent by evoking complex, realistic social worlds and a multidimensional view of human behaviour.

In television, the freedom to work with a broad dramatic canvas was liberating not just for scriptwriters but also for actors, directors, editors, cinematographers and sound artists. American commentators tend to see The Sopranos (1999–2007) and The West Wing (1999–2006) as the breakthrough examples, but there were forerunners in Britain, where the BBC and Channel 4 had been producing exceptional dramatic series including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), Edge of Darkness (1985) and the original House of Cards (1990).

One of the key factors in the US-led golden age was money. Liberal financial backing meant freedom to explore locations and use technologies in sound and image previously associated with cinema. The growing scale of the enterprise led to the emergence of the showrunner, a role akin to an orchestral conductor.

Whereas a director and executive producer make most of the decisions on a movie set, a thirteen-part series may involve several directors. With teams everywhere — in the writers’ room, the editing suite, the costume studio — the role of maintaining an overall creative vision is vital. The cast needs to work as an ensemble, and be selected accordingly.

An executive producer doesn’t traditionally oversee the editing process or become involved in the logistics of choosing locations. All these matters fall to the showrunner, whose main focus must be on creating a style, mood and narrative cohesion that keeps an audience hooked.

Perhaps the most remarkable example is the showrunning duo David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who steered Game of Thrones through eight seasons and seventy-three episodes, attracting an audience that grew from two million to nearly ten million. While many claims are made for the defining series of the golden age, GOT achieved unrivalled dramatic ambition across every aspect of production. Mythic fantasy is not an easy genre to sell — beyond the cult following it initially attracts — but Benioff and Weiss left all genre expectations in the dust.

Drawing on the classics and Shakespeare, they dramatised George R.R. Martin’s story of warring states to evoke the Wars of the Roses and the great battles of the Trojan wars. They rose to the challenge of writing dialogue with the requisite grit and gravitas, and contracted linguist David J. Peterson to develop Martin’s fragments of Dothraki and High Valerian into expressive spoken languages.

Even extravagant fantasy worlds have their own forms of authenticity, and GOT set new benchmarks in craft and discipline across all areas of production. Great battle scenes didn’t just depend on the spectacle created with computer-generated imagery (though there was plenty of that) but also relied on human choreography, dramatic structure, and the most finely observed sonic and visual effects.

As the popularity imperative gave way across the industry to a fearless investment in sophisticated dramatic vision, audiences came to meet it. Global communities of taste were discovered by producers enterprising enough to source material in different languages and regions. The most successful of these ventures across language barriers has been a range of Scandinavian series, starting with Denmark’s The Killing (2007–12) and Borgen (2010–22), and Sweden’s The Bridge (2011–18).

Fusion productions followed, with cast and crew from Anglo and Nordic backgrounds working alongside each other, notably in Fortitude (2015). Nordic noir fed a growing appetite for tougher, darker stories, and demonstrated the potency of psychological realism. Tight ensemble casts brought stage rather than screen experience to their roles and didn’t conform to the demands of conventional photogenic casting.

All this helped to break the stranglehold of received wisdom in the industry, creating demand-driven production. As audiences grew and diversified, the challenge of courting viewers switched to that of keeping up with all those searching for the next binge-viewing experience.

While a plethora of generic crime and horror was always on offer, more innovative series demonstrated that darkness need not be equated with violence. In extended storylines, sinister philosophical and psychological dimensions are much more involving, especially when interwoven with wit and charm.

These were James Gandolfini’s secret weapons in the role of Tony Soprano, deployed so effectively he seduced viewers into becoming near-supporters of the mafia regime over which he presided… until the confronting brutality of it hit in the next scene of graphic atrocity. We may initially be drawn in to The Bridge by the mystery surrounding a grotesque murder, but what keeps us hooked is the paradoxical psychology of detective Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), whose obtuseness in interpersonal relationships plays out in a clinical moral absolutism that enables brutal decisions.

As literary epics have demonstrated over centuries, there is more narrative mileage in moral ambivalence than in any naive account of heroes and villains. Breaking Bad (2008–13) and its spin-off Better Call Saul (2015–22) created a massive cohort of addicted viewers for nuanced explorations of the moral nature of their central characters. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jimmy McGill, alias Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), present different but related versions of a contemporary Everyman figure.

If Walter has converted to a life in the criminal world, does this make him an essentially bad human being? Is Saul Goodman, despite his ever more ruthless conmanship, a good man? Put that way, the questions seem simplistic, but they become harder to answer with every twist in a marathon journey through dozens of episodes.

As a counterpart Everywoman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge created a new kind of alchemy in her genre-defying series Fleabag, playing disconcerting tone games across the registers of farce, melancholy, satire and pathos. Fleabag is easy to accuse of being self-obsessed and generally desperate, but when she directly addresses the camera she comes across like a twenty-first-century Tristram Shandy, narrator and witness to an imploding social world.

So where does all this brilliance leave us, as the golden age starts to do what all golden ages do and follow its own story arc in an irreversible decline? Netflix faces a revenue gap and falling stocks. With too many players in the market, viewers are reluctant to sign up to multiple services to get the programs they really want.

Brilliant series are still being made, but the proportion of run-of-the mill stuff is creeping up rapidly. Genre is back with a vengeance. A search on Stan or Netflix involves negotiating taxonomies at every step, including those algorithmically selected “for you.” Most of the abundance of series on offer are a stir-fry of hackneyed ingredients.

Enough of the noisy sex and amplified punch-ups. I swear I will not watch another series that is punctuated with jump scares, opens with a murder hunt in misty woods, features spies meeting on a park bench (have none of our security agencies cottoned on to that one yet?) or, worst of all, introduces a pet dog because killing a pet is the meanest thing bad guys can do. Could we have a Toto Award for the animal that makes it through to the end?

Many factors are contributing to the decline of this golden age, but primary among them may be excess consumption. It’s impossible to keep meeting demand at the highest levels of originality and quality. Something’s got to give. •

The post Twilight of the Golden Age? appeared first on Inside Story.

West Point in the 1830s was a remote spot on the Hudson River, surrounded by woods and subject to deep freeze in the winter months. This is the setting of The Pale Blue Eye (Netflix), a dramatic exploration of what director Scott Cooper calls Poe’s “origin story.” Taking the writer’s literary style as its model, this story — drawn from the novel by Louis Bayard — also has a narrative of its own: part Gothic melodrama, part detective story.

But Poe’s style is a stranger hybrid than that. “Landor’s Cottage,” the prose fragment that became the starting point for Bayard’s tale, reads now like a winning exercise for an elite creative writing course. The cottage that is its focal point is described with the precision of an architectural drawing, the surrounding landscape evoked in photographic detail, and yet… there is actually no story here.

Poe breaks off at the point where the cottager Landor appears, and that is where Bayard takes up the challenge. Acknowledging Poe’s achievement as the creator of the first modern literary detective in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), he turns Landor into a retired police officer called in to investigate a sudden and troubling fatality at West Point. Landor recruits a misfit cadet fourth classman, Edgar A. Poe, as his right-hand man.

Bayard is not good at plots. This one quite literally blows up in the middle and, for all the courageous efforts of Cooper and his resourceful editor Dylan Tichenor, the film comes close to absurdity in its climactic scene. What rescues the story, in dramatic terms as on the page, is the very thing that would send most producers running a mile: a genius for the formalities of language.

Fortunately, one of the film’s producers is Christian Bale, who takes on the role of Landor, and whose dramatic instincts are unerring. The go-ahead for the film came after an audition tape for the role of Poe arrived from Harry Melling. Those who have seen Melling as the spoiled, overweight brat Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films will be unlikely to recognise him in this latest incarnation.

A lean and angular presence with eyes that transfix, he looks uncannily like the best-known portrait of Poe. As significantly, he gives voice to the character in a way that brings out all the calculated formality of the original. As he speaks, “the jib of the jaw [and] the slicing motion of the hands” described by Bayard are accentuated by candlelight.

Landor, who believes that the one speaking is generally the weaker party in a dialogue, lets Poe do most of the talking and decides to enlist him as an assistant in the murder investigation. This is a cadet who marches to the beat of a different drum, and he soon becomes not so much an assistant as the medium through which Landor is figuring it all out.

There is a fine rapport between the two actors. They create a counterpoint with strong humorous tendencies: Melling engaging in stylised exaggeration as he portrays Poe’s tendency to act things out, Bale playing it straight, enjoying the display and finding ways to prompt it, as if to see where it might go.

The scenes between them are scripted with a pace and precision that is true to Bayard’s meticulous counterfeit of Poe’s literary prose. “Precision is all,” as Landor insists, but it is the young Poe who turns out to be the master of it, having schooled himself in spherical geometry and Lacroix algebra.

And so, in spite of the debacle in the central plot, the narrative lines around it make a fascinating weave. Cooper made a decision to cast British actors in most of the roles because, he says, they had better command of the language, and that has certainly paid off.

Distinguished veterans Timothy Spall, Simon McBurney and Toby Jones, used to forming an ensemble, bring unexpected edges and intriguing subtleties to the roles of Superintendent Thayer, Captain Hitchcock and Doctor Marquis, who gets to perform a succession of grizzly autopsies. Gillian Anderson plays on the verge of parody as Marquis’s wife in an exquisitely mannered first appearance, then turns the dial up to create bizarre turbulence in later scenes.

Yes, it’s a heavily male-dominated dramatis personae, but the course of events is triggered by forms of tension generated in a nineteenth-century military academy where women are encountered only as an exotic diversion on “Flirtation Walk.” At the heart of the tragedy, though, are mothers, daughters, and women as the idealised objects of love.

The Pale Blue Eye brings out the strong psychological fascinations of the story, especially those associated with the role of the detective as investigator of human nature itself. Poe quotes the classical poet Terence: “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.” Who better to remove a man’s heart than a poet?

What makes a brilliant detective, in the classic tradition of the genre, is a capacity to recognise the potential killer in oneself and to inhabit the psychology of the most dangerous criminal. Explored through intricately probing dialogue between the detective and his chosen confidant, as the Sherlock Holmes stories continue to demonstrate, this makes compelling drama.

Long scenes in which the two men sit opposite each other, talking late into the night, are superbly enhanced by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, who captures many shades of darkness behind the sputtering candles. He picks up on all the subtleties of Bayard’s visual evocations, avoiding the cliché of snowbound forests to take us through the cracking branches of woods “lacquered with ice.”

Even in a gothic murder story, the real hooks for an audience are in atmosphere and psychological intrigue rather than all-too-predictable scenes of gory mayhem. •

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Innovative comedy series of this kind generally start with the perennial ingredient: people behaving badly. After all, isn’t originality always born of a re-engagement with tradition? The comedic spark is ignited by a situation in which the social pathologies of the time can be concentrated. Whether they are ill-mannered, unprincipled, clueless or just plain nasty, people who behave badly typically get away with it because they are in a controlling position.

Basil Fawlty made a small seaside hotel his fiefdom in Fawlty Towers (1975–79), where its writer and star John Cleese could draw a gallery of blinkered lower-middle-class types into his orbit. Fawlty, reincarnated for a new era by writer Mike White in last year’s HBO series The White Lotus, becomes Armond, manager of a luxury resort in Hawaii, a place of wish fulfilment for people who don’t know what they want.

In a stand-out performance from Australian actor Murray Bartlett, Armond evokes Fawlty’s sycophantic smile, along with the hysterical rage it tries to mask, but here it is he who is at the mercy of guests whose narcissistic aggression may be provoked at the slightest shortcoming in the standards of service they expect.

The balance of social control in this dreamy, idyllic retreat is as unstable as the volcano that overlooks the scene. One of White’s achievements is to combine the ingredients of a television sitcom with cinematic qualities of sound and setting that serve to expand the dramatic scale. Characters who seek to enhance their lives through self-gratification find themselves pitched into another order of experience as farce slides towards tragedy.

It is not necessary to watch the first season of The White Lotus to find orientation in the recently released season two, screening on Binge, which has an almost entirely new set of characters and storyline, and is set in a resort high on the cliffs in Sicily. Instead of spine-tingling a cappella Hawaiian chants, the great arias of Italian opera swell with the waves. The massive presence of ocean and a glowing volcano are again dominant.

White, who has background in reality TV — notably Survivor — says he is fascinated by how behavioural patterns can shift under pressure, revealing unseen sides of a personality. Such a premise creates the kinds of opportunities good actors relish, and the cast for this new season is as good as it gets.

As their entangled storylines evolve, the characters begin to echo the dramatis personae of Italian opera, equal parts Puccini and opera buffa. Tanya, who presents at first as an overblown but talentless diva, tragic only to herself, defies any typecasting as her yearning for admirers draws her into ever deeper waters. Jennifer Coolidge won an Emmy for the role in season one, and her finely tuned sense of tone and register is integral to the creation of White’s unorthodox dramatic mode in the sequel.

She is well matched with Tom Hollander as Quentin, a very British, very gay adventurer with a virtuoso line in flattery. His yacht party of apparently vacuous pleasure-seekers are a counterpart to the close-knit Di Grasso family, a father, son and grandfather whose Sicilian roots and macho propensities suggest mafia heritage, a connotation strengthened by the casting of Soprano star Michael Imperioli as Dominic and F. Murray Abraham as his incorrigible father.

The most sinister qualities are not, however, to be found where we might expect, and there is a sense that almost anyone here might turn very ugly at some point. The marital tensions of the two young couples who dine together on the terrace overlooking the spectacular coastline are brought to a slow boil, while the two good-time girls who light up the scene every time they appear (played by locals Beatrice Grannò and Simona Tabasco) bring plenty of trouble in their wake.

Adhering to the tighter conventions of the true sitcom is the BBC series Motherland, awarded the 2022 BAFTA for best scripted comedy in its third season. Co-creator Holly Walsh, who heads a team of six in the writing room, demonstrates how the ensemble approach can work in both cast and production, and that sitcom, at its best, is a true, if minor, art form.

With a twist on the classic BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, we have middle-class mothers collectively behaving badly. For their children, who remain in the background, the panic stations are evidently just business as usual.

Vying with each other in the worst-behaved stakes are Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin), a professional event planner driven to hysteria by the challenge of planning the daily trip to school on time, and the vain and posturing Amanda (Lucy Punch), who seems to have nothing to do but organise social events for a coterie of friends. The in-group and the out-group occupy tables at opposite ends of the local cafe.

Julia’s out-group includes Liz (Diane Morgan), dour and unflustered even when she nearly severs a finger trying to cut the cheese she keeps in the freezer, and the self-effacing Kevin (Paul Ready), a full-time dad. When Meg (Tanya Moodie) arrives in the neighbourhood, she appears to bring some savvy maturity to the situation, until her reckless party spirit reveals itself.

The sidelining of children might cause concern in some circles, but the storylines are skilfully managed to display pathologies born of incompetence and fuelled by anxieties that come of caring too much rather than too little about primary responsibilities. At the heart of it (and there is some genuine heart in this series) is an honest sideswipe at the assumption that “mothering” comes naturally, and that most of us even know what it is when we find ourselves in the midst of it.

For those whose tastes run to sterner stuff, HBO’s Tokyo Vice is screening on SBS. Based on Jake Adelstein’s book about his experiences as a young American reporter working in Tokyo in the early 1990s, the story tracks his journey into the underworld of heavily ritualised organised crime syndicates known as yakuza.

Against all the odds, he gains a position with Tokyo’s leading newspaper and is assigned to report on crimes under strict protocols dictated by the police. Primary among these, as he learns on his first case, is that “there is no murder in Japan” and published accounts must be composed accordingly.

Protocol here is an iron hand not always concealed in a velvet glove. Breaches earn a dressing-down in front of colleagues in the arena of the newspaper office; if the infringement involves yakuza codes, there may be resort to tempered steel.

Under such constraints, the prospects for an investigative reporter, and a cultural outsider at that, are far from promising, at least until he is taken up by a senior detective with an equal determination to penetrate the hornets’ nest. And so the yakuza chiefs meet their match in an unlikely partnership between a maverick American and a sternly honourable Japanese police detective.

There are no spoilers here — the end of the story is signalled with a flashforward in the pilot — and there is a sense in which the narrative is itself a ready-made convention, even if it is based on Adelstein’s documented experience.

The parallels with Ridley Scott’s 1989 film Black Rain are hard to miss. Ken Watanabe, who plays the detective, has the same quiet charisma and sophisticated gravitas that Ken Takakura brought to the role of the police inspector in Scott’s film. And again there is an American night-club hostess (Rachel Keller succeeds Kate Capshaw in a more edgy interpretation of the role), sufficiently immersed to have crossed the boundary that keeps out gaijin (ignorant foreigners) and well placed to assist with connections.

In marked contrast to the film, though, the American lead is no crass cultural ignoramus like Michael Douglas’s NYC cop. Adelstein, played by Ansel Elgort, speaks fluent Japanese, trains in aikido with a master, and consciously studies cultural conventions. Elgort himself brings five years of dance training to the martial arts work, and spent nine hours a day learning Japanese in the months prior to filming.

The storyline might ultimately be another version of a favourite American narrative about helping foreign cultures with what they apparently can’t do for themselves, but the quality of filming and dramatic interpretation makes this a compelling series. Filmed entirely in Japan, its sense of milieu is superb.

Scenes in the huge open-plan newspaper office, the highly charged atmosphere of nightclubs haunted by dangerous clients, and the ritual bathing precincts where yakuza drop their robes to reveal fearsome whole-body tattoos: all are evoked as if in real time. The numerous “extras” in these scenes are not extra at all, but integral to the potent social dynamic.

SBS is releasing episodes weekly, so if you want to binge you may have to wait till New Year for the full season. •

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It is 1862, a few years after the end of the first Crimean war, where the central character, Nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh), has seen all the horrors in a military hospital under the direction of Florence Nightingale. At this point in her story, though, she is on her way to a much less challenging assignment.

As she makes her way alone, crossing the sea to Ireland in the hull of a small vessel, then by train and finally by horse-drawn cart to a small village “in the exact middle of the country,” all the generic components of the vintage ghost story seem to be in place. Lured by an offer of good pay and light duties, she knows little of the situation she will find herself in.

Like Jane Eyre, or the governess in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, she is alone in the world, with no one to call on if she finds herself in trouble. Her destination is remote both in location and from all the business of the contemporary world. With its low, drawn-out whoops and whistles, composer Matthew Herbert’s soundtrack reinforces the anticipation of strange events.

Nurse Wright completes the last leg of her journey on foot the morning after she arrives in the village. A long, straight track stretches across the bare countryside, apparently for miles, before it reaches the door of a lone timber house. Here she is to meet her patient, an eleven-year-old girl who, as Wright has now been informed, has not eaten for four months yet remains in apparently sound health. Is this, as her family claim, “a Wonder”?

As a rationalist and a trained professional, the nurse’s job is to help resolve that question. Shades of The Exorcist loom as she mounts the stairs to the attic room where the girl sits alone, awaiting the new arrival, on a wooden chair. From here, though, all bets are off. There is nothing generic about the rest of the story, or about how Lelio and his inspired cinematographer Ari Wegner tell it.

Remarkably, this is Lelio’s first period film. He brings to it a subtly intelligent pace and perspective that complement the more obvious work of historical recreation in costume and setting. It is “a highly designed film,” he has said, because the relationship between camera and characters requires formal consideration at every point, complemented by restrained editing.

The narrative is anchored in real time by the walks to and from the cottage, where Nurse Wright works eight-hour shifts alternating with a nun who has been contracted as the second observer. Everything here takes time, and surely it is only a matter of time before a living body without nourishment perishes? Crosses in the cemetery outside the village mark the graves of children too weak to endure through the hungry season before the potatoes ripen. Available fare may be rough, but the nurse eats regular meals, seated alone at a table, spooning food from a bowl.

Florence Pugh brings a balance of dour tenacity and human sensitivity to the central role. She has been widely lauded for her performance, but this is very much an ensemble piece, with strong casting throughout. A committee of local authorities assembled to manage the watch over the girl includes Ciarán Hinds as the parish priest, Toby Jones as the doctor and Dermot Crowley as the squire. They sit behind a table at one end of a bare stone room while the two women they have contracted to watch the girl stand at the other.

But the power dynamics don’t play out in the ways that set-up might suggest. The men are clearly in dispute with each other about the meaning of the phenomenon they have agreed to investigate, and fundamental tenets of belief are at stake. But they are agreed on one principle: “the girl is not to be forced, nor interrogated nor badgered.” Neither is Nurse Wright, it seems, and it is she who puts the blunt questions. Why isn’t the child in hospital? Or, if she is in good health, why the need of a nurse?

Scriptwriter Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder (2016) is prefaced by a definition. “Nurse: to suckle an infant; to bring up a child; to take care of the sick.” What kind of nursing is really called for here? This is one of the most genuinely unpredictable storylines I’ve encountered in a film, and its unfolding hinges on a bizarre merging of the three responsibilities.

Donoghue takes on the “persistent cultural fantasy” of fasting girls to bring wonder and naturalism onto common ground by working a kind of alchemy between Wright and her charge, Anna O’Donnell. In the film adaptation, the nurse’s initial hostility is modified to make the rapport almost immediate.

The child, played by Kíla Lord Cassidy, does seem to harbour a kind of mystery. She lays out holy cards and interprets them as if they were the major arcana in a tarot pack, and speaks only of “manna from heaven” when quizzed about her sustenance. Although her role in the drama seems deeply passive, the young actor matches Pugh’s grit and maturity with a convincing kind of steadfastness. If there’s an exceptional central performance here, it is a collaborative achievement.

Historical dramas always raise questions about contemporary relevance, and Lelio responds to these readily. Themes of rationalism versus magical thinking, “spiritual elasticity versus fanaticism,” are very much of concern in our time, he says. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, they have resurfaced with all the urgent loading that goes with a shared conviction that survival depends on one form of understanding versus another. •

The post A kind of alchemy appeared first on Inside Story.

While the rest of the speech could serve as commentary on the pandemic-ridden country portrayed in the series, Branagh interprets Johnson as the eternal optimist — or at least the inveterate performer of optimism. The camera repeatedly follows him from behind the scenes, as he braces himself for yet another grim meeting or fraught public announcement, to his ever-buoyant performances before an audience.

This England opens as results of the 2019 Tory leadership contest are awaited. But there has been a prior announcement: Johnson has been contracted, for a princely sum, to write a biography of Shakespeare. In reality, this caused tensions during his early months of government, with those around him believing he was distracted from the larger and more urgent role of prime minister.

Here, though, the bard seems to serve as a kind of spirit guide for Branagh’s Johnson, putting words in his mouth and a spring in his step at critical moments, allowing him the passing illusion that he is a second Churchill. Behind the role-play he’s a bumbling, incoherent mess, always on the verge of meltdown.

His usual strategies of reality-denial and clownish bravado prove ineffectual in the face of the pandemic, and the full meltdown occurs when he has to be taken to emergency after contracting the virus himself. It’s a defining moment in the series but also points to a fundamental problem in its conception.

Shakespeare’s histories offer many dramatic models of how the fate of the country and its people can hang in the balance. Treachery, corruption and civil war, threats of invasion, plague and famine — all may contribute, but the deciding factor is the character of the head of state. A weak monarch like Richard II enables all these evils to take hold; a bad one, like Richard III, actively fosters them. In dramatic terms, the distinction is radical.

This England attempts a Shakespearean vision of how tides of chaos wash across the land when things go wrong in the seat of power. Sequences filmed in hospitals and aged care homes, created with such realism they might be documentary, alternate with the crisis meetings in Number 10 and scenes from Johnson’s private life. But this Johnson, like Richard II, is weak rather than bad.

That portrayal not only blunts the dramatic edge but also — and more seriously, in view of the ongoing crisis in British government — fudges the political dynamics. As a figure whose mental world is composed more of poetry than politics, Branagh’s Boris has an air of pathos. Like everyone else, he’s caught up in the workings of fate, and if he lacks the grit and courage to take up arms against the sea of troubles, well, that’s kind of sad — for him as well as all the good people we see weeping on the phone to dying relatives.

Perhaps writers Michael Winterbottom and Kieron Quirke were too readily seduced by the idea of 10 Downing Street occupied by a classically educated political maverick with a lot of Shakespeare in his head. Quirke has a first in classics and Winterbottom’s credits include a series of films in which virtuoso mimics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon exchange literary impressions in romantic locations.

Their title, This England, signals association not just with Shakespeare but also with a larger range of mythic and symbolic traditions: the Arthurian legends revived in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Blake’s “Jerusalem” and the national hymn derived from it, Churchill’s exhortation to fight on the beaches, and the arcane ceremony of royal funerals and coronations. Mythic England is also, significantly, free of all the fraught political heritage of modern Britain.

Why produce such a dramatisation at a time when Britain is in crisis on so many fronts? As the pandemic recedes (perhaps) the country still faces the desperately serious problem of child poverty, which UN rapporteur Philip Alston attributed in his 2018 report to the Conservative government’s “punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach.” Recent legislation has cleared the way for sewage dumping in rivers and coastal waters. And the disasters of Brexit continue to roll out.

Many viewers may nevertheless be drawn to the series (as I admit I was) by the lure of Branagh’s performance, which takes its place in a newer tradition. Since Michael Sheen made the transition from comedic political impersonator to nuanced performances as Tony Blair in The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006), a succession of star actors have taken on the challenge of embodying a public figure in a tour de force transformation that blurs the line between acting and impersonation.

Standout examples include Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady (2011), Gary Oldman as Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017), Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice (2018) and, most recently, an unrecognisable Sean Penn as John Mitchell in Gaslit (2022). The difference between a dramatic interpretation — Claire Foy’s rendition of the young Queen Elizabeth in The Crown (2016–17), for example — and the virtuoso challenge in these cases begins in the makeup chair.

Deciding whether to work “inside out” or “outside in” has been core business in actor training for generations, and the question has become even more acute as advances in camera technique have made it possible for viewers to almost literally see what lies behind the eyes of a character on screen. A fine actor can evoke the elusive inner life of a well-known person through psychological interpretation, but is it actually more effective to access the psyche through the forensic capture of voice and manner?

In the case of Branagh’s Boris, the question must be answered in the negative. Branagh portrays his behaviour with startlingly accuracy but, as the camera closes in, the face just doesn’t seem to belong. An image search for close-up shots of Johnson shows that he never stops mugging for the camera, which rarely catches him off-guard. When it does, the eyes are hard, almost blank, in stark contrast to the thoughtful, reflective qualities of Branagh’s expression.

The producers’ quest for verisimilitude led to a search for actors who bore a physical resemblance to key members of cabinet. The results are, if anything, a bit too subtle and, in line with the approach to Johnson, a bit too nice. Shri Patel as Rishi Sunak seems keen to provide assistance to British workers under lockdown. Really? Simon Paisley Day’s Dominic Cummings is a convincing backroom apparatchik, and the only cast member true to the ruthless banality of the original.

For all the fine art Branagh and the production team have brought to this docudrama, a more accurate picture of the rogues gallery currently occupying Westminster is to be found on Spitting Image. It seems Britain has been spared another spell of Boris in the latest leadership debacle, and Sunak may settle unease in the financial sector, but John of Gaunt’s original England, “the envy of less happier lands,” shows no sign of return. •

The post Boris Johnson, outside in appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been back in Alice Springs since October 2018 to make repairs to my unit and live cheaply while I finish writing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who roamed outback Australia last century. I first moved here in 2003, and even after I shifted to Melbourne in 2010 I was never entirely absent, returning to Central Australia every few months to work on a research project.

January is typically when Alice people flee to the coast to avoid the heat, but this year it’s even hotter and more humid than I remember it during the noughts. In summers past, say long-term residents, the temperature usually fell to 15°C at night, but high maximums these days are accompanied by high minimums. One morning when I was making breakfast the temperature was already 39°C.

“Heat wave” — the term that’s used on the news — is surely a euphemism for what we’re experiencing. A 2015 CSIRO report says Alice Springs averaged seventeen days above 40°C each year during 1981–2010 and forecast the figure rising to thirty-one days by 2030. When fifty-five days exceeded 40°C between July 2018 and June 2019 I began to wonder when the desert capital will become uninhabitable.

By the year’s end, the town is awash. On Christmas Eve 2019 I wake to see brown water churning between the normally barren Todd River’s banks across the road from my townhouse.

During the year I’ve struck up an acquaintance in the library with a Luritja woman from Papunya, chatting with her whenever she brings in her grandkids to use the computers. When I admire how the rain overnight brought out the fresh bush scents, she disagrees. She didn’t like it at all; it was too hard to find anywhere dry to sleep. She’d been sleeping rough, of course, maybe in the saltbushes hemming the Todd or in the riverbed.

That’s where some of the library’s local Arrernte regulars sleep, along with the Warlpiri, Anangu, Alyawarr and Warramungu who come into Mparntwe from their communities, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, for cultural purposes, or to shop for supplies, use services or catch up with family and friends. Some stay with relatives in one of Alice Springs’s seventeen town camps or sleep overnight in or around the riverbed, then eat and shower at the Salvos before coming to the library.

Local Indigenous leaders fear that climate change will drive many from their traditional homelands to towns like Alice, escaping from flooded communities and overcrowded houses unsuited to extreme temperatures. “We are already suffering through hotter, drier and longer summers in our overcrowded hotbox houses,” says Central Land Council chair Sammy Wilson.

After the deluge, the usually bare slopes of the West MacDonnell ranges, flanking the town, are festooned in green. It would be tempting to see this as a La Niña bonus if not for the fact that much of the greenery is buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), an insidious invasive species introduced by pastoralists to feed cattle. Buffel overwhelms native grasses, driving out bilbies and other small creatures and impeding local people’s collection of bush foods. Because of its intense flammability, traditional fire management practices no longer work. As Arrernte Anmatyerr poet Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds writes, “It’s too dry now. / The summer is too hot. / That buffel grass is everywhere.”

Back in January a boy had appeared in my peripheral vision as I drove out of the library car park one steamy evening. When he rolled across my bull bar in a loose, graceful motion I slammed on the brakes, fearful of hurting him, then bit back my irritation, waiting for him to move. How old was he? Eight; ten at the most. He was playing chicken, trying to provoke me, and when I failed to respond, he staggered away melodramatically.

I eased out of the car park, a little shaken and annoyed, although I’d soon be home sipping a G&T on my balcony with its view of the MacDonnells. I regained my equilibrium, distanced myself from what this scene ws a reminder of — the youth crime wave said to be plaguing the town.

When I first lived in Alice during the noughts, youth crime was expected to rise over the summer holidays. Since then, reports suggest it has reached epidemic proportions all year round. Aboriginal kids as young as eight are said to be roaming the streets in packs at night and “running amok.” Most of my friends have a story about a window being smashed, a house broken into, or a car being taken for a joyride, sometimes repeatedly.

This time round, the youth crime wave has become the main topic in what writer Robyn Davidson wryly calls The Conversation — the constant discussion about First Nations people among progressives in Alice Springs. Davidson, famous for walking with camels from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, has been dipping in and out of the town since 1977 while many of the “white do-gooders” (as they are called by their detractors in town) associated with the land rights movement and Aboriginal-controlled organisations in the 1970s and 80s have retired or moved to the coast. Over the past decade, in their stead, my gen-X contemporaries have shifted into the senior ranks of the local chatterati while millennials have refreshed many creative and political spaces in town with their artistic and digital agility. An Indigenous middle class has also emerged, often holding key managerial roles in Aboriginal-controlled organisations.

To live in Alice Springs, regardless of whether you were born here or why you came here, is to be caught up in The Conversation. The reasons relate to Mparntwe’s role as what the late Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called a “little Central Australian Rome — too much Tywerrenge [or Law].” It is a cultural, social and economic focal point for First Nations people from the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Because colonisation occurred later here than in the southeast, First Nations people consequently make up a greater proportion of Alice Springs’s population of 25,000 (a shade over one in five, according to the 2021 census) than of densely populated coastal cities. With the fallout from the encounter between First Nations people and settlers more evident in daily life, The Conversation in Alice Springs is more direct and less notional than the talk on the east coast.

Within eighteen months of my return to Alice Springs in 2018, my van’s passenger window has been broken repeatedly — once in my carport and three times in the library car park. Around the complex where I live, shattered car windows often glint in the grass like dew-encrusted cobwebs. Friends advise me to leave the van unlocked with a window half down so people can break in without shattering the glass. The windows remain intact but I sometimes find signs — an open door or glove box, a cigarette butt — that someone has rummaged around overnight.

A local glazier says he replaced thirty car windows each day during the recent midyear school holidays. Most shop windows in Todd Mall, the main business drag, are shuttered to protect them overnight, dampening what was once a colourful tourist precinct. Windows in the town council chambers and the library were often smashed while I worked there; once the aquatic centre fell victim to a midnight vandalism spree, with eighteen windows shattered and computers thrown into the pool.

The town is “under siege,” one headline declares. On community social media forums people cite the continued break-ins, loss of property and vehicle damage as reasons why they’re leaving town, posting photos and footage from home security cameras of break-ins. The issue of race frequently surfaces:

Sorry but the way I see it now is that anybody with white skin is simply not welcome.

Time to leave.

Where are the parents? comes the cry, along with exhortations to get tough on crime and employ more police to ensure no kids are on the streets after a certain time.

A friend who works with children in care in Alice Springs tells me about how, when she encouraged a boy to reflect on the consequences of theft, he replied, “Whitefellas have lots of stuff. They can always get more stuff.” One possible interpretation is that the rise in crime is an up-yours to the coloniser — to those who’ve taken so much and have so much — by young people exiled to the shadow zones of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Whatever its causes, statistics lend weight to the perceptions of rising crime and rising rates of recidivism among young people. In 2019–20, NT Police proceeded more than once against 54 per cent of offenders aged ten to fourteen and 37 per cent of offenders aged fifteen to nineteen (with the older cohort making up 82 per cent of all offenders), indicating high rates of reoffending. Young people detained by NT police are overwhelmingly Indigenous.

That youth crime should have burgeoned in Alice Springs over the past decade seems no coincidence. During the noughts, the main Conversation topics within local social justice organisations were violence against women and substance misuse. Central Australia was experiencing record rates of alcohol consumption and associated harms, including assaults, mainly against Aboriginal people. These declined over the next decade following the introduction of alcohol harm-reduction measures, including the NT government’s Banned Drinkers Register, a Labor policy implemented in 2011–12 and then resumed in 2017, when Labor resumed office.

Many young people were consequently born to parents who drank alcohol to harmful levels and mothers who experienced family violence. According to an NT government report, “at least one child is subjected to domestic and family violence every day of the year in the Northern Territory.” Other children live with the effects of having witnessed family violence; still others leave unsafe and overcrowded living situations and gain a sense of identity in street gangs.

Central Australian Youth Link Up Service report seeing a rise in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other neurological conditions. While the current incidence of the disorder is unknown, a 2003 study calculated its prevalence in the Territory’s Aboriginal children to be between 1.87 and 4.7 per 1000 live births, compared with an estimated national rate of 0.02 per 1000 non-Indigenous children. Parents and educators find these young people, afflicted by limited attention spans, hyperactive behaviour and other learning difficulties, difficult to engage in educational, social, recreational and other activities.

Their parents are often young: in 2019, a fifth of Aboriginal mothers who gave birth in the Alice Springs region weren’t yet twenty. Often they haven’t completed school and face limited job opportunities, especially in remote areas. Around half remote-living Indigenous people don’t receive income from either wages or a Centrelink allowance, so they fall back on families for support, lifting poverty among the broader group. Census data indicates that between 2006 and 2016 Indigenous poverty rates increased to 50 per cent in very remote areas while falling to 22 per cent among Indigenous people in the major cities.

Food, fuel and other essentials were already more expensive in regional centres — and higher still in remote communities — but have hiked further in Alice Springs and its satellite communities since late 2021. Petty crime can be driven by something as basic as hunger.

The rise in crime and poverty also coincided with the implementation of the Howard government’s NT National Emergency Response and Labor’s Stronger Families policy. The BasicsCard, an income management tool introduced in town camps and prescribed communities in 2007, was extended to all welfare recipients in the Territory in June 2010. Fifty per cent of recipients’ Centrelink payments and 70 per cent of child protection payments could be spent only on food, clothing and rent. Financial penalties applied if, for example, children failed to attend school.

The BasicsCard was accompanied by the Community Development Program, a work-for-the-dole program that required remote participants to work for longer hours than their non-remote counterparts. Unlike its predecessor, the long-running Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the CDP was designed without any input from local communities.

Because allowances under these schemes were suspended if participants were unable to meet requirements, poverty rose. An ANU analysis found increased rates of infant mortality, child abuse and neglect, and a rise in low birth weights and child deaths from injury — a sad irony, given that the first round of reforms came in response to the Little Children Are Sacred report.

The rate of family violence in the Territory remains staggeringly high, and in 2021 recorded the greatest annual increase (12 per cent) in family and domestic violence-related assault victims across the country. NT police data indicate that nine out of ten victims were Aboriginal, and eight were Aboriginal women. “It is not an exaggeration to say that intimate partner violence committed upon Aboriginal women in the NT is pervasive,” NT coroner Greg Cavanagh said in 2016. “Almost three quarters” of NT Aboriginal women have been victims of intimate partner violence.

The Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group in Alice Springs has developed resources and initiatives to assist women and men in tackling family violence, but the lack of women’s refuges and other services, especially in very remote areas, and long waiting times for already overburdened clinics exacerbate the risks for those seeking to escape violence.

Although the fallout from this crisis is devastating, even the most distressing incidents scarcely rate a mention in national media. Which is why campaigners from the Tangentyere group held a vigil one Sunday in July this year to mourn the deaths of a mother and child, allegedly shot by the woman’s forty-one-year-old partner in a murder-suicide out of town. About one hundred of us gathered on the lawn outside Alice Springs Court and laid flowers on the grass and wrote messages of support to the family. Friends and relatives spoke about the impact of the loss of this thirty-year-old Aboriginal woman and her fourteen-week-old baby.

While the campaigners hoped the vigil would raise national awareness of the high incidence of family-violence-related deaths among First Nations women, the deaths received little attention outside Alice Springs. Indeed, more coverage was given to the shooting of three whitefellas in a property dispute in north Queensland the following month. And the small turnout for the vigil seems telling, too, in a town that focuses so much outrage on property crimes.

Strange things happened in Central Australia during the pandemic. After the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, the streets of Alice Springs became abnormally quiet. Heeding the strong messages carried by remote Indigenous and national media about Covid-19’s risks, people stayed inside their houses or returned to their communities.

Behind closed doors in the library, we continued to provide borrowing and printing services, and moved storytelling and other educational programs online. But we wondered what had happened to our regulars. What were the tjilpis (Pitjantjatjara for older men) who watched westerns in the library doing every day, and the cheeky kids who enjoyed using computer apps to make videos and create emojis?

That was the town’s longest lockdown. By mid May we were dining al fresco in cafes; by early June we were allowed to go camping again (the ban had been a great privation for locals). On the last day of May, about one hundred people gathered at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for the launch of local author Dani Powell’s book, Return to Dust — the first sign for me of a return to a fragile normality.

For almost two years, as we resumed life in our own Truman Show in the middle of the desert, the virus seemed hypothetical. We went through the motions of sanitising and physical distancing (mask wearing never became widespread, except where mandated). Because of the Territory’s relative isolation, sparse population and, most of all, strict border controls, the virus’s spread was curtailed until quarantine restrictions were lifted for vaccinated travellers just before Christmas 2021. For me, the pandemic’s most difficult aspect was not being able to visit family in Sydney because of the prohibitive cost of fourteen days’ quarantine when I returned.

Alice Springs didn’t experience its first Covid-related death — an Aboriginal woman from Mutitjulu, who was the third fatality in the Territory — until 31 January this year. By the time five-day Covid isolation ended nationally, the Territory had recorded seventy-three Covid-related deaths and a fatality rate of 0.07 per cent. While any loss of life is tragic, these figures are remarkably low given that the region’s indices of disadvantage are among the worst in the country.

The effectiveness of the Territory’s Covid response stems from advocacy early in the pandemic by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations and peak Aboriginal health bodies, and especially by Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, who initially lobbied for strict border controls.

The pandemic’s first year was also an unwitting social experiment. Property crime rates plummeted from April to August 2020, which some local commentators attributed to the existence of a curfew of sorts. A more compelling hypothesis is that crime fell after the coronavirus supplement lifted the JobSeeker and Youth Allowance by $550 fortnightly in March 2020, temporarily raising welfare recipients’ income above the poverty line.

“For the first time some households have been able to afford basic needs like accommodation, food, winter clothes, whitegoods or repairs to motor vehicles,” reported the Northern Territory Council of Social Service in October 2020. As the supplement was phased out from late September through to December that year, property break-ins resumed their previous high levels.

When people ponder the distance, the climate and the crime they often ask me and my friends how we can live here.

Despite the town’s extremes, it’s possible to experience many things here that have been lost in other urban areas. You can usually commute to work in ten minutes from any direction. You can escape to the bush for a walk or a swim in a waterhole, or to camp overnight, often without much preparation. You can immerse yourself quickly in the dramatic landscape — giant orange rocks cast by ancestral beings, wild dogs (Akngwelye) and caterpillars (Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrngatye) churning across the land — and its moodiness, all bold primary colours in bright sun one day, brooding pastels in overcast weather the next. You can enjoy a sense of social ease, bumping into anyone at any time, and you can slot quickly into the town’s social, cultural and sporting lives.

To me, Alice Springs’s greatest strength has always been its community-driven activities, of which it boasts an extraordinary number. The town wheels through a calendar of iconic and idiosyncratic creative and sports events, including Parrtjima, the country’s only Aboriginal light festival, the Anaconda mountain-bike race, the Finke Desert Race, the Beanie Festival, Word Storm (the NT Writers Festival, every second year in Alice), the Bush Bands Bash, the Desert Mob exhibition, Desert Song and the Desert Festival.

In early October, composer Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera was performed with the support of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir in the botanic gardens, on the site where the eponymous anthropologist camped in a tent during the 1950s.

While Alice Springs is best known for its visual arts — Albert Namatjira’s landscapes, the central and western desert art movements, the annual Papunya Tula Art Exhibition — it is also an incubator for experimental work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. A recent exhibition, Footy Show, at Watch This Space, showcased First Nations artists exploring their relationship to football. Indigemoji, Australia’s first set of Indigenous emojis, was produced by young people guided by senior Arrernte cultural advisers, and Awemele Itelaretyeke is an app with two audio walking tours made by traditional owners to help users learn about Mparntwe’s history, culture and language.

Some of Centralia’s most hard-hitting creative achievements over the past decade have been in film and television: Warwick Thornton’s prize-winning Sweet Country (2017), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, is a Western based on the local story of Willaberta Jack, and Penelope McDonald’s Audrey Napanangka (2021) explores the life and work of the Warlpiri artist. Dylan River (Thornton and McDonald’s son) directed Finke: There and Back (2019) for Brindle Films, which follows several Finke Desert Race participants, including local filmmaker Isaac Elliott, who competes on a modified motorbike after an accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

Alice-based production company Brindle Films, founded in 2011 by Rachel Clements and Trisha Morton-Thomas, produced the ABC TV comedy series 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and The Song Keepers (2018), the NITV/SBS documentary about the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir on tour. Isaac Elliott also worked with Brindle Films on the Netflix TV series MaveriX (2022), about dirt bike riders in the red centre.

Locally made documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019), which screened on ABC iView and Netflix, introduced viewers to the challenges encountered by ten-year-old Arrernte/Garawa boy Dujuan Hoosan in navigating cultural life and Western educational systems in Alice Springs. SBS crime series True Colours (2022), created by Erica Glynn (Thornton’s sister), portrays First Nations people’s social and cultural realities in Central Australia in a way rarely seen on TV. With white characters appearing as marginal figures, it features strong performances by untrained locals including singer Warren H. Williams, Arrernte elders Sabella Kngwarraye Ross Turner and Rosalie Kumalie Riley, and lead actor Rarriwuy Hick.

Books and publishing also have a high profile in Alice Springs. Although Dymocks closed its local store in 2013, local bookseller Red Kangaroo Books, run by the Capper–Druce family in Todd Mall since 2007, battled on, featuring on one list of “21 of the Best Bookshops in Australia to Visit in 2021.” As “the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing in Australia between Port Augusta, Darwin, Broome, and Broken Hill,” the shop attributes its success to its “fiercely local” focus, stocking (often hard-to-come-by) books on Central Australian subjects and by Centralian authors.

Community-publishing outfits have long flourished in Alice Springs, especially those dedicated to producing books by First Nations people. The Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, which has published First Nations dictionaries and resources since 1969, has recently been joined by Running Water Community Press, which has produced anthologies of local women’s poetry including Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology (2019) and Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia (2020). The first book in its new truth-telling series is local stolen generations survivor Frank Byrne’s Living in Hope (2022), an earlier version of which won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award in 2018.

Other notable First Nations publications include Central Land Council’s collective memoir, Every Hill Got a Story (2015), and ninety-year-old Kanakiya Myra Ah Chee’s memoir, Nomad Girl (2021).

Among the most inspiring local ventures are the First Nations children’s books published by intergenerational Arrernte learning initiative Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe Children’s Ground. Led by local Arrernte elders, Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe began providing education to First Nations children on Country and in people’s communities, combining Arrernte and Western educational priorities. Since 2019, its Arrernte educators have produced nine educational resources featuring seven local languages, the latest of which include Tyerrtye Atyinhe (My Body), Althateme (McGrath’s Dam) and Intelhiletyeke, a First Nations colouring book.

“We’ve been following government nearly all our lives — this is a new beginning,” says Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe director M.K. Turner. “We are following a new path, our own path as First Nations people for the future of our children. At Children’s Ground, the community is taking the lead. We are very proud of that. We are the government of ourselves.”

When the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh arrived by train in Alice Springs in 1933 he experienced “an uncontrollable joy and fear.” “One feels,” he wrote, “that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents — Australia.”

I can relate to the intensity of Ravitsh’s response. Unsettling feelings take hold of you on being confronted by Mparntwe Alice Springs, destabilising your perception of Australia. The town continues to draw people like me — rootless wanderers above the ground, as a Māori elder once described the Pākehā — back to the Centre. With its sharp light throwing so much into relief, there is rawness about living in the place.

Here you live on the precipice of the prosperity so many Australians take for granted, where the marginalisation, the poverty, the trauma and the damage to Country that resulted from dispossession of First Nations people are all too apparent. At the same time, it is a privilege to see this other, remote Australia, to live and work alongside First Nations people, to catch a glimpse of what Country means to them, even if the depth and complexity of this relationship is hard to grasp.

“The town grew up dancing,” the late W. Rubuntja wrote. “And still the dancing is there under the town… We still have the culture, still sing the song… It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.”

May the dance never end. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Hot, wild heart appeared first on Inside Story.

The young woman’s body lay on an open tiled platform in the yard of Bali’s Sanglah hospital surrounded by piles of other corpses, many charred beyond recognition. A medical team in gumboots and rubber gloves moved slowly through, checking teeth and scraps of clothing that might help identify the victims. Scores more bodies filled the entrance foyer of the hospital and lined the walkways to wards crowded with the injured. Flies were swarming in the oppressive evening heat.

Ambulances weaved through the traffic, ferrying the most seriously injured to evacuation flights. Pickup trucks unloaded dozens of crude plywood coffins. The dead and wounded were mostly young, mostly Australian — many kids on their first trip to Bali.

I had woken in Singapore on the morning of 13 October 2002 to the shocking news of the massive bomb blasts that had destroyed the popular Sari Club and the neighbouring Paddy’s Bar in the heart of Kuta’s nightlife district. Within hours, I was reporting from the midst of the chaos.

The Bali bombings would soon be confirmed as the worst act of terrorism in Australian history. The ultimate toll would be 202 dead — eighty-eight of them Australians — and hundreds more seriously injured, many of them Australians.

As shocking as the moment was, it should not have come as the surprise it did to most Australians. A year earlier, the world had been numbed by the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York. It was clear that al Qaeda and its global affiliates had the means and the determination to continue striking their Western enemies at will — and anywhere.

Moments before the first suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Bar just after 11pm on Saturday 12 October and, seconds later, another detonated a massive car bomb in front of the Sari Club, a smaller bomb — crude calling card of al Qaeda’s Asian surrogate Jemaah Islamiyah — had exploded outside the United States consulate in Denpasar. But while the Americans undoubtedly remained the primary focus of the terrorists, the Australian toll in Bali was far from incidental.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had denounced Australia as a “crusader” country after it sent troops to join the invasion of Afghanistan and the failed hunt for him. And just a few weeks before the Bali bombings, twenty-one men, most of them Jemaah Islamiyah members, were detained in Singapore in connection with an alleged conspiracy to build seven truck bombs and attack Western military and diplomatic targets, including the Australian High Commission.

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the bombings, the media has once more been revisiting the events in Bali and their shocking fallout. Controversy has stirred around a four-part miniseries, Bali 2002, airing on Stan. As with the release last year of Nitram, the film based on the Port Arthur massacre, concerns have been expressed about the emotional impact on survivors and the families of those who died.

One Western Australian academic has accused the producers of Bali 2002 of “cashing in” while disregarding the grief of the victims and giving too much attention to the terrorists. Guardian film critic Luke Buckmaster has criticised the realism of the series and declared it to be “out of its depth” in the dramatisation: “Bali 2002 feels like a very loose simulation of historical events.”

In fact, Bali 2002 holds remarkably true to the actual events and is finely and fairly balanced in its depiction of the impact on the victims both foreign and Indonesian, the motivation of the terrorists, and the immense challenges faced by the emergency responders and the crime investigators. Its graphic recreation of the moments before and after the bombs exploded, and the carnage that unfolded in the minutes and hours that followed, is disturbing viewing even for those not personally affected by the massacre, but it is utterly authentic, mostly factual and not gratuitous in the least.

Buckmaster also derides for “too little realism” an opening sequence in which Balinese woman Ni Luh Erniati (played powerfully by Sri Ayu Jati Kartika), whose husband was one of the staff killed in the Sari Club blast, stares into the camera lens and pleads, “What did we do wrong to make the gods angry?” He dismisses this as “vague spiritual commentary, as if supposed to symbolise the soul of the country.”

In fact, the bombings were as traumatic for the deeply spiritual Balinese Hindus as they were for the foreign victims. For many, the disaster raised disturbing issues about the unchecked development and commercialisation of their idyll. A few days after the attacks, the professor of psychiatry at Bali’s Udayana University, Luh Ketut Suryani, described the bombings as divine retribution for the crass commercialisation that had upset the harmony of Bali’s culture. “Bali has lost its Hindi identity and there is no longer a balance between the spiritual and the material in our society,” she told me. “Everything now is about money. Balinese must ask why God has punished us. We must see this not only as a sign but as a punishment from God because we have taken a wrong direction in our society. This is a lesson for the Balinese.”

At one moment in the final episode of the series, though, the narrative does appear to divert from the historical record. Back home after leading the Australian Federal Police contingent that helped track down the bombers, assistant commissioner Graham Ashton (Richard Roxburgh), confronts an unnamed superior officer: “You lied to me. The government had intel that Bali was going to happen… The Office of National Assessments and ASIO briefed the government that Bali was a target.”

The day after the bombings, Ashton (who later become chief commissioner of Victoria Police) was appointed to head the Bali investigating team by AFP commissioner Mick Keelty on the strength of Ashton’s years as AFP liaison officer in Australia’s Jakarta embassy and his fluency in Bahasa Indonesia. There is no evidence that Ashton ever confronted Keelty over lying about intelligence warnings, or that Keelty was complicit in any such cover-up. But the case that the Australian government was well aware of the danger to Australians visiting Bali in October 2002 — and did nothing to warn them — gained substantial momentum after the bombings.

As early as December 2001, ASIO assessed Indonesia as being at high risk of terrorist attack. In the months that followed, evidence grew of the intensity of that threat and the capacity of al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah to realise it. In April 2002, Australian and US intelligence analysts simulated scenarios of such terrorist attacks — including one in which Bali was identified as an attractive al Qaeda target.

In June 2002, the Office of National Assessments was so concerned about the growing risk of regional attacks that it sought a face-to-face meeting with foreign minister Alexander Downer at which it identified Bali as a target for Jemaah Islamiyah — at a time when an average of 20,000 Australian tourists were visiting the island each month. The minister was told the extremists had the intent and ability to attack targets such as hotels, bars and airports. In July, ASIO warned Qantas that the threat across all Indonesia, including Bali, was high.

Despite the alarm bells, the Department of Foreign Affairs travel advice continued to claim that despite terrorist incidents in parts of Indonesia, tourism services elsewhere were “operating normally, including Bali.”

A Senate inquiry concluded in August 2004 that while there had been a general terrorism risk in Indonesia in late 2002 there had been no specific warning of the Bali attack. Labor’s Steve Hutchins, the committee’s chair, declared that while there had been failures of intelligence, there had not been “a culpable lapse by Australian government agencies or individual officials.”

In a dissenting report, Greens leader Bob Brown and Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja thought otherwise. In calling for a royal commission to fully assess the performance of agencies and government in the lead-up to the Bali bombings, they were scathing about the role of the foreign minister. “Mr Downer could have taken the evidence of the danger of an attack to cabinet,” they wrote. “He could have used his considerable influence to persuade the Indonesian authorities, who appeared unwilling to recognise the terrorist danger, to act. The minister’s inaction contributed to Australia’s unpreparedness for the attack in Bali.”

If Australian officials were unprepared for the Bali bombings, their performance after the event was outstanding, as Bali 2002 recounts. The RAAF’s biggest medical airlift since the Vietnam war and the heroic efforts of medical staff, including plastic surgeon Fiona Wood, undoubtedly saved scores of lives. And its part in identifying and tracking down the bombers and the bombmakers was probably the AFP’s finest hour.

The series rightly acknowledges Graham Ashton’s skill in deftly handling the cultural sensitivities and building a powerful partnership with Bali police chief General Made Pastika. But great credit is also due to Mick Keelty in negotiating an unprecedented agreement in which Australian police were able to work with great freedom within a foreign jurisdiction.

Within hours of the bombings, Keelty was on the phone to Indonesian National Police chief General Da’i Bachtiar. The two men had cemented an evolving friendship a year earlier during a visit to Australia by Bachtiar. After Keelty offered his sympathy and support, his friend replied, “Mick, I need all the help I can get.” Later that day, the first of more than one hundred AFP investigators and forensic specialists were on their way to Bali.

The partnership that grew from that collaboration would help build a broader strengthening in the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. At a memorial service in Bali to mark the first anniversary of the attacks, Indonesian security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would speak powerfully of the need for closer “brotherhood” between the two nations.

Nine years later, President Yudhoyono would describe the emotional event as one of the most poignant moments of his political career: “It was heart-wrenching to see those who had lost their loved ones among the gathering.” He said the attack had been a turning point in a bilateral relationship challenged by the confrontation over East Timor. It had produced “a compelling reason for Jakarta and Canberra to explore new ways of cooperation in a world haunted by new, unfamiliar threats.” •

The post Return to Bali appeared first on Inside Story.

As scriptwriter, editor, composer, cinematographer and director, Sen might have laid claim to auteur status in the tradition of the visionary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his acknowledged influences. But Mystery Road was also a genre film, a Western with a crime story at its heart. Its esoteric quality of “silence made visible,” in the words of Inside Story’s late film critic, Sylvia Lawson, was balanced by a commitment to building narrative suspense and creating a heroic detective figure in Jay Swan, played by Aaron Pedersen.

Sen’s dramatic world took on a life of its own, sustaining its imaginative hold as the baton was passed by a succession of directors, including Rachel Perkins and Warwick Thornton. Thornton’s son Dylan River took the helm for the latest series, a prequel that involved a challenging change of actor in the central character of Swan, now played by Mark Coles Smith.

Greer Simpkin, a producer of Mystery Road: Origin, sees the depth of the ensemble acting by a predominantly Aboriginal cast as essential to its appeal. Indeed, the three series in which she and casting director Anousha Zarkesh have been involved seem not so much cast as populated.

River agrees with Pedersen’s observation in 2013 that “the land is a bigger character than anyone” in Mystery Road — though for River, he tells me, this is “a subconscious thing.” With his background in cinematography, telling stories through landscape is second nature. Perhaps this experience also gives him an instinct for who belongs in a dramatised train of events so bound up with everyday life in an outback town in Western Australia’s Goldfields region.

A discerning eye for untrained newcomers with a captivating quality on screen is born of Zarkesh’s decades of experience travelling through remote regions, often visiting scores of schools and social organisations in a few days. But choosing actors for the latest series’s eighty speaking roles, not to mention finding 254 extras, was especially complicated. River, Simpkin and Zarkesh were in different states during the pandemic and filming was slated to take place on the other side of a locked border.

Zarkesh’s role, she tells me, is to facilitate the director’s vision by identifying the dramatic tone of the production and drawing together a pool of likely candidates. The process of blending local extras with professionally trained actors and established stars is a challenge any casting director might face, but here it is the heart of the matter. She describes it as “an overall puzzle,” moving from the selection of individuals with distinctive physical and personal qualities to the composition of an ensemble able to portray the surface tensions and underlying bonds of an enduring community. “Something magical’s going to happen when it all comes together,” she says.

River, likewise, talks of a kind of alchemy that occurs when the chosen actors appear on set. “Once we get shooting you can’t see anyone else in the role. They already are who we want — to the extent that we will change the script and even the character to suit them.”

A remarkable instance came with the casting of Megan Lilly Wilding as Ziggy, a bizarre, ragged figure Swan comes across near an isolated hut in the desert. She carries a shotgun, talks of devils and magic, and gives Swan the slip by haring off into the distance on a dune buggy. Wilding has form as a comedian, and there’s an unpredictability to her performance that is nothing short of inspired as she makes the transition from crazed joker to cowed pathos as an elemental being confined to a police cell. The role was originally written for a male actor, but Wilding had an unmistakable claim on it.

Scripted lines were readily dropped, says River, when they were made redundant by nuances of behaviour truer to the complexities of communication in a social environment where so much is left unsaid and often suppressed. Here the series differs markedly from the dominant tendency for Australian TV acting to be over-explicit, as if the goal is always to find the shortest route to the next emotional climax.

When Zarkesh and Simpkin speak of finding actors who will suit the tone of the production, they are identifying the need to be true to the quietness River encourages, even in dialogue fraught with underlying distress. This is a place where grief and loss are deeply embedded, too acute for ready expression.

This is something Pedersen, as the older Swan, made central to the earlier series. He brought a fusion of brooding machismo and brusque restraint that Mark Coles Smith, as the younger Swan, manages to display as qualities in the making. Coles Smith has a lightness about him that lifts the spirit of the new series (yes, he’s even permitted fleeting smiles) without losing the essential gravitas of the character. “Mark was the only person on our list,” says River, and he brought a subtlety to the role that came of the most attentive preparation.

Experienced actors like Coles Smith and Steve Bisley, as the ageing cop who runs the local station, carry intricately detailed backstories in their heads. These may never emerge in the scripted narrative, but the camera has a way of reading these psychological sub-strata in their faces and bodies.

This discipline and imaginative commitment spreads through the cast, who must sustain their conviction through prolonged camera shots and laconic conversations. River prefers to shoot dialogue with a single camera, placed “at the distance it needs to be emotionally,” which means actors need the concentration for a single, prolonged take. There are no opportunities to mix shots from different angles in the editing room.

As River heads for Toronto to promote the series to an international audience, Zarkesh is in the Northern Territory scouting for new talent for Warwick Thornton’s next film, which needs a group of eight- to twelve-year-old boys to take lead roles. What does she look for? First, kids who are confident, playful, expressive in improvised games; and at the next level, kids who listen, draw on imagination and come from a truthful place. And when they start to form a relationship with the camera, “they’ll break your heart.” •

The post Casting Mystery Road appeared first on Inside Story.

Not yet, as it transpired, and nor was the fall of the Republican Party, which continues to deny its real significance. Coincidentally or not, the fall that didn’t quite happen has been a central theme in several major American television series this year. Following major disruption to production schedules through the pandemic, The Morning Show (Apple Plus), Billions (Showtime) and Succession (HBO) all returned with new seasons about those who surf the high tides of wealth, power and celebrity.

The leading characters may not be likeable but their complex and often perverse personalities have disturbing resonances in the real world. Their fantasies, delusions, moods and impulses are consequential because wealth and celebrity mean power. Not the power of the presidency, though they sometimes come close to it, but power that is wide-ranging and even fundamental.

Billions continued its rollercoaster ride through the theme park of hedge fund capitalism, where the key players, always seemingly headed for a crash, take daredevil loops into the next escapade. This year’s season five eventually saw the departure of Damien Lewis from the lead role of maverick trader Bobby “Axe” Axelrod after a marathon combat with prosecutor Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giametti) and, for a while, it looked like a classic downfall.

Regular viewers, of course, knew better than to expect anything like that. Victories and losses in this arena are never final and, while billions are always at stake, that never seems to matter much. It’s all about the combat, which plays out in round after round of alpha male confrontation that is at times overtly primordial.

Episode one begins literally in the jungle, with Axe and his right-hand guy Mike Wagner (David Costabile) bellowing and beating their chests under the influence of the psychoactive brew ayahuasca. Afterwards they hare off on motorbikes, bearded and leather-clad, to get back to the city and be restyled in time for a contest with new challenger Mike Prince (Corey Stoll): not a shootout, but a photoshoot for GQ, vying for the cover profile.

Meanwhile, over at the headquarters of Axe Capital, the women are proving that they too can play hard. Performance coach Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff) has arranged a stunt with a friend who poses as a feral intruder looking for trouble. They throw each other across tables, do a few spins and backflips then embrace to the applause of the assembled company. “Now are we ready to do the fucking job for each other?” yells Wendy.

That’s Billions, subtle as a shower of brickbats. Purporting to offer an updated interpretation of game theory, a view of human nature developed by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s, the dramaturgy always revolves around competitive individualism, where collaboration is only another means of serving one’s own ends.

Axe’s departure, with its soundtrack of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” may signal the emergence of an instinct to escape the psychological straitjacket, but maybe not. “Why can’t we make our own?” was his response to Chuck’s challenge about the need to recognise wider laws in the universe. Prince arrives to take over Axe’s company, quoting Emerson and apparently offering a more expansive philosophy, until his concluding pronouncement: “What this is, is mine.” Ultimately, this gives us an Ayn Rand world — endlessly profitable but weary, stale and flat.

In its first season, The Morning Show offered a welcome antidote, working a blend of farce and pathos in its portrayal of a major television network descending into mayhem when leading anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) is forced to leave following allegations of abuse. There was genuine sparkle in the performances of Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson, the presenters left with the challenge of holding the audience and restoring confidence.

Integrity, of the news and those communicating it, remains a central theme in season two, but the business of distinguishing between genuine integrity and its public enactment becomes increasingly tortuous. Kessler’s fall is terminal, but with other key personnel implicated in the scandal, the fall of the network is what counts; and there, the public face is all that matters.

The longer story arcs of The Morning Show follow each of the central characters as they confront the question of what it means to be a good or worthwhile person. Their explorations take them on divergent paths, which means the new season has been criticised for lack of dramatic cohesion. Aniston and Witherspoon don’t have enough good material to work with and risk settling into prototypes: Alex as the melancholic narcissist, unable to escape her own mannered persona, and Bradley as the queen of charm whose zipped-on smile vanishes as instantly as it appears.

But showrunners Jay Carson and Kerry Ehrin should be credited with some serious thematic commitment. With his capacity to escape every impasse by stretching the parameters of the situation, chief executive Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) emerges as the most dynamic figure, becoming a focus for larger questions about the corporate ethos he represents.

Stood down in the first phase of the crisis, he makes a defiant return as head of the news division and fronts the board with debonair contempt. Holland Taylor gives a crisp vignette performance as the board’s chair, Cybil Richards, getting nowhere in her attempts to exert authority over someone whose response to her demands is, “You really think that’s what this is all about, your little television network? This is a battle for the soul of the universe.”

Crudup portrays him as a lightning-witted improviser, always fully present in the moment, “exploiting the landscape of chaos.” Perceptive in interviews, Crudup speculates that if wealth and celebrity are the foundations of our value system, the implicit assumption is that individuals who personify those things must somehow be good.

The invitation to perform honesty, warmth and courage is always there, and some have the talent to do it with aplomb, but when the quest for goodness becomes introspective, as it does for each of the leading characters, and eventually for Cory himself, the corporate vehicle they are piloting may indeed go off the rails.

Succession has been compared to classical dramas of dynastic power and family conflict. Scripted with brutal wit and terse intelligence, and featuring a superb ensemble cast, it is widely acknowledged to be in a class of its own. Nevertheless, I have friends who won’t watch it, saying that the personalities it portrays are too toxic. And so they are, but the history of drama is filled with toxic characters. In ancient Greek tragedy, five generations of the house of Atreus engage in an unrelenting exchange of atrocities. Shakespeare gives us the murderous family pathologies of Hamlet and King Lear.

In these canonical models, the dramatic arc moves towards redemption through the downfall of the villains, and the termination of the regimes over which they have presided. But the rollout of the multi-season television drama allows the dramatic fall to be protracted, and perhaps ultimately averted, and therein lies the most troubling aspect of the contemporary picture.

The central strand of tension in Succession lies in an unresolved question: are we in a world that can no longer bring down a ruthless potentate and the twisted system of values over which s/he presides? Ageing media magnate Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is no mafia figure. He doesn’t dispatch people with physical violence; he destroys them by capsizing their economies and, if they are part of his inner circle, through humiliation and personal abuse. His four adult children are treated to the psychological equivalent of flaying.

This shouldn’t be fun to watch, but sadism in the realms of psychology has always been the stuff of comedy, where unfailing resilience is a source of entertainment. Connor (Alan Ruck), Roy’s eldest son, has an obtuseness that forms a natural defence: when he’s being got at, he usually just doesn’t get it. Roman (Kieran Culkin) and his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook), children of a second marriage, sharpen their wits on each other through pseudo-incestuous sparring that is exuberant and vicious by turns.

Some farcical secondary fallout comes from Shiv’s earnest spouse Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) who rolls with punches then takes it out through mock-bullying sessions with cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun). Only Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seems to have enough human sensitivity to be really vulnerable to the abuse, which, of course, makes him Logan’s prime target.

Spoiled, arrogant and petty, they are all ruined personalities, playing the game of corporate succession because it’s all they know how to do, though much of the comedy arises from their conviction that they can do pretty much anything. Shiv thinks she can dance, Kendall thinks he can sing, Roman fancies himself as a slick negotiator and Connor thinks he can be president.

How it will all turn out is unclear, and with a fourth season announced recently it is likely to remain so for some time, but don’t expect any catharsis. Chaos will always come again, and we live in an era when those who thrive in its landscapes are almost impossible to bring down. •

The post Landscape of chaos appeared first on Inside Story.

That suddenly changed last Friday when treasurer Josh Frydenberg, communications minister Paul Fletcher and ACT senator Zed Seselja descended on the NFSA’s headquarters in Canberra with the surprise announcement of a $41.9 million funding boost, over four years, for its digitisation program. The announcement also provided funds to digitise the holdings of seven other institutions as well, including the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery and the National Library. It recognised the essentiality of preserving Australia’s at-risk audiovisual heritage while properly placing the NFSA at the centre of the action. So how good is that?

Has the government found a new enthusiasm for vintage and recent movies and radio programs? Or are there more basic concerns? Following immediately on a disastrous parliamentary session, the good-news story got blanket media coverage and will do no harm at all to the electoral prospects of the ministerial trio, whose seats are all under challenge from high-calibre “Voices of” candidates.

And, in a classic Yes Minister nuance, something vital is missing: a starting date for the cash splash. In the end, it’s really just a statement of intent. I doubt the NFSA will see the colour of the government’s money before polling day. Post-election, if things don’t follow through as announced, it won’t be the fault of Messrs Frydenberg, Fletcher and Seselja. It will be interesting to learn whether Labor and the Greens have begun to focus on national institutions like the NFSA.

The announcement also diverts attention from much more fundamental matters: the integrity of the NFSA’s governance and curatorial standards. In detailed questions on 18 October, independent MP Zali Steggall asked minister Fletcher whether he would seek to amend the NFSA’s legislation to ensure that its board comprised experts with academic and professional backgrounds directly relevant to the institution’s operations, and whether he would fill the two current vacancies against these criteria. Advocacy groups have suggested plenty of candidates he could choose from. The minister has yet to respond.

While its act requires the NFSA to work to the “highest curatorial standards,” the institution no longer specifies which curatorial, technical or ethical standards and codes it adheres to, thereby distancing itself from its international peers. Its collection-development policy lacks depth and detail. Research has stagnated. Relationships have deteriorated. Redundancies have continued to leach away corporate memory and expertise. Rebuilding those lost assets is a task that still awaits attention.

While any funding increase is a plus, the NFSA is much more than a digitisation factory or government-funded YouTube. The selection, protection, documenting, cataloguing and accessibility of the national collection, guided by trained long-term professionals, are as fundamental to our national polity as environmental protection and integrity in public administration. The archive requires sustained ongoing funding — not short-term, opportunistic grants. It needs the continual interest of elected representatives, such as Zali Steggall and Helen Haines, to keep bureaucrats and administrators up to the mark. It is refreshing that they, and others like them, have a vision of Australia that embraces technological change and an aspiration to respect our heritage through good governance.

Finally, there is a worrying hint in all this that digitisation is a once-and-for-all solution for audiovisual heritage generally. It is not. It’s crucial for access, with all its possibilities, but preservation and curation is a separate and much more complex reality than we might assume when we back up our personal data to the cloud. Archival standards require that analogue originals be retained after digitisation for as long as they remain viable. Among other things, digital files must be protected from decay and viruses, and their integrity maintained against the potential manipulation of their content. They must be refreshed regularly and are permanently on life support. It has been said that digital files last forever — or five years, whichever comes first.

The coming election is a time when all those seeking office, whether party-aligned or independent, can rise to this challenge with imagination and a willingness to ensure Australia has a world class NFSA that we can all be proud of. •

The post Promises, promises… appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s important to her to be liked. In an episode of her TV series Almost Australian she admits to being “a bit nervous” as she prepares to meet the elders at an Aboriginal settlement on the edge of Alice Springs. “I just think they might not like me,” she tells us. The words are barely out of her mouth before members of the community approach with the warmest of welcomes. When she settles herself in a camping chair, dressed like the surrounding elders in an ample cotton-print dress, she seems already to be one of them.

A world away from here and three generations ago, Margolyes commenced her first year at Oxford High School where, as she recalls, she’d do almost anything to be liked. Although born and bred in Oxford, she seems to have been at greater risk of being made an outsider there than in a remote community in the Northern Territory.

Having attended the same school myself for a couple of years (a decade or so after she left) I can attest that insider status was not readily accorded and — for a Jewish girl of unruly appearance like Margolyes, whose parents were not associated with the university — the risk of being ostracised would have been acute. Those who found themselves on the outside became anarchists, making dubious her claim to have been the naughtiest girl in the school. It was hot competition.

That she thrived by inventing entertaining personae may have set the course on which she embarked as an adult. Her gifts as a comic performer developed further during her student years at Cambridge, where she became a star of the Footlights Review and began to attract the interest of London agents. But, as she now reveals, the Footlights was dominated by a public school boys club to which she was not admitted. Fellow performers who later became luminaries of the Monty Python team “treated me as if I were invisible and did not speak to me at all.” This much may well be true.

Her recollections of well-known personalities are surely not the whole truth, but she always comes across as honest. Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant and radical on stage, was a stalwart and generous colleague behind the scenes, in contrast to Glenda Jackson, who was arrogant and intimidating. “I called her a cow and she called me an amateur.” Maggie Smith, Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Claire Danes get good references; Warren Beatty (“an absolute bastard”), Arnold Schwarzenegger (“a pig of a man”) and William Hurt (“an arsehole”) head the negative side of the register.

All this might flout the unwritten rule that people in show business should be sycophantically nice about each other, but for Margolyes all anecdotes are an opportunity for flouting rules, written or otherwise. Most of them are told against herself, and she seems to take particular delight in challenging conventions of physical embarrassment.

Having a body that refuses tidy boundaries — too fat to go to bed with, according to a colleague who, she assures us, “meant it in a nice way” — she flaunts her physicality by wearing shorts to auditions, making unpredictable sexual advances and, when she is arrested for swearing at a police officer, pre-emptively taking off her clothes to enable a physical examination. You can’t fat-shame someone who has ostentatiously banished all sense of shame and made you choke with laughter in the process.

Some of the sexual encounters she reports seem a little far-fetched, including one with an agent whose lacklustre approach she thought might benefit from some hand to mouth resuscitation. Then there’s the adventure with a Maltese fisherman who gave her an emergency lift in his rowing boat when she missed the ferry. But it’s unlikely any of the parties involved will come forward to contest her version of events.

Her scurrilous narratives have made her a favourite on Graham Norton and other top-rating chat shows, where she dominates the mock–drawing room atmosphere. Yet, even as she recalls these moments, she never really stops insisting that hers is the story of an outsider. She’s the odd one out amid the glamorous A-listers, included only because she’ll go where they dare not.

Stories that would embarrass the locker room are told in the “Oxford High School accent” (as she labels it) that has remained unaltered through all the changes of milieu she has experienced during her years in America and Australia. It’s a mode of speech redolent of educational snobbery and a quintessential Englishness that seems at odds with her merciless subversion of social airs and graces.

Given that she can assume the tone and accent of characters from any walk of life, it is curious that this vocal chameleon returns to that voice when she is speaking as herself. Aside from its social pretensions, though, it is also a voice attuned to literary language. As a graduate in English from Cambridge, her tastes lean towards the classics.

Margolyes’s most significant professional achievement is her one-woman show presenting impersonations of women from the novels of Charles Dickens. Dickens’ Women has provided her with a gallery of alter egos, and a favourite among them — Mrs Gamp, the seedy midwife in Martin Chuzzlewit who drinks gin from a teapot — makes an impromptu appearance in the Central Desert in Almost Australian.

Margolyes has left Alice Springs and is heading for a desert site known as Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe, or Children’s Ground, where local communities have created a cultural recreation program based on traditional storytelling. Sitting beside one of the elders, she decides to tell a story of her own. As she assumes the voice and manner of Mrs Gamp, her companion’s face lights up with recognition. This might absolutely be someone from round here.

Outsider she may be, but Margolyes’s finely tuned instinct for establishing rapport comes through in the TV series as she tours the country on a mission to learn what it means to be Australian by taking in the cultural diversity of the people. She’s quiet and receptive in conversation, quick to find vulnerabilities and to win trust: the opposite of her public persona.

This Much Is True provides further insight into the person behind the performer. At the heart of this memoir is her sense of being Jewish, and of being an outsider by virtue of belonging to a people in exile. Genealogy is her passion, she says, and her parents (still referred to as “Mummy and Daddy”) dominate her own view of her life story.

Her father was born in the Glasgow slums to Orthodox parents who fled from Belarus in the 1880s. Having trained as a doctor he established a practice in Oxford. Her maternal grandparents moved from Yorkshire to southeast London, where her grandfather was the first president of the South-East London Synagogue in New Cross and her mother, never given the benefit of a tertiary education, made her way up the social hierarchy through force of personality.

A visit to Auschwitz five years ago tapped into a deep-seated rage, leaving Margolyes feeling she never wanted to laugh again. But she remains conflicted about Zionism. On a trip to Gaza with a touring performance of Dickens’ Women, she was stoned by children in the streets, but more recently her criticism of Israel has prompted stone-throwing of another kind, with social media posts vilifying her as an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew.

This Much Is True is, as most readers will expect, a hugely entertaining book, but it is also a disturbing one, with strong undercurrents of anger. Its real value may be as an account of a life lived with immense courage and resourcefulness. •

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The new six-part Netflix series Midnight Mass is set in the extended Christian festival of Lent and Easter, but plays on the duality of pagan and sacred in ways that resonate particularly well with the Halloween tradition. I usually click past series promising blood, gore, violence and horror themes in my routine trawls through Netflix. But this one kept popping up at the front of the menu, so I decided to give it a ten-minute trial. Less than a minute into its opening scene, it was clear this was far from generic.

An accident on a city bridge at night: the camera travels over a car — its side window smashed, steam rising from the engine — while paramedics perform CPR on a casualty lying on the road. A few metres away, the young driver sits on a wall, his face illuminated by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. It’s as if this is all happening in slow motion, and for a while in silence, as a Neil Diamond ballad swells on the sound track.

At once realistically horrible and lyrically other-worldly, the atmosphere is reminiscent of David Lynch. Larger forces of destiny are converging on Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), the young man responsible for the tragedy, as he sits mouthing the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

A few years later, a chastened Riley is released from prison and returns to his home on Crockett Island, where a remote, close-knit community is bound together by the church and its ageing priest, Monsignor Pruitt. Pruitt was scheduled to return on the same ferry after a trip to the Holy Land, but a much younger priest, Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater), unexpectedly steps ashore in his place.

Director and showrunner Mike Flanagan, who grew up in a small-island Catholic community and served as a chorister and altar boy, draws on a deep familiarity with the liturgy and with the feasts and symbolic rituals that dramatise the passage of time in a place where nothing much happens. With its plush costumes, stirring music, atmospheric lighting and mesmerising rhetorical display, the church itself is a form of theatre.

Flanagan has assembled some outstanding talent. Composers Andy Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart (the Newton Brothers) arrange traditional hymns, some sung in full as mass is celebrated, with Grush himself playing the role of the organist. Production designer Steve Arnold, whose credits include Mindhunter and House of Cards, has a way of creating spaces that never quite contain what goes on in them.

Hamish Linklater delivers the sermons with poetic virtuosity, building to crescendo in unnervingly syncopated rhythms. The son of legendary voice trainer Kristin Linklater, he made his reputation in Central Park Shakespeare productions, and brings a repertoire of technical strategies to his intensely demanding role. If you’re going to deliver fire and brimstone, it’s best to start quiet, and Linklater’s performance is bedded in a low-key, self-deprecating manner.

Father Paul, newcomer though he is, gets about the village with an uncanny instinct for getting to know people, and especially those who don’t want to be known — like Riley, who tries to avoid the traditional greeting at the church door and refuses communion, insisting that he is not in a state of grace.

Most people here bear scars. The mayor’s daughter, Leeza Scarborough, is paraplegic following a shooting accident. Local doctor Sarah Gunning grew up as an only child who never knew her father, and now cares for a mother suffering from rapidly advancing dementia. Erin Greene, the schoolteacher, has returned to her home on the island pregnant after a failed marriage. Sheriff Hassan, a devout Muslim, has retreated from life in the New York police department, where he suffered prejudice and punitive demotion.

Over seven hour-long episodes, the series takes time to explore these lives and the bonds that have grown between families and across the community as people try to help each other through their struggles. In this place of strong loyalties, moral principles are more than mere doctrinal notions.

Flanagan loves to indulge in prolonged takes, tracking characters as they walk the length of the village at dusk, engaged in quiet conversation, or gather on the beach at dawn to assess the damage wrought by a terrifying storm. As you would expect in a horror series, much of the drama happens at night. But here there is a fascination with shades of darkness, literal and metaphorical. The horror takes its time brewing, and when it does burst through it must contend with a bedrock of human solidarity.

Once the full blood-and-gore cracks open in episodes four and five, though, some of the effects are grossly out of keeping with the realism built up in previous episodes. It’s really not a spoiler to let on that, yes, we do get vampires, and reflective contact lenses to signal that someone has gone over to the dark side.

If you are tempted to give up at this point, don’t. Flanagan proceeds to redeem himself by ambitiously orchestrating the whole village in an enactment of the Good Friday Midnight Mass. As the candle-lit procession completes its tour of the village and fills the church, Father Paul enters in a gold chasuble.

From a scriptwriter’s point of view, it takes some nerve to set up a scene like this. What is the priest going to say? A great deal, actually, and it’s potent stuff, as holy and unholy as anything anyone ever heard in church. Don’t miss it. •

The post Unholy night appeared first on Inside Story.

Composed only of recordings by those in the midst of the trauma, the documentary was both immediate and unmediated. Dramatisation, on the other hand, necessarily involves many kinds of mediation. Storylines are created by blending actual situations to create something that is typical and yet filled with invented detail. Actors find diverse ways of expressing emotional and psychological responses. Editors and cinematographers arrange time and space to suit the script’s sequence of events.

Numerous recent television series have produced fine dramatic renditions of real events. But where those events are both acutely traumatic and recent — as they are in Fires, the ABC’s six-part dramatisation of the 2019–20 blazes — a very keen sensitivity is called for.

The first episode of Fires was prefaced with content warnings, and many people commented on social media that they could not watch because it was “too soon.” But there is another important sense in which it can be too soon to explore a disaster in dramatised form. Some critical distance is required to make the best judgements about tone and focus — about where creative reconstruction is appropriate, and where not.

The clips the ABC has used in its trailers for Fires are indicators of where such judgements have gone awry. Richard Roxburgh and Miranda Otto, playing a couple whose dairy farm has been devastated, are seen looking intensely into each other’s faces in lingering close-up. At the information centre, a switchboard operator played by Noni Hazlehurst offers personal reassurance to a distressed caller as the camera slowly moves in and her expression softens.

We are being invited to focus — intimately — on the human impact of the fires. What is being promoted is emotional power of a kind the ABC believes to be a drawcard for audiences. Underlying the entire approach is an assumption that viewers need an emotional hook in order to engage with the experiences of those caught up in an unfolding catastrophe.

Producer Tony Ayres says the goal was to honour the experiences portrayed — to be authentic and truthful — and in many parts of the series he and his cast have certainly done this. But good intentions are not always accompanied by the best instincts. Although showrunner Belinda Chayko’s approach, in which personal storylines are to the fore, is effective in giving dramatic shape and unity, the dramatic pull starts to favour interpersonal tensions.

Each episode focuses on a different set of characters in circumstances representative of the worst scenarios of the black summer, with Eliza Scanlen and Hunter Page-Lochard as two young firefighters whose recurring appearances serve to create an overall story arc. The actors may be playing rookies, but their own professional experience shows in the subtlety with which they convey signs of budding romance.

This only becomes intrusive when it serves to create a sentimental overlay that clashes with the sheer brutal urgency of the situation. In the opening episode, the pair are in a fire truck caught in an ember storm in remote bushland where back-up can’t reach them, as actually happened to a group of firefighters in the Four Corners report. Two young people reaching out to each other under the fire blanket creates a moment of poignancy, but belongs to an emotional register that is entirely at odds with the hard-headed self-control of the experienced team who in real life made their way to safety against all the odds.

What’s troubling is the sense that the creators of the series felt they needed to focus on human relationships because they didn’t have sufficient trust in viewers to let the relationship between the humans and the fires be the dominant element.

The second episode, featuring Otto and Roxburgh, includes scenes in which the couple, having found their house burnt to the ground, must shoot injured animals then muster the surviving cattle to be fed and tended. This is all conveyed with stern conviction.

But as the episode progresses, an already unimaginable burden of distress is added to when conflict breaks out between the couple and their daughter-in-law. This explodes into renewed anguish when their son is found dead in a burnt-out vehicle. Roxburgh handles the scene in which he finds the vehicle with stoic restraint, but in a follow-up sequence he returns to the spot and undergoes a storm of explicit grief.

If the old adage for fiction writers, “show, don’t tell,” has an equivalent for dramatic media, it is “don’t show, indicate.” The breakdown is too much in every sense, and for those already triggered by the recall of such tragedies, it is surely insensitive to linger on such intimate and explicit portrayals of suffering.

Writing this, I’m well aware that the views of critics matter less than those of people who were directly affected. Social media posts suggest the majority of viewers have been moved and impressed, but there are dissenting voices. “I’m still living with the charred remains of many of my possessions and surrounded by dead, burnt trees,” one tweeted. “Trauma isn’t entertainment.”

Some have compared the series to Neighbours. It would be disrespectful and unfair to badge it as soap opera, but it risks being tinged with that genre, the hallmark of which is to set up an emotional rollercoaster through a storyline littered with interpersonal crises. Overpitched emotional registers make for cheap drama, and it is the curse of the ABC repertoire that it keeps leaning in that direction. •

The post Too much, too soon appeared first on Inside Story.

This six-part series is the latest in a long line of TV series and telemovies set in Australia’s 1980s, including dramatisations of the magazine industry (Paper Giants: Magazine Wars) and the lives of prime minister Bob Hawke (Hawke), ultramarathon runner Cliff Young (Cliffy) and rock group INXS (INXS: Never Tear Us Apart). Each appealed to the nostalgia of two groups who have money to indulge their taste for it: boomers and generation Xers, who were either young or middle-aged during that decade.

But more years have passed, making The Newsreader as much period drama as The Doctor Blake Mysteries, or — going back further — the long-running serial The Sullivans. The latter, set in Melbourne in the second world war, began screening about three and a half decades after the beginning of that conflict. The Newsreader is set in 1986, thirty-five years ago.

Centred on a television newsroom, the romantic drama at the show’s heart involves “difficult” star newsreader Helen Norville, played by Anna Torv, and ambitious up-and-comer Dale Jennings (Sam Reid). It is hard to avoid the parallels with the American romantic comedy Broadcast News (1987), in which the telegenic “star” is the blond, glitzy and shallow newsreader Tom Grunick, played by William Hurt. That film’s romance lies in the triangle between Grunick, the talented and highly strung Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) and the intellectually substantial but physically unremarkable Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), who is destined to be the also-ran in both his professional career and his love for Jane.

The Newsreader’s Helen combines many of the qualities of Broadcast News’s Tom and Jane. Like Tom, she is glamorous, popular and an on-screen natural: the cameras love her. Like Jane, she lives for her work, she wants news to be more substantial and serious, and her private life is a bit of a disaster. Dale is likeable and handsome in a slightly dorky kind of way — the kind of colleague who is subjected to good-natured teasing to his face and mild ridicule behind his back. He keeps a videotape collection of all his TV appearances, has worked a little too hard to get his voice right, and blows his first chance to read an “update” by reading too fast — a colleague suggests he’d make a great race caller — and then too slow. (I was again reminded of Aaron in Broadcast News who, finally given the chance to read to camera that he had long craved, sweats so profusely that he seems in danger of collapse.)

A love triangle is developing in The Newsreader, too, although not one that would have been risked in a mainstream comedy like Broadcast News. Gay cameraman Tim (Chai Hansen) is sufficiently obsessed with the developing relationship between Dale and Helen to let Dale know that his interest is other than platonic. And there are plenty of hints that the boyish Dale’s sexuality remains somewhat unresolved.

TV often evokes past times through their consumer technologies, and the 1980s — the last decade before the digital revolution — especially so. At the beginning of the first episode, the producers of the 6pm news have a mishap with some footage on a video cassette: a replacement has to be made. Messages arrive on fax machines — more than the computer, the key office technology of the era. Our eyes are assailed not by bright pastels of the kind often used to evoke the 1960s and 1970s but by the relentlessly subdued beiges, tans and fawns of wood-panelled settings, if not of Jane’s spectacular shoulder pads.

But the office politics speak to our own times as much as the 1980s. Those who have the most power are male, stale and pale; I’m no expert on the subject, but I have a feeling this world wouldn’t be completely unrecognisable to today’s journalists. The experienced boss, Lindsay (William McInnes), is both exasperated with Helen and dependent on her for ratings — and ultimately protective of her in an old-fashioned way that is tinged with the hint of sexual attraction. The male anchor, Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor), evokes something of the gravitas of the two venerable Brians of 1980s TV news in Australia, Henderson and Naylor; but his insecurity and taste for intrigue mean he can’t quite pull it off. His highly ambitious wife Evelyn (Marg Downey) stokes his ambitions, convincing him that great days are still ahead for him.

Women’s power is more fragile, uncertain and conditional. Helen drives a hard bargain, but because she teeters on the edge of falling apart she never quite carries the freight of that very 1980s figure, a woman succeeding in a man’s world. Perhaps better evoking women’s professional life in that era is Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson), a Korean-Australian, who is seemingly the newsroom’s most competent employee. It’s clear she’s going to spend a career being taken for granted and cleaning up after people like Rob Rickards (Stephen Peacocke), a likeable enough Aussie sporting jock without too many social graces who seems to be vaguely sweet on her.

Each of the three episodes so far has centred on a historical event evocative of the time: Halley’s Comet, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the release of Lindy Chamberlain. In this weekend’s episode, it will be the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson paired with the bombing of the Russell Street Police Station. All sorts of other period references are strewn through the first three episodes: Paul Hogan makes an early, obligatory appearance as Australian of the Year, and it isn’t long before we are discussing AIDS and, on a lighter note, the new butterfly enclosure at Melbourne Zoo and the Cabbage Patch Kids.

There is something slightly fetishistic about all of this: the effect is sometimes like “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” that Billy Joel song packed with historical references. But history is essentially used as a way of orienting and providing the setting for the romantic drama. No one is likely to come out of The Newsreader with a much better understanding of the 1980s than they already have, and it is hard to imagine anyone who didn’t live through the decade making much of the many events that are referenced.

The Newsreader is enjoyable enough, sometimes funny, pleasingly nostalgic and well acted. The writing is engaging rather than sparkling. But perhaps the gestures to banality are part of the point, for the series is self-conscious about the stereotypes, clichés and fictions in which television news trades, then and now. And it is in its evocation of that media world — one that was on the cusp of radical transformation — that The Newsreader might be at its sharpest. While it is hardly an elegy, its characters do sometimes appear to be sleepwalking into a night that will bring to their cosy little world greater terrors than anything their own times were capable of sending their way. •

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A series concerned with the internecine battles in the English department of an Ivy League college would seem an unlikely candidate for widespread popularity, and the healthy ratings are no doubt largely attributable to the appeal of Sandra Oh in the lead role. As a comedian, she has perfect pitch, specialising in a demeanour of constant surprise, as if life keeps serving up eventualities she could never have anticipated.

Oh plays a professor and recently appointed head of department who, as the story commences, seems to know just what to expect. Arriving on campus with an expression of apprehension on her face, she is aware of the challenges she faces as the first woman of colour to take on the role, and at a time when the department’s future is in jeopardy.

The camera follows her through the corridors of a finely appointed nineteenth-century building, adorned with the portraits of former luminaries, to the door of her new office where the sight of her name — Professor Ji-Yoon Kim — evidently gives her some ironic pleasure. She enters, sits at the massive desk in the centre of the wood-panelled room and leans back in the chair, which immediately collapses.

That she did not expect. Besides affording a moment of slapstick, it’s an adroit piece of symbolism. Elements of the typical and the bizarre are combined in the situation she faces and, confident as she may be in her determination to get control of it, the wackier aspects start to get more and more out of hand.

The quartet of veteran colleagues she intends to shield from the humiliation of forced retirement prove deviously sharp-witted in pursuing their own interests. They teach outmoded subjects to empty classrooms, wilfully oblivious to their own responsibility for falling enrolments, but are sufficiently on the ball to be adept mischief-makers. There’s an especially enjoyable performance from Holland Taylor, who defies the stereotype of the borderline geriatric to generate a wonderfully unpredictable storyline of her own.

Maverick lecturer Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) is the subject of another misfired rescue mission. He’s the most popular teacher in the department, but having gone on a bender after the recent death of his wife and his only daughter’s departure for college, he does a Hitler impression in front of a packed lecture hall to add colour to his explanation of fascism.

And then there are Ji-Yoon’s troubles on the home front. Her adopted seven-year-old daughter Ju-Ju (Everly Carganilla) has become obsessed with birth and birth mothers, and puts the babysitter to flight with explicit questions. Emergency back-up is called for from her grandfather, an elegant Korean-speaking widower who is terrified of the child’s anarchic tendencies.

The debacle surrounding Dobson widens and overlaps with the fallout from a bungled tenure case for young African-American academic Yaz McKay, a rising star who wins prizes for her essays and galvanises the students with improvised rap sessions. As the dean (David Morse) observes, “They want to create their own content.” Played by Nana Mensah, herself an accomplished scriptwriter, McKay combines the dynamism with a steel core: this is someone who will decide her own destiny.

Showrunner Amanda Peet has her work cut out for her with this Escher-like configuration of story arcs. A certain recklessness on her own part, though, makes her approach distinctive. The standard comedy protocol of having it all turn out okay, though with a few clever twists, gets abandoned somewhere along the way. Ultimately the Chair, and all that is held together by it, may be beyond salvage.

The college story, usually heavily sentimentalised, has been a favourite genre in American popular culture since the mid twentieth century and, inventive as they are, Peet and co-writer Annie Wyman don’t always avoid the pitfalls of convention. Both writers have Ivy League credentials, and by choosing to set the story in a college that is itself a bastion of convention, heavily subscribed to notions of literature and writing as higher-order activities, they are also perpetuating these notions.

The prototype of the inspiring literature teacher, epitomised by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, hovers over the character of Bill Dobson as his students wake up and lean forward to hear him say profound and arresting things. What he actually comes out with is a few historically inaccurate platitudes. Yaz McKay’s classroom jam sessions are in the same tradition of self-indulgent idealism, albeit in an updated version.

A display of what real teaching and learning may look like occurs outside the building when Dobson fronts up to an angry crowd of students armed with their own set of notions and catchphrases. Evidently keen to participate in what may be an opportunity to engage with the complex ethics of human communication, he steps into a minefield. Plaudits to the writers for not trying to rescue him this time with a few lines of stirring rhetoric.

Peet, who admits to a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis, says the interviews she conducted in preparation for the series convinced her that departmental interactions between academics are “just psychotic family dynamics happening over the course of many years.” That perspective enables an increasingly poignant overlap of family and collegial relations as the story progresses, but it also signals a very significant blind spot in the portrayal of an academic institution.

The fictional Pembroke college, funded from endowments, allows tenured academics to teach whatever they regard as important. The goal of a good teacher is to inspire, and those who do so will acquire loyalty and adoring followers. Scholarly publications are the principle measure of achievement: a suite of brilliant articles will have prestigious institutions bidding for your recruitment.

As two senior Australian academics pointed out in the Conversation, academic life (if it can be called that) is not like this in institutions run on corporate principles of economic viability, client satisfaction and measurable productivity. With the ratio of student funding to staff salaries meaning it isn’t cost-effective for senior academics to teach undergraduates, most courses are staffed by people on casual contracts who don’t get to form long-term collegial relationships, psychotic or otherwise.

While universities may have formal commitments to equity and diversity, the fight to retain a position is rarely about the qualities of the individual who holds it: it’s about how the costs of the salary can be offset against income from research grants and international postgraduates. And with the introduction of penalty rates for students in the humanities, subject areas such as literature, history and philosophy may be wiped from the curriculum in Australian universities.

The Chair is dramatically effective in showing that the broken chair means more than the loss of a job for a few privileged people. The loss of deep traditions of principle and meaning in what should be an advanced learning environment causes palpable distress. Yet to those working in environments where the loss is so much more advanced and thoroughgoing, that distress has hardened into a stoic realism absent from Peet’s dramatis personae. •

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This tightly focused scene at the start of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) heralds an unfolding horror story, the smudge on the radar looming closer and larger, then ever more monstrous. But if Alien represents one extreme of the observation-to-imagination ratio, the history of how US security officials have responded to UFO sightings is at the other: nothing to see here, and if you think otherwise then you are probably deluded, drunk or paranoid.

The Pentagon’s report on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs — more popularly known as UFOs — released in June this year includes an image not unlike the one Ripley sees on her screen. It’s known to insiders as the Tic Tac video. The question is how far from such a manifestation we can legitimately take our speculations.

Highly anticipated, the report’s release has been accompanied by a spate of television dramas and documentaries about UFOs. The filmmakers don’t have much to go on: the Pentagon report is a long way from sensational reading. Of the 144 sightings deemed worthy of investigation, eighteen demonstrated movement or flight patterns that left unresolved questions. That’s about it. What caused some media excitement is the fact that the Pentagon had at last acknowledged that unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable, phenomena have indeed been detected in our skies and oceans.

These new programs tend to make the most of the “cover-up” side of the story, as the title of Netflix’s Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified indicates. Although this series purports to be contributing to a newly enlarged view of close encounters, its relentless voice-over narrative and its mishmash of interviews and archival footage are stale and unpersuasive.

With little revelatory to offer — most of these accounts of sightings have already been widely circulated — the six episodes make for pretty tedious viewing. If anything, they perpetuate an ingrained problem with popular treatments of the UFO theme: by appealing to naive assumptions that all things hidden must be fascinating and all the most amazing things must be hidden, they damage the credibility of what evidence there is.

Australian journalist Ross Coulthart risks falling into the same trap with The UFO Phenomenon, a one-off 7NEWS Spotlight production that is the result, according to the publicity, of a two-year investigative journey across key American locations where sightings have been reported. The pitch is set in the opening frames. “This story will challenge your understanding of reality”; “The mainstream media wouldn’t touch it”; “We are at a turning point in human history.”

The Pentagon has made an unprecedented admission, says Coulthart: there is something in our skies that we — and more importantly, they — can’t explain. Cut to the seminal image of the blurry Tic Tac spot on the radar. Not our system? Despite its tendency to sensationalism, Coulthart’s version of the story has some advantages over its American counterpart. For a start, it’s shorter and more selective in its focus, concentrating on more recent events.

Coulthart wisely lets his interview subjects provide the bulk of the narrative. The conversations are filmed on location, notably in the spectacular remote landscapes of New Mexico, which seems to be a favoured site for visitations by alien craft. Stories of alien encounter come across so much better in settings that display the scale and strangeness of our own planet. With contributions from US navy commander Kevin Day, former deputy assistant defense secretary Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Coulthart creates an effective reconstruction of the incident that began with the Tic Tac apparition.

So what are the legitimate lines of speculation to be drawn from this? Day provides a point-by-point account of the navigation patterns traced by his own reconnaissance pilot and the unidentified craft that was clearly responding to them. Elizondo offers a rapid inventory of capacities displayed by the Tic Tac: instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocities, low observability, trans-medium travel, anti-gravity. It is only through such detached, technical accounts that any real credibility can be established.

UFO historian David Marler refers to the tinfoil hat stereotype. The real cover-up story (well documented) was to encourage absurd popular culture stereotypes of little green men, flying saucers, bug-eyed gremlins, and the ominous officials in hats and overcoats reputed to pay a visit to people who report such things. Anyone who might be seeking to be taken seriously ran up against those cartoonish associations.

But the men in hats and overcoats were real enough. A US Air Force study in the 1950s and 60s, code-named Project Blue Book, was dedicated to suppressing and discrediting witness reports. Anyone making such a report was likely to get a knock on the door from its investigators. Project Blue Book, quite a story in itself, is dramatised in an American series of that name, currently in its second season on SBS.

The central character in Project Blue Book is J. Allen Hynek, a professor of astrophysics at Ohio State University and the Smithsonian Institution, who is enlisted to provide scientific explanations that will scotch any adventurous speculation from the press. Initially gratified by the role of “debunker for the air force,” the real-life Hynek gradually came round to a more qualified view, acknowledging that where reliable observers were involved, there were questions of scientific obligation and responsibility.

Hynek is played in the series by Aidan Gillen, who was superb as a smiling Machiavel in Game of Thrones. It should be good casting, just as the idea of a scientific expert who has to revise his most fundamental assumptions should provide a strong dramatic spine. But Project Blue Book is disappointing. The allusions to The X Files are obvious and overplayed, its sense of period too stylised and self-conscious, and it lacks pace and genuine psychological tension.

Which raises the question of why UFO stories are so hard to dramatise effectively. The X Files — with its blend of mystique and self-parody and some sophisticated on-screen chemistry between its charismatic lead actors — established a genre of which it remains the premier example. Perhaps the difficulty now is that the repertoire of stories and sightings is so drenched in retrospect. Close encounters seem to belong to a time when technologies were simpler and human understanding less constrained by advanced cosmology. Perhaps, after all, you do have to be a bit simple to swallow narratives about unexplainable phenomena.

The French series UFOs, also showing on SBS, certainly adopts that premise. Set in 1978, it gets some comedic mileage out of a plot involving a space engineer who, when his career goes off the rails, is invited to redeem himself by heading a UFO investigation unit. As he comes to terms with the hokey organisation to which he’s been assigned, with its hippy assistants and metal cabinets full of hard-copy files, the series works fairly well as a situation comedy. The UFOs remain essentially what the Pentagon was determined to make them — a silly story. •

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Stoker’s Count Dracula may not be the source, but he is the superspreader, and the compulsion to return to him again and again has gripped successive generations. Brought into the cinematic era by Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922) and carried through the mid twentieth century by Christopher Lee, he made television history when Louis Jourdan inherited the mantle in the 1977 BBC production. Variants have proliferated since then, with The Twilight Saga (2002–12) threatening to eclipse its origins altogether.

In a time of pandemic, conditions are ripe for the Prince of Darkness to reassert his dominance. Right on cue, scriptwriters Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, with producer Sue Vertue — the team responsible for bringing Sherlock Holmes into the twenty-first century — have collaborated to take Dracula back to the nineteenth for a new three-part BBC series on Netflix.

As with Sherlock, Gatiss and Moffat draw characters and situations from the literary classic but then license themselves to invent, exploring tangents from the original storylines to take the dramatisation in unexpected and sometimes wayward directions. Reflecting the structure of Stoker’s novel, their three movie-length episodes explore the distinct stages of the Dracula saga: the arrival of young London lawyer Jonathan Harker at the castle in Transylvania, Dracula’s sea voyage to England, and the culminating dual between Dracula and crusading vampire killer Van Helsing.

Much of the impact of the original story derives from its portrayal of Harker’s journey from Victorian London into the wild and uncanny terrain of the Carpathian Mountains, a cultural transition vividly captured by Frances Ford Coppola in his 1992 film. Gatiss and Moffat choose to skip the journey, concentrating on Harker’s arrival at the castle, a location that admittedly carries all the required dramatic impact.

Gatiss, a self-confessed Dracula buff, travelled through Eastern Europe in quest of the original sites, and chose Orava, a castle “jutting like a fang” out of perpendicular rock above the village of Oravsky in Slovakia. The place carries cinematic heritage from its use as the setting for Nosferatu, and cinematographer Tony Slater Ling adds exaggerated vertiginous dimensions that evoke the Wagnerian glamour of Neuschwanstein.

This is a place in which the straitlaced Victorian Englishman will lose himself in every sense. It’s a cultural and psychological meltdown as well as a mortal encounter with a virtuoso in the art of blood transfusion. I wish I could say that it is also scary, as the scriptwriters claim, but therein lies the essential weakness of this ambitious and in many respects brilliant reinvention of the legend.

The actors are not the problem. John Heffernan as the young Jonathan Harker opts for a lawyerly persona rather than the bland young romantic typically portrayed in movie adaptations. Danish actor Claes Bang, who was wonderfully unnerving in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 film The Square, brings appropriate charisma to the title role: seductive and repellent, sharp-witted, debonair and primordially gross by turns, he does much to sustain the dramatic edge of the story when the writers begin to steer it all over the road.

The twists and turns are not always misjudged. Those who have ploughed through the middle section of Stoker’s novel will know that Van Helsing, spouting endless sermons in a Dutch accent rendered with laborious phonetic inaccuracy, is one of the most tedious characters in literature. The decision to create a new kind of adversary for Dracula is welcome.

Dolly Wells as a nun driven by some curious academic interests and a psychological acuity in advance of her time makes a dynamic sparring partner at times reminiscent of the revamped Sherlock. There’s some genuinely smart repartee between the adversaries, but as she and Dracula make a transition to the twentieth century for the final conflict, the writers well and truly lose the plot. Dracula may indeed be seen as a Time Lord, as they insist, but does he really have to morph into yet another Doctor?

The problem with Time Lords in the Gatiss/Moffat repertoire (the duo have written scripts for four of the most recent Doctors) is that they have no commitment to history or to the sense of an epoch. Because they’re bound by no social or linguistic conventions, the period trappings are essentially set decoration.

The second episode, set aboard the ship carrying Dracula’s cargo of coffins, does make a sustained commitment to time and place to conjure a highly charged atmosphere. Photographed by Julian Court, its interior scenes draw on the lighting and colour palette of Joseph Wright, and the seascapes evoke Turner. As they realise what has found its way among them, society passengers and rough crew members, “all in the same boat,” are forced into close collaboration. No magic realism comes to their aid this time.

As in all great stories, the constraints of society and culture are the source of dramatic tension in the original Dracula. Stoker himself, a city businessman, was a product of such constraints, and his association with the great actor Henry Irving, undoubtedly the model for the Count, began when Irving mesmerised the company at a dinner party with his recital of the “ghastly story” of a guilt-stricken murderer.

Irving’s theatre was all about the allure of partially illuminated darkness in a world fascinated with the limits of human knowledge. Fear was generated from what lies outside the circle, though, and however cleverly Gatiss and Moffat play with the image of a Dracula kept outside a literal circle, they just don’t have what it takes to make him frightening.

This is precisely because, assisted by all the innovations of contemporary television image making, they take such unlimited licence with his story. Why accept limits? The vampire, after all, breaches the limits of mortality. Yet he can’t bear sunlight, or crucifixes, or garlic. It’s these restrictions that generate the story’s suspense.

Without observing limits, you end up with all plot and no story. It’s a crucial distinction. Writers create plots by experimenting with what they can make happen, but stories arise from the difficulties people have in making things happen, or preventing what seems inevitable.

“Reality is overrated,” Dracula says more than once in this latest incarnation. But there’s the rub. Where there is too little reality, there can be no real fear. •

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It was, in fact, less an interview than an extended opportunity for Banks to detail the “shocking allegations” she makes against parliamentary colleagues in her new memoir, Power Play. Banks looked nervous as she began to describe a working environment where “Mad Men meets House of Cards.” Tingle prompted rather than challenged.

Allegations like these certainly matter, but in the absence of consequences their continued outpouring risks simply becoming dispiriting. Last week’s Four Corners featured another extended airing of grievances by former Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate. “I was thrown under the bus and the bus reversed back over me,” Holgate said as she recalled the prime minister’s sudden attack on her in parliament last October.

When such powerful and influential women present themselves as victims, the message is double-edged. On the one hand — and this is Banks’s and Holgate’s point — it shows they are up against an exceptionally hard-grained, intractable culture of abuse wrought by those more powerful than themselves.

On the other hand, it raises questions about how women in positions of power can manage their options. This is the focus of Ms Represented, a four-part ABC series premiering next Tuesday to mark the centenary of the first time Edith Cowan — the first woman elected to an Australian parliament — spoke in Western Australia’s House of Assembly.

Writer and presenter Annabel Crabb, who sometimes risks trivialisation in her determination to show the lighter side of our political culture, is at her best here: crisp, vivid and ironic. She and director Stamatia Maroupas, with deft work from editors Andrew Hope and Karin Steininger, blend historical narrative with observations by twenty groundbreaking female parliamentarians.

One of their strategies is to get the participants to read the historical narrative to camera, cross-edited between speakers. And so we have Anne Aly, Ros Kelly, Julie Bishop, Linda Burney, Natasha Stott Despoja, Amanda Vanstone, Julia Gillard, Bronwyn Bishop and Penny Wong working as an ensemble to tell the story of how the 1902 Franchise Act was passed.

Aside from the novelty of catching all these speakers quite literally reading from the same page, there’s significant entertainment value in the way they present the material. Rivalling trained actors, they use shifts in tone and pace to underline the absurdities of antiquated political attitudes. Except, of course, such presumptions are now proving to be not so antiquated.

These female voices from across the political spectrum are also in chorus, unscripted this time, on the syndrome of “gender deafness.” It goes something like this: put forward an idea in a meeting, and there is no response — until, a few minutes later, it is repeated by a male colleague as if it were his own, and is thereafter cited with general approval.

In the telling, these experiences come across as social satire rather than victim narrative; the speakers share a wry awareness of their own capacity to manipulate the wilful blindness of ego-driven male colleagues. But there are times when it really is no longer funny, as a succession of recent scandals and crises has shown.

In some of the worst instances, the procedures of the parliament itself are at issue. Sarah Hanson-Young’s account of being sabotaged on the floor of the Senate by Cory Bernardi, who crept up behind her and audibly whispered the names of all the male colleagues he implied she had been intimately involved with, is well supported by video documentation from the chamber. Bernardi was called to order, but it was Hanson-Young who was formally ruled against, for suggesting that he be breathalysed.

What is most striking about Ms Represented is how, time and again, these usually discordant voices converge to present identical narratives and perspectives on issues that really matter, not so much for themselves as individuals trying to make their way in an especially difficult professional environment, but for women in general.

They emphasise the opportunities they have as parliamentarians, and the responsibility they feel. Quick-witted, insightful and determined, and with a directness and honesty rarely evident when they are “on message,” they make entertaining company across the four episodes. “What’s not to like?” as Amanda Vanstone asks at one point.

And yet, over the decades, there has been so much outright vilification, from shocking comments in the 1902 Hansard about the prospect of Aboriginal women in parliament, read out by Linda Burney, to Tony Abbott and his supporters congregating under a placard urging “Ditch the Witch.”

The centenary perspective is an appropriate reminder that a difficult road has been travelled, but also that any sense that the journey is complete is premature. What the series lacks is the perspective of independent MPs, with Cathy McGowan, Jacqui Lambie, Kerryn Phelps, Helen Haines and Zali Steggall all unaccountably missing. Surely an additional episode might be devoted to them? They may well hold the key to a real change in the culture of parliament. •

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In its dramatic setting in The Messiah, the aria is a commentary on the loss of leadership, though in this case the message is that the people are to blame. “We have turned every one to his own way,” runs the next line of the text, drawn from Isaiah. If we the people are in trouble, we may have no one but ourselves to blame, but who are we?

“It’s time to find out,” Annabel Crabb announced later in the evening, introducing Australia Talks, a ninety-minute feature on the results of a survey in which 60,000 people across the country were invited to respond to 600-plus questions about their attitudes, habits and opinions. Co-host Nazeem Hussain declared himself “so pumped to be part of this special event” as cheers went up from the studio audience and a graphic of bouncing coloured balls set the party mood. There would be none of Tingle’s astringency here.

Some of the survey’s findings suggest the mood of the nation is upbeat: 80 per cent of us think it’s the best country in the world, a rise of 10 per cent over the past decade; 80 per cent of us are optimistic about our own futures; 79 per cent of us think we should keep the borders closed until Covid is over. How good is Australia?

And yet, as emerged from a series of live crosses to regional centres, many of the responses were far from happy. Forty per cent of residents in Rockhampton, for example, say they have difficulty making ends meet, and the young are especially hard-pressed. One young woman fights back tears as she says she can’t afford to rent somewhere to live and fears she may never be able to move out of her parents’ place. The trickle-down effect doesn’t work, says a train driver.

Fifty per cent of respondents say that capitalism has failed. Seventy-nine per cent think the gap between rich and poor is too big. Sixty-five per cent think that JobSeeker should be raised. Eighty-one per cent don’t trust corporate executives. As if to reassure viewers that no one was going to get too serious about such matters, live-cross host Nina Oyama did a brief stand-up on the theme of capitalism at a Rockhampton club; then it was back to the studio for some fun facts about our sex lives and personal habits.

No doubt the bubbly atmosphere was a careful programming decision: halfway through a second year of intermittent lockdown and social distancing, perhaps it was fair enough to use the survey as pretext for a show that accentuates togetherness and fun. And it should be acknowledged that its findings are being featured elsewhere, including in snapshots of the data from Casey Briggs on ABC News.

Yet the program came across as over-hyped and confused. Contradictory findings — majority concern about economic inequality versus an overall satisfaction with the state of the nation, for example — were ignored. Glib studio banter risked making light of the obvious distress of some interview subjects.

The announcement of the number one issue on which we all agree (“Da-ra!”… “Are we all pumped?”) led to tougher perspectives. Ninety-eight per cent of us think politicians should resign if they are found to have taken a bribe. Ninety-four per cent think they should resign if they lie to the public. Crabb made an awkward attempt to shift to a more urgent register. “In many ways Australia Talks is a cry for help and for more accountability from politicians,” she said.

Fifty-six per cent of respondents think politicians are often corrupt; 72 per cent think they get away with it. Eighty-eight per cent support a federal corruption watchdog. Barrie Cassidy, appearing in a video segment on the theme of trust in politics, said the public should be pushing for the watchdog. “Make them nervous and that might just change behaviour,” he urged, striking a note of moral seriousness that the program as a whole signally failed to sound.

The appearance of John Howard for the concluding section did nothing to help in this regard. If the responses in the survey are to be taken seriously, it was bizarre to call for a warm welcome to the prime minister who so consequentially traded on fake news about weapons of mass destruction and refugees throwing their children overboard.

Like any such attempt to gauge public opinion, the survey behind the program is open to criticism for its methodology. And we should always be wary of attempts to translate pollsters’ respondents into “us,” or Australians in general. For a more circumspect consideration of who “we” are, viewers can turn to Rachel Griffiths’s three-part ABC series Finding the Archibald, which delves into the hundred-year history of the national portrait prize.

Using the medium of portraiture to focus on how we see ourselves needn’t entail any attempt to come up with firm answers. In fact, Griffiths’s explorations serve to deepen the enigma of identity rather than resolve it. Perhaps there is an analogy with the way a good actor works: Griffiths has no need to indulge in flamboyant vitality in order to draw us into the genuine curiosity she so evidently feels for the work of the painter.

As a motif for the series, she takes on the challenge of finding the one painting that, above all others that have been in contention for the prize, represents the face of the nation. It’s a chimera, of course, but she redeems her quest by making it all about the uncertainties and shifting criteria of judgement.

Here she is helped by curator Natalie Wilson, who has the task of selecting one hundred portraits from some 6000 Archibald finalists for a centenary retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. As we look at some of the paintings Wilson has already identified as key works, social and aesthetic transitions are starkly visible.

W.B. McInnes’s inaugural winning portrait of architect Harold Desbrowe Annear, an image of posed dignity in greys and browns reflecting a deeply conservative white Australia, is set against John Brack’s 1969 pop art rendition of Dame Edna Everage. With its gaudy colour palette and satirical attitude, Griffiths suggests, Brack’s is the first portrait that was really about celebrity.

The search for the one painting involves moving through a forest of exploding criteria. As a form of social enquiry, it’s a scoping exercise with requirements that echo those of a good demographic survey. Painters and their subjects must be considered across ethnicity, gender, age, location and employment.

And then there is the range of styles and approaches taken by the painters, many of whom have sought to flout the conventions of portraiture and test the adjudicators. Ultimately, the work must itself be the determinant. “You have to look and look and look and look,” advises Ben Quilty, who has recent experience on the judging panel. “A good portrait is way, way more than a likeness.”

If we, like sheep, have gone astray, it may indeed be time to take a good look at ourselves. One hundred years of the Archibald, with all its controversies, could test our preconceptions about what we will see. •

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Dexys were a band from the English midlands pretending to be Irish (Rowland’s parents really were Irish), and “Come On Eileen,” replete with fiddle, banjo, tin whistle, accordion and lots of “toora loo rye ay,” took them to number one in Britain, the United States, Australia and half a dozen other countries. Although they were somewhat more than one-hit wonders (their version of Van Morrison’s “Jacky Wilson Said” reinforced the impression they might be from Ireland), it is “Come On Eileen” for which they are best remembered, and that’s partly because it’s one of those earworms. In spite of its odd structure, its abrupt and unpredictable changes of tempo and key, the song lodges in the memory.

When Kristen Dunphy, creator of the eight-part ABC television drama Wakefield, was casting around for a tune to put in the head of her central character, Nik Katira (Rudi Dharmalingam), she googled “earworm” and up popped “Come On Eileen.” It was the perfect song, not only because of its references to the act of listening, the power of music and Johnnie Ray’s emotional vulnerability, nor even for Rowland’s oddly prescient line at the end of the second verse, “I’ll hum this tune forever!” No, it was perfect because, being an authentic earworm, it stuck in the audience’s head, too. As viewers of this series, we find ourselves participating in a unique manner; Nik’s problem becomes ours, following us into the shower, on to the bus, into our workplaces.

Nik’s workplace is a psychiatric hospital at the top of a cliff in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, where he is a nurse. The “song stickage” (a real term) that he experiences is more than just an irritation; it also represents a repressed childhood memory. As Wakefield moves from episode to episode, we learn about the lives of its characters — the doctors and nurses, the patients (the new mother, the businessman, the musician) — but the source of Nik’s trauma remains hidden until the last episode, hinted at by the persistence of “Come On Eileen” and the sound of tap shoes. In his childhood, we learn, Nik was a tap dancer, and these taps are almost as recurrent a feature of the soundtrack as the infernal earworm.

Wakefield’s composers are Caitlin Yeo and Maria Alfonsine, the latter attached to the project from the outset. Unusually for TV drama, Alfonsine was in some of the early planning meetings, and a good thing too, because this is not the sort of show for which a composer can be brought in late in the piece and given the job of making the sad bits sadder and the funny bits funnier. Music is central to the story.

The Dexys song is put through endless variations. It is strummed on a guitar by one of Nik’s patients, turns up as a gospel number and, in an already famous scene at the end of the first episode, becomes a tap routine on a station platform performed by a chorus line of waiting passengers. But away from these set pieces, it is the fragmentation of the song — and of the sound of tap shoes — that insinuates itself into the drama most effectively.

Yeo and Alfonsine have provided Wakefield with plenty of conventional music to establish mood and underline character — conventional, that is, in the way it’s used — and I’m told a soundtrack album is under consideration. This would mean that music like the evocative opening theme, which brings together a viola and the voice of Hindustani singer Rucha Lange, will have an existence separate from the TV series. And so it should. In the context of the show, the music suggests both Nik’s fragile state of mind and his Indian family background. But without the pictures, it’s free to mean whatever the listener wants it to mean.

Still, it’s the music in Wakefield that probably won’t make it on to a soundtrack album that is the most remarkable. The composers isolated tiny melodic cells in the Dexys song and wove them into new musical strands, but tellingly, these fragments are also allowed to stand on their own. Some of the musical cues in Wakefield are one or two seconds long; some are at the threshold of audibility. Was that music? Was that “Come On Eileen” that just flashed by? Was that a tap shoe? The effect is sometimes comic, sometimes unsettling, often both, and at moments such as these it is impossible to separate the composers’ work from that of the sound designer, Sam Petty, and sound editor, Abigail Sie. But then that’s frequently true of music in film and television when it’s used well.

Music is the key both to Wakefield’s mystery and to the telling of its story, and it also provides a quietly satisfying ending. Onscreen, songs are frequently called upon to do the work of a lazy scriptwriter, telling us what to think, what to feel. Not here. For one thing, the scripts (by Dunphy, Sam Meikle, Cathy Strickland and Joan Sauers) need no saving. For another, because musical fragmentation has brought us to the climax of the story, only a complete song will round it out.

So in the final scene, the music, no longer in our heads or on the soundtrack, comes out of the mouth of one of the main characters, Kareena (Geraldine Hakewill), who sings Measure’s “Begin Again.” And because she isn’t miming, but really singing, it’s possible to have her start the song unaccompanied, giving it an air of magical spontaneity. The song’s phrases, connected in the original version by keyboard fills, are now separated by silences. Kareena/Hakewill sings as a mother might sing at her child’s bedside. And when, at length, a keyboard arrives to help her join the dots of her vocal line, something yet more magical occurs. The actor looks up, turns to the camera and sings to us. It’s Wakefield’s final moment of audience participation, dispelling, as it were, the earworm and silencing the tap shoes. •

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The landmark British series Broadchurch, all three seasons of which are available on the SBS “Best of the Brits” menu, established a new strain with its exploration of the complex dynamics of extended families in scenic locations. Crime takes on the qualities of tragedy as local residents are drawn into an increasingly sinister sequence of events.

David Tennant, who took a lead role in Broadchurch, heads the cast of a new miniseries with similar generic elements. Deadwater Fell (SBS On Demand), also featured among the Best of the Brits, is set in a historic village surrounded by hill country west of Glasgow. With its winding lanes running down towards the coast, this might be the setting for a northern version of Doc Martin: surely a broken leg or undiagnosed diabetes is the worst that can happen? But the title sequence, intercutting images of the spring-green landscape with shots of a forensic team combing through a burnt-out house, warns of something more.

Episode one opens by establishing a buoyant mood. A primary school painting class is interrupted when parents arrive to shepherd the children into the street to cheer on village contestants in a cycle race. Celebrations continue into the evening, with a barn dance to the accompaniment of a cèilidh band; then family groups talk quietly as they walk home through the narrow streets, small children hoisted on the shoulders of parents.

The fire comes later that night. Desperate attempts are made to rescue the wife and children of the local doctor, but a shift to slow motion when emergency vehicles arrive signals they are too late to prevent the worst. It all looks like a horrible accident, one of those local tragedies that is remembered across generations.

Tennant plays the bereaved father who becomes the prime suspect. The actor’s prehistory intensifies the ambiguities of his performance, which at times evokes the dour but sternly principled Broadchurch detective, but also, under pressure, recalls the dead eyes and febrile energy of his role as serial killer Dennis Nilsen in last year’s Des.

As the story closes in around its central character, Western Scotland’s great outdoors is left on hold and viewers are drawn into scenes that belong more to the claustrophobic world of the American series Mindhunter. We seem to be back in the generic mainstream of the crime thriller, where the story is not, after all, about spirit of place but only about who among the dramatis personae is the real bad seed.

One of the challenges of this subgenre is finding an effective balance between scenography and the interiority of a psychological crime story embedded in confined networks of family and community. Stories might be born of places, but it takes deep imaginative commitment to create a strong dramatic weave of places, people and events. And while a stunning location is a lure in itself, some series are over-dependent on cinematography to provide atmosphere and expansive vision to a less-then-compelling narrative.

In Smother (ABC iView), set in the wild Burren region of Ireland’s County Clare, Dervla Kirwan plays the matriarch in a household ridden with secrets, lies and betrayals. Again, suspicions grow around what appears to be a fatal accident in a narrative that offers a blend of crime thriller and family tragedy.

When families break and reform in an isolated community, faultlines run through children’s lives. Parenting under stress can become toxic, and resurgent crises are inevitable. But interpersonal crises, however explosive, are not always the most effective ingredients for dramatic tension. As Smother progresses, one emotionally overblown scene follows another.

Writer Kate O’Riordan is known for her commitment to local authenticity, but in this series the stunning coastal landscapes come to seem oddly disconnected from the domestic psychodrama. Perhaps television producers should be more wary of assuming that location, location, location is a winning formula.

Or perhaps it is more a matter of whether and how location is integral to the drama. The new HBO series Mare of Easttown (Foxtel and Binge) is deservedly winning plaudits, both for Kate Winslet’s performance in the title role and for its unflagging realism. Here, there is no disparity between spirit of place and the brutality of events.

At the start of episode one, the camera pans across a graveyard in the cold light of dawn and then travels along one of the town’s streets. A light goes on in an upstairs window and the scene cuts to the interior, where local detective Mare Sheehan is woken by a call. This seamless transition signals that here interiors are as important to the visual narrative as the scenery outside.

Cinematographer Ben Richardson admits to having been concerned about scope and scale in the small-town setting. He collaborated with production designer Keith Cunningham to prepare a range of real locations to “make it all about the nuance and the detail and the scope of these homes, these little spaces.” At first glance, the enclosed spaces are unprepossessing: cluttered surfaces, dated wallpaper, worn furniture. Lace curtains suppress the daylight. Key encounters take place in kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms, a pet shop, the pub, the local basketball club and, of course, the police station.

Easttown is a battlers’ neighbourhood. People stay there because they can’t afford to move and because they are bound by family ties. As in any community defined by the co-dependencies of economic constraint, the young are frustrated. They take drugs, get into fights, and have casual sexual encounters with long-term consequences.

Because so many children are born to parents too young to care for them, three-generation and even four-generation households are common. Mare lives with her mother, a daughter and the four-year-old child of a son who committed suicide. Mare herself — hard-bitten, short-tempered and driven — is the most difficult personality in the family, though her mother (Jean Smart) comes a close second.

They spar and jibe incessantly, but there’s as much humour as rancour in their exchanges. Sitting in the kitchen drinking beer and eating cheetohs from the pack, foot hoisted on the table with a bag of frozen food applied to a recently sprained ankle, Mare seems to derive perverse relaxation from the battle of wits. For all their mutual provocations, these two women are on the same wavelength, and the bonds between them prove strong in a crisis.

Mare’s loss of her son, it transpires, is a case of the past repeating itself: her father committed suicide when she was thirteen. She is numbed by tragedy, yet there’s enough fire in her to fuel a fierce devotion to the surrogate parenting of her grandson and the police work that defends the neighbourhood.

Here, crime is always someone’s tragedy. Grief spreads through families as they are inevitably drawn into the events Mare must investigate. For all her self-effacing toughness, it’s clear she feels the pain at every turn, and is prone to break police rules when she sees a way of staving off potential disaster. The pressure of seeing what’s coming before anyone else is part of the burden, and an effective suspense device for the series.

Winslet embodies this character with a stolid, foursquare presence that is riveting in every scene, so much so that it’s easy to overlook other performances in the extensive cast. Veteran Jean Smart holds her own, and there is some especially effective rapport with Guy Pearce, Winslet’s co-star in Mildred Pierce, who plays a visiting teacher of creative writing. With that specialisation, he’s so obviously out of place in Easttown that you have to wonder what he’s really up to. But this is a story that constantly prompts second-guessing, which is an essential part of its appeal. •

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This might be a classic high school science lesson, the student guided to learn from observation, but there’s something not quite right about Phillips’s kindly pedagogical manner. She might almost be talking to a child, yet the sixteen-year-old student — who admittedly looks much younger — already has a sophisticated understanding of the causes and effects of climate change.

Thunberg’s 2019 journey “the whole way round the world the wrong way” is documented in a new three-part BBC series coinciding with the virtual summit on emissions control hosted by US president Joe Biden on Earth Day, 22 April. Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World shows the young campaigner combining a high-profile speaking tour with excursions into areas where devastating consequences are all too evident.

In Davos to address the January 2020 World Economic Forum, she takes a side trip up the Piz Cengalo to learn what prompted the massive rockfall that cascaded though the village of Bondo three years earlier. It has to do with that three-degree difference in the temperature of the snow cover, she discovers: the snow is trapping the heat in the ground, causing permafrost to melt and water to flow through fissures in the rock, destabilising the cliff face.

As she moves from one region to another, such chains of consequence fascinate Thunberg. She travels by sleigh into the northernmost reaches of Sweden to talk to indigenous Sámi herders on the edge of the Arctic Circle about the loss of the reindeer herds central to their economy. Lichen, the major component of the reindeers’ natural diet, grows under the snow, and in normal conditions they can sniff it out and dig it up. But when rain falls instead of snow, ice sheets form over the ground and the animals can’t break through.

Scenes from Thunberg’s odyssey are intercut with snatches of her public speeches and extracts from a studio interview. After spending years of her childhood unable to speak to anyone outside her family, her economy of communication seems to have paid off: she has the art of making a clear statement every time she opens her mouth. Seated on a stool in a loose checked shirt with her ever-present water bottle in hand, she makes one crystal clear pronouncement after another.

“Right now we don’t speak the same language as the planet,” she says, and the series shows her unique capacity to heighten awareness of what that means. In the Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies, she talks to a biologist about the loss of vast tracts of pine forest. The mountain pine beetle, a species once controlled by periods of deep frost, is running rampant, its eggs feeding on the tissue inside tree trunks that should be carrying nutrients up through the branches.

As a television guide to such phenomena, Thunberg invites comparison with David Attenborough: the sage and the wise child, both deeply committed observers of the natural world who can ignore the distractions of everyday life and focus on larger realities. Their meeting, at the end of the second episode, also highlights the polarities: Attenborough, the veteran career broadcaster who has clocked up more hours of screen presence than almost anyone else in the business, is perhaps the only person who can offer her genuine reassurance as she battles fierce misgivings after what she feels was a debacle at Davos.

For Thunberg, the meetings with celebrities and world leaders are just part of the job she’s given herself, but the encounter with Attenborough has a special pathos. Both have looked into the abyss, confronting the scenes of devastation that will multiply if climate change is left unchecked, but where Attenborough carries the awareness with the gravitas of long experience, Thunberg seems one step away from panic.

Addressing public forums with thousands of delegates, she maintains a steady composure, her laser-like speeches cutting through the political rhetoric. Alone in the interview room, though, her voice shakes and she seems on the verge of breaking down. She tells her fellow students that “it falls to us to be the adults in the room,” but reveals a child’s unguarded immediacy. Contemplating the damage and distress she has witnessed, she has no filter, and is perplexed at how people can insulate themselves psychologically from such crises.

Her father, Svante Thunberg, who speaks to camera through the series, provides some background. By the time Greta left primary school she knew as much about the climate change research as most world leaders. But when she first delved into the facts at the age of eleven, she became depressed and unable to speak to anyone outside her immediate family. A sustained phase of anorexia set in. When she was preparing to make her first public speech, he said, he was afraid she would be unable to cope. “She’s not strong.”

Svante is an unsung hero of the story — pragmatic, patient, concerned and seemingly always there for his daughter, he accompanied her wherever she went until she turned seventeen in early 2020. His presence in the documentary is one of the many ways it calls the bluff on critics who claim she is a puppet figure managed by publicity-hungry parents.

Thunberg may be psychologically fragile in some respects, but as a public figure she is made of pure steel, a match for political leaders of all stamps, whether they attack her or, like Angela Merkel, invite her in to be patronised. She knows their strategies and answers the rhetoric with hard figures on emissions, rising temperatures and fossil fuel subsidies.

“For reasons I don’t understand, people listen when I talk,” she says to camera from her stool in the interview room. “You are listening to me right now. But I don’t want that.” She wants us to listen to the science as she has been discovering it across Europe and America. China was to be her next destination, but the pandemic proved that even Thunberg’s determination can be blocked by circumstance.

With Australia’s prime minister proving one of the most recalcitrant national leaders at the Biden summit, and recently released figures showing that subsidies worth $10.3 billion were given to Australia’s fossil fuel industry over the past year, viewers might wish she was headed this way. And that very thought might shame us into asking ourselves why the responsibility for bringing about change should rest on the shoulders of a teenager who demonstrates that speaking truth to power is more than an empty cliché. •

The post What does it take? appeared first on Inside Story.

On renewed acquaintance — season one is currently available on SBS — the qualities that spawned a buoyant industry in Scandinavian television are strikingly evident: its sweeping cinematography, the unrelenting dramatic build-up, the cast who form a finely tuned ensemble. Where British series usually depend on a couple of star actors, here every performance is riveting. Part of the secret is their strong theatrical tradition, whose defining influences are the dark poetic visions of Ibsen and Strindberg.

Amid the arctic landscapes of more recent series, Fortitude and Trapped, an ominous view of human nature escalated into quasi-surrealist horrors that engulfed whole communities. But now two new miniseries from Denmark, The Investigation and Cry Wolf, move in the opposite direction, with a stringent commitment to social realism and a focus on how sinister dimensions emerge in everyday life, to be grappled with and contained. Both are streaming on SBS.

Søren Malling, who played the brash young detective trying to rival Sarah Lund in The Killing, heads the team in The Investigation as a senior officer subdued by long experience in the school of hard knocks. The story, based on actual events in 2017, begins with a court case gone wrong. The police prosecutor loses on a technicality, and a murder suspect is acquitted. It’s a devastating verdict for Jens Møller (Malling), who conducted the investigation, and for the victim’s family, whose distress he witnesses. But it’s in the nature of the job, and with scores of such cases behind him, Møller knows better than to ever be confident of a desired courtroom outcome.

For prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen (Pilou Asbæk), younger and less mellowed, it’s an experience not to be repeated. When another murder takes place, one that seems to foreshadow more atrocities, he maintains close contact with Møller’s team (something permitted under Danish law) and refuses to accept the brief until the evidence is safe against legal loopholes.

The usual elements of crime drama are absent; all the dramatic tension arises from the tussle over technicalities. The spectacular aspects of the murder, which involves the decapitation and dismemberment of journalist Kim Wall aboard a private submarine, are not exploited. The state of the corpse is reported in discussions between Møller and the pathologist, but there are no shots of grisly procedures in the morgue. Interviews with the prime suspect, whose guilt is never in doubt, focus entirely on the legal implications of his testimony. As series creator Tobias Lindholm has said, “the story was simply not about him.”

The idea of a dramatic approach arose from conversations Lindholm had with Møller, whose account focused on the extraordinary work done by marine search teams and on the fortitude of Wall’s parents. It’s always hard to make the reaction of the victim’s parents a compelling element in a crime drama. They have little to do but contain their grief as best they can and wait for justice. Lindholm’s determination to give them some dramatic traction pays off through the casting of Pernilla August and Rolf Lassgård, both distinguished theatre actors who know how to establish a presence with minimal action and dialogue. Their real-life models, Ingrid and Joachim Wall, both journalists who wrote their own account of their daughter’s loss, were involved in the creation of the series, and insisted on the family dog Iso appearing as herself.

Other key figures in the investigation also find themselves enduring an enforced passivity. This portrayal of impasse may run counter to the conventions of crime fiction, but the tension can if anything be more compelling than the manufactured excitement of detective stories that involve sudden call-outs in the small hours, shootouts, showdowns and chases. When Møller’s family dinner is interrupted by a phone call, it is simply news of yet another blocked avenue. Asbæk, a major star since his appearance as a swashbuckling villain in Game of Thrones, here takes on a role at the opposite end of the spectrum — formal, reserved and relentlessly sceptical.

This apparently perverse approach to creating suspense pays off brilliantly by exploiting the capacity of the best actors to hold attention with the most sparing words and gestures. As a counterpoint, the marine explorations in the Oresund Strait are recreated in full, with involvement from the original diving team and the frigate used to raise the real submarine.

Cry Wolf offers another view of the seasoned professional navigating the stresses of an investigation in which the evidence just refuses to stack up. It is not based on an actual case, but rather one that is typical.

When an essay by a fourteen-year-old girl detailing violent abuse by her stepfather is brought to the attention of social services, it lands on the desk of Lars Madsen, an overweight and overburdened senior case officer. Madsen (Bjarne Henriksen) wearily slides the document to the front of his desk, but as he reads, the quality of his attention changes.

Henriksen, another veteran from The Killing, is one of those actors who can hold your interest while he reads a document. More than that, he’ll have you on the edge of your seat. Evidently the child’s story contains graphic material, but the matter of who did what to whom, and when, is not the issue here. Rather, Madsen has to get to the truth of an ongoing situation, led by the testimony of a juvenile witness with a wayward imagination. Relying partly on trained observation and, in the eyes of his supervisor Mona Michelsen (Lila Nobel), rather too much on instinct, he orders the immediate removal of the girl and her brother.

As the story evolves, distress mounts on all sides. Clearly both Holly (Flora Ofelia Hofman Lindahl) and her younger brother Theo (Noah Storm Otto) are traumatised. Socially withdrawn, neither is doing well at school, and Theo has a recent injury to his arm. Yet their parents appear genuinely dumbfounded by the sudden accusation. Once the children are placed in foster care, their mother (Christine Albeck Børge) must gain permission from officious care workers even to talk to them. Theo, acutely distressed, is obsessed with going home. All this places immense pressure on Madsen as he confronts increasing signs of Holly’s unreliability.

Who is telling the truth? It’s one of the oldest and most fraught questions in human relationships. And when legal and institutional processes are brought in to adjudicate, their terms of engagement are critical. In the Danish system, the odds are stacked heavily against the parents, which only increases the pressure on Madsen. If he makes the wrong call, lives will be ruined and it will be on his head.

From a dramatic point of view, everything depends on a narrative structure that interweaves contrary signs and ramps up the tension with telling details. Showrunner Maja Jul Larsen, one of the lead writers for the hit series Borgen, has a flair for showing how micro-elements of human behaviour can amplify the dynamics of a situation, with widespread fallout. The casting — especially that of the two children, who carry the storyline — is perfectly judged.

With so many series on offer, it’s easy to be lured by those that promise obvious forms of suspense and excitement. An invitation to venture into the changing shades of everyday darkness is easy to resist, and yet making the gamble can be a deeply revealing process. With guidance from the best kinds of human intelligence, it’s how the light gets in. •

The post How the light gets in appeared first on Inside Story.

Over here, on ABC’s Planet America, hosts John Barron and Chas Licciardello introduced their inauguration special with no signs of accelerated ageing. The mood was almost jocular as Barron recounted the 6 January assault on the Capitol, though due emphasis was given to its most disturbing aspects. Licciardello followed up with some derisive comments on Republicans’ responses to the mayhem.

They were not omitting the worst of what had transpired in the previous two weeks so much as failing to communicate the gravity of the situation. “Pretty serious stuff there,” Barron remarked airily, following a clip of the clerk from the House of Representatives reading the second impeachment finding against Donald J. Trump on the charge of “incitement to insurrection.” Licciardello quoted from a trenchant statement by Republican senator Liz Cheney, then quipped that, regardless of what happens at Trump’s Senate trial, “someone is going to get punished. And that’s Liz Cheney.”

Like many of the leading television commentators in America, Licciardello has a background in comedy. But distanced from the emotional force of the crisis, he seemed to lack the instinct to recognise that this is not a time for quips. In a powerful monologue delivered on the evening of 6 January, Seth Myers began by stating baldly that jokes were off the menu. After a day “filled with horrifying scenes of surreal and armed insurrection… images that should be seared into our collective consciousness for the rest of our lives,” he said, it was important to be “as plain-spoken and as clear-eyed as possible.”

Something critically important is at issue here. For those in the midst of it, the crisis in American democracy amounts to a moral emergency. With the confusions of judgement that lead to mob violence compounded by the moral contortions of Trump’s congressional supporters, disseminated at length on Fox News and other right-wing channels, the entire nation risks losing its moorings in the bedrock of sanity. And when sanity is on the line, plain speaking is vital. Parody and satire are redundant; irony doesn’t work. Humour, that most ancient and lethal of political weapons, must be laid aside.

Myers chose his words as if they were stepping stones across quicksand. Democracy, he said, requires “vigilant stewardship,” and at this harrowing moment its survival depends upon the “sedition caucus” in the Republican Party being shamed and disgraced. “No one who aided and abetted today’s actions should be allowed to serve in a democracy they so clearly detest.”

In the aftermath, it is all about consequences, and where Myers articulated the need for prosecution as both urgent and imperative, Planet America focused on the ifs and buts. Former Trump security advisor John Bolton, a guest on the program, gave the view that Trump’s incitements had had an “unfortunate effect” on his supporters and that overall his conduct had done “considerable harm.” The leadership of the Republican Party “did not do an adequate job” in refuting the election fraud claims. Although the former president’s actions were “unacceptable,” Bolton did not see a Senate trial as either constitutionally viable or good for the country. Better, he said, to ignore Trump, which for Trump himself would be the worst punishment.

Although the tone of the interview was reasonable, I watched it with growing unease. A moral emergency is a real phenomenon, and raises some counterintuitive challenges, one of which is the need to recognise that there is such a thing as dangerous understatement. Moral compromise can compound a situation in which the political bastions of the nation have been compromised. Hence Myers’s insistence on the severest legal consequences.

On 29 January, when some semblance of order had been established by the first week of the Biden presidency, the matter of consequences was front and centre on American news channels. Rachel Maddow commenced her program by reading parts of a letter from 270 congressional staffers. Their collective voice came through loud and clear.

“Our workplace was attacked by a violent mob… who charged into the building with body armor and weapons,” they wrote. For hours they were in fear for their lives, hiding under desks or barricaded in offices. Among those killed was a police officer, “one of our co-workers who guards and greets us every day,” who was beaten to death. Some of those who incited the violence were people they still passed every day in the hallway. Urging all senators to convict the former president, the letter set out an equation: the gravity of the consequences for the nation are in inverse relationship to the gravity of the consequences faced by Trump and his enablers.

Someone who knows there is no escape from this equation is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Selensky, interviewed for Axios by Australian journalist Jonathan Swan. A few hours before Maddow went to air with the letter from congressional staff, Swan spoke to Nicolle Wallace, host of MSNBC’s White House, about Selensky’s reaction to the evolving situation in America. “It’s a reminder that what happened echoes well beyond American shores,” said Swan. “This is not theoretical. Ukraine is on the edge, defending a struggling democracy against Putin, and he [Selensky] is seeing this horrific sight. It’s a really troubling conversation that we had, a really strong reminder that the world is watching here.”

As part of the watching world, Australia has a significant role to play in the formation of perspectives. Is this just another political drama from wacky old Planet America? Or is it a defining crisis in an increasingly stressed world order? “What lessons will America learn from this deep rupture to its soul?” asked presenter Sarah Ferguson on Monday night’s Four Corners.

The program provided a narrative reconstruction of events on 6 January, drawing on footage from a wide range of sources to assemble a chronological account of the insurrection. Close-up views of what happened during the assault on the Capitol were shot on phones in the midst of a crowd whose chaotic surges caused strange angles and jolts. While much of the material was available from prior compilations, the editors have created what may be the clearest and most graphic overview to date.

Interviews with those caught up in the maelstrom were concerned with the immediate experience rather than analytical background. The distress on the faces of witnesses was in stark contrast to the overweening confidence of those addressing the rally beforehand and those who led the crowd through the grand entrance hall, shouting in triumph.

An absence of challenging questions has led to some criticism from viewers, especially in the case of Proud Boys spokesman Enrique Tarrio. Tarrio is an ambiguous figure, an FBI informer according to some reports, and his absence on 6 January because of an arrest two days earlier looks like convenient timing.

Among those unhappy with his inclusion in the program was Tim Soutphommasane, who tweeted, “You wouldn’t give al Qaeda a platform, so why would you give one to white supremacists and fascists?” It’s an important caution, but this wasn’t exactly a platform, and Tarrio was fairly evasive, though he made one disturbing statement. “There’s a saying that a federal prosecutor can prosecute a ham sandwich. Right? If they wanted to. But I think they’re going to have a very, very hard time with me. I got full faith in it.”

It’s a faith evidently shared by Trump himself, and a few notorious Republican members of Congress. If it proves well founded, American democracy is terminally fractured. •

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Major television producers were prepared. Over the past few months Netflix has screened a range of extravagant period dramas, fortuitously completed before pandemic restrictions kicked in. The most recent, and most spectacular, is Bridgerton, released just in time for Christmas. American Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon summed it up: “Everyone in the world watched it and it exploded.” Perhaps viewers weary of the moral squalor of the presidential meltdown were especially in need of escapist romance.

Based on a sequence of novels by American writer Julia Quinn, Bridgerton is, among other things, a historical fantasy about the England of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, is the Darcy figure — a single man in possession of a good fortune and surely in want of a wife, yet perversely determined to flout the “universally acknowledged truth” with which Austen famously commences her novel.

Basset’s resolve is put to the test by Daphne Bridgerton, belle of the season, who finds herself the target of some mischief from the news media of the time, in the form of a gossip sheet authored by one Lady Whistledown, whose real identity is spiritedly investigated by Daphne’s sisters. Further troubles arise from the rivalry between the Bridgerton and Featherington households, both of them matriarchal and burdened with too many daughters.

The ingredients seem promising enough, if counterfeit Jane Austen is to your taste. As to the question of why anyone would want to attempt a pseudo version of the classic novel, it certainly creates the opportunity to add missing elements like sex, feminism, royalty and preposterously extravagant costumes, all of which can be amplified to cater to twenty-first-century tastes and preoccupations.

Anachronisms are inevitable, and there are plenty here to concern the people Quinn refers to as “the accuracy police.” A debutante is subjected to the ordeal of tight-lacing, regardless of the fact that Regency gowns had no waistline — as is evident when she appears fully attired in the next scene. The assertive Lady Featherington dresses her daughters in intense yellows and pinks more in tune with the Mary Quant era than the aesthetics of Regency London. Does it matter? The gauge is dramatic coherence rather than historical authenticity, though a certain level of authenticity is required to make the fictional world convincing.

By that measure, with assistance from an army of specialist coaches and advisers, showrunner Chris Van Dusen has largely succeeded. The series hits its stride early on when debutantes are presented to the Queen at Hampton Court. The scale and formality of the courtroom are nicely counterpointed with small moments in which the participants rise, or fail to rise, to the occasion. The Queen presides, slumped on her throne in a bad wig and a gown several decades out of date, but with an eye that misses nothing. Commentary from Lady Whistledown is delivered in voice-over, read by Julie Andrews.

Queen Charlotte is played by Guyanese-British actress Golda Rosheuvel, whose theatrical experience is evident as she manipulates codes of deportment to create unsettling shifts in expectation among the royal watchers. Van Dusen says he was influenced by historical accounts claiming that Charlotte’s Portuguese descent made her Britain’s first mixed-race monarch. This was factored into the producers’ decision to opt for what’s known as colour-blind casting — actors chosen entirely on performance qualities, regardless of ethnicity.

In this case, though, the term is misleading. A high degree of conscious selection has been exercised in deciding which roles to cast with non-white actors, and the racial differences implicitly underscore dynastic rivalries and social tensions. When Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), a diminutive English rose, clashes with the dark and rakish Basset (Regé-Jean Page) at a dinner party, echoes of Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are overlaid with more contemporary resonances of cultural difference. The interplay between the two is beautifully judged.

Like the dour Queen Charlotte, though, I found that Bridgerton’s charm palled after a while. I’d no sooner binge-watch this series than eat multiple slices of pavlova. For more grit and realism, the vogue for Freudian crime stories continues elsewhere on Netflix with Freud and season two of The Alienist, and on SBS with Vienna Blood.

All three series are set in the Belle Époque, an era that, besides affording prime opportunities for the costume designer, is rich terrain for gruesome and erotic plotlines. The stories play on the idea of Freudian analysis as a breakthrough form of detective work analogous to that of Sherlock Holmes. Where more recent crime dramas portray the split between the grim urgencies of police work and the everyday world of home and family, these historical evocations explore a larger division as the investigators move between the glittering halls of high society and an underworld where horrors of the most lurid kind are encountered.

As a subgenre of crime, the model depends on balancing these alternative realities effectively. The Belle Époque itself becomes a Freudian expression of the psyche, with the ego as a glamorous presence in the centre, torn between social conventions and dangerous compulsions arising from hidden depths.

The Austrian series Freud gets the balance wrong, plunging hook line and sinker into a morass of traumatic fantasy. It’s not the first attempt to exploit the idea that the young Freud was a dynamic avant-garde figure; David Suchet nailed that interpretation in a 1984 series for the BBC. Here he is portrayed as a psychological adventurer in the grip of a cocaine addiction that afflicts him with terrifying hallucinations. He spends evenings at seances and days at the asylum surrounded by screaming psychotics. As for the plot, I’m afraid it escaped me entirely after the second episode.

Far more cogent is Vienna Blood, an English-language series based on a set of novels by clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. The analyst/detective here is Max Liebermann, an English student of Freud, who associates the pioneering psychoanalyst’s lectures on the unconscious with “a shadow realm the city is determined to hide.” He attaches himself to a police inspector investigating the murder of a young woman who has been holding seances in her apartment.

Nothing for mere effect: Jessica De Gouw and Matthew Beard in Vienna Blood. Petro Domenigg/Endor Productions/MR Film

Matthew Beard plays Liebermann as a quietly spoken youth with a natural authority beyond his years. His poise is unshaken by the horrors of the murder scene, the anxieties of his conservative Jewish parents or the remarks of his elegant fiancée Clara (Luise von Finckh), who exercises her own form of challenging insight. Inspector Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer), initially rankled by Liebermann’s arrogance, comes to see that the assurance is an asset, especially when he himself comes under pressure from his superiors in the police department. They make a good duo — a refreshing change from the Holmes/Watson prototypes, with subtler opportunities for collaborative learning.

One of the secrets of any effective urban crime series is to give the city itself a dominant role, and this series has the advantage of being filmed in Vienna, so that the portrayal of Viennese life in those years extends well beyond generic images. Social events are evoked highly specifically: Liebermann takes Clara to the opening of a Klimt exhibition, to a Mahler concert, and on an afternoon tour of the Natural History Museum. There is genuine historical intelligence in all aspects of the scenography and production design. Everything is done for dramatic cogency, nothing for mere effect.

The same may be said for The Alienist. Caleb Carr, author of the original novels, brought specialist knowledge of military history and foreign affairs to his stories of the underworld in fin de siècle New York, and the television adaptation observes the same stern relationship to facts.

The production team went to great lengths to create what director Jakob Verbruggen describes as “a visual time machine,” making minimal use of CGI. A large budget from TNT/Paramount enabled the construction of extensive replicas of tenement streets in a vast studio backlot in Budapest. Night-time street scenes are shot using ambient light sources — gas lamps, braziers, torches — to sharpen the contrast with luminous interiors where the fashionable world is on display.

While there is some acknowledged indulgence in the opulent range of costumes, they are superbly designed and made. Dakota Fanning as Sara Howard, the first female employee of the New York Police Department, seems to have a new outfit for every scene, each of them stylish enough to warrant a magazine cover. The sight of her pursuing a killer through underground labyrinths in a full-length gown and cropped jacket serves to accentuate the collision of worlds.

But authenticity means more than getting the sets and costumes right. The worst offences in many historical series — including Bridgerton and The Crown — are not in details of setting and circumstance, but in language. Use of anachronistic phrases and vocabulary can signal a failure, or even a stubborn refusal, to observe fundamental differences in social ethos. I noticed almost no lapses of this kind in either season of The Alienist.

Howard as a crusading figure is not seen through the lens of twenty-first-century feminism. Her commitment to establishing an independent detective agency and her involvement in campaigning for women’s legal rights are entirely convincing as phenomena of the times. Fanning’s performance is restrained and austere, but there’s a sense of turbulent emotional life held in check.

The Freudian member of the trio of detectives is Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl), who is called in at the start of season one by a young Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty), recently appointed police commissioner, to assist in the investigation of an extravagantly gruesome murder. John Schuyler Moore (Luke Evans), the third member, is a society figure whose work as an illustrator for the New York Times does little to prepare him for the task of sketching imaginatively mutilated corpses.

It’s easy to dismiss historical drama as a form of escapism, centred on glamorous characters in opulent circumstances when real life for most people at these times was nasty, brutish and short. Less judgementally, pre-twentieth-century settings provide opportunities to create a larger sense of story. More mysteries are to be encountered in a world without electric lighting, motorised transport or remote communications, and more radical shifts in human destiny to be experienced in societies with marked social strata. And for viewers in the grip of pandemic doldrums, they can serve as a reminder that the powerful and unpredictable chemistry of social change may soon come back into play. •

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Not that they were failures for which blame could always be attributed. The limits of human vision and agency must be confronted in any disaster, and Black Summer, the first episode of the year, presented the confrontation as a very immediate ordeal, terrifying to witness even in its aftermath. The program was introduced by Hamish Macdonald, who was himself caught up in the unfolding catastrophe in Cobargo on the NSW south coast, and footage was provided by people struggling to get their bearings in the midst of the inferno. With sparks flying from all directions as the fire front approached in the opening scene, a voice-over at least provided reassurance that we were in the presence of a survivor: “The sky was changing colour… It just got darker and darker and darker.”

“There are known unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “and there are also unknown unknowns.” The fires were a known unknown. Rural fire brigades knew that conditions were stacking up for a worst-case scenario; fire chiefs issued dire warnings to the government. But no one could know how, when or where the emergency would present itself. When outbreaks began to multiply, news commentators spoke of “uncharted territory.” As for dealing with the human aspects of the tragedy, Shane Fitzsimmons, head of the NSW Rural Fire Service, put it best: “there’s no rule book, no script, no guide.”

The fire itself was a demon of unpredictability, changing course, creating its own weather, eliminating so many features of the natural world that people trying to flee couldn’t see or hear anything else. Vehicles were driven in conditions of near-zero visibility; a fallen tree across the road could prove fatal.

Twenty-twenty vision is a luxury we don’t always have, and having to do without anything resembling it was one of the lessons of the bushfires. “It’s going to be a turning point for everyone in Australia and a lot of people worldwide as well,” said a Kangaroo Island survivor in the closing moments of the program.

If that’s the case, we have yet to reckon with it. Hard Winter, a follow-up on bushfire recovery screened in June, showed the communities of Cobargo, one of the worst-affected areas, struggling on their own. A couple are seen pulling a tarpaulin over a makeshift shelter on a property surrounded by blackened trees. With no running water, they must drive to the village to take showers. Fuel is a scarce commodity. Five months on, basic needs were still not being met.

The government bodies, charities and services supposed to be helping were simply not equipped to respond adequately, and had failed to factor in the psychological gap. Presenting application forms to traumatised people who have lost everything is crassly inappropriate; a $50,000 rebuild grant for an uninsured farmer living amid the burnt-out ruins of a lifetime’s work is cruelly inadequate. Post-traumatic stress may kick in several months after the event, once the mental health counsellors have packed up and left.

But the turning point seemed not to have registered in the national psyche. Only those at the centre of the disaster were facing up to a changed reality. “We’ve lost our innocence, our ‘she’ll be okay mate,’” said a local business owner. “Because it’s not. And it won’t ever be.” “Be with us. Work with us. Stay with us,” another resident pleaded. Some have stuck around, like the volunteer backpackers who helped a farmer replace kilometres of fencing, but elsewhere other concerns were coming to the fore.

By late February, the pandemic was taking over from the bushfires as the crisis of the year. In Coronavirus (24 February), Sean Nicholls reported from Wuhan with footage of a deserted metropolis that presaged what was to come in cities around the world, though at the time it seemed an extreme symptom of some alien regime of power. The virus was another known unknown, with comparisons to be made with SARS, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and the Spanish flu.

If there were any unknown unknowns, they were in its place of origin — this great oriental city under the control of a government increasingly perceived as hostile and secretive. What was really going on in those sinister scenes of white-suited men hauling citizens out of their houses and bundling them into official vehicles? Terrified residents found themselves locked in their apartment buildings; people were said to be dropping dead in the streets; doctors were being threatened for sharing information about cases they were seeing.

Xi Jinping had lost control of the narrative, said the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor. And as for the infection rate and mortality numbers, who knew for sure? According to Neil Ferguson, professor of epidemiology at Imperial College in London, up to an estimated 50,000 people were being infected each day in China. Official figures were reckoned to reveal less than 10 per cent of the actual rates. If the Chinese government was underestimating at that stage, Ferguson’s numbers were wildly overestimated.

In hindsight, the program had some troubling elements of xenophobia. How different does all this look when we take the Orientalism out of the picture — when it is the deserted streets of Paris and Rome on our screens; when the US administration has lost control of the narrative; when an apartment block in Melbourne is suddenly cordoned off and Sky News stirs up alarm about Dictator Dan?

Pandemic (30 March), was the first attempt to report on the virus from an Australian perspective. Sean Nicholls, again the principal reporter, opened by announcing that Australia, like much of the world, was “on a war footing.” Norman Swan, reporting from the frontline, was measured and genuinely informative, as he has been throughout the pandemic, but the spectre of disaster on an unpredictable scale loomed.

Every infected person would infect two others, said Sharon Lewin, director of the Doherty Institute. That is theoretically possible, though not a standard expectation by any means. As the program went to air, the Ruby Princess debacle was unfolding and the prime minister had been forced to do a swift reversal on pronouncements made two weeks earlier about freedom to go to the footy. On social media, “2020 vision” was becoming a bad joke.

As might be expected, the pandemic dominated the Four Corners agenda for the rest of the year. Episodes focused on the financial implications, on the Ruby Princess, on vaccine research, on the second wave, on infection spread in aged care facilities, and on the impact of school closures on Year 12 students. As the year progressed, reporting became less speculative, less foreboding and more focused on the specific ways in which the pandemic’s impact was being experienced.

Students interviewed for The Class of 2020 (2 November) talked of how the lockdown had brought them to reflect on their futures in sterner ways. A confrontation with the unexpected can create a steep learning curve. “This year targeted everything I took for granted,” said Joseph Hathaway-Wilson. Like the woman in Cobargo who spoke of a lost innocence, these students were coming to terms with the limits of human foresight.

Those limits can be a challenge for even the most hard-bitten investigative reporters. A Careful War, a two-part series on the war in Afghanistan originally broadcast in 2010, was promoted again on the Four Corners site earlier this year. It was a remarkable piece of reporting by Chris Masters, embedded with Australian Special Forces troops, who provided live documentation of engagements with the Taliban, including an incident in which two Australian soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device.

This was the blackest day for Mentoring Team Alpha, which was on a mission to provide security and reconstruction to communities in the remote Mirabad Valley. At the start of the enterprise, morale was high. “Shifting schisms and alliances” was the name of the game and, as commanding officer major general John Cantwell put it, it was not one for sledgehammer tactics: “It requires understanding, nuance, and a sense of affiliation.”

It also requires stepping carefully across every metre of ground. What the troops could not determine, often because the locals wouldn’t tell them, was where the explosive devices were buried. Always, there are known unknowns. And for Masters himself, there was a residual awareness of another side to the military story, which he has subsequently taken a lead role in exposing. The darker picture emerged with devastating impact in Killing Field (16 March), based on footage captured by soldiers in Afghanistan. Mark Willacy obtained extensive interviews, most notably with Braden Chapman, an operative deployed with the elite Special Forces in 2012.

From the opening frames, with a soldier’s voice shouting “Get the fuck out!” while frightened civilians were herded from their homes, it was clear we were in a very different environment from the one Masters had documented. Everything was reversed. Here, it was the Australians who were the danger to local communities, and the soldiers themselves had little to fear. “You definitely feel confident with these guys,” said Chapman, “I never felt like we weren’t gonna get through it.”

Chapman is an impressive witness, determined to say what needs to be said despite not knowing how he will get through whatever may be in store for a whistleblower. He had distressing stories to tell, in detail, and the program-makers illustrated them with expertly edited footage that gave a sense of events unfolding in real time.

By the time the episode went to air, allegations of war crimes committed by Australian Special Forces were the subject of an inquiry by NSW Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton. Four Corners reporting, and the work of Masters and Willacy in particular, has a prominent place in the log of evidence.

Amid the global crises and the mounting chaos in the United States, domestic politics registered less strongly than usual on the current affairs radar. With little to be reported from a deserted Parliament House, Louise Milligan’s attempt to portray the building as a scene of scandalous affairs in Inside the Canberra Bubble (9 November) was ill-timed. Why at this moment, when the fallout from the US presidential election was dominating the news, the second wave of the pandemic was building across the globe, and fears of an economic depression were being rehearsed in the press?

It’s not that the issues lacked importance. But the program was made up of a jumble of concerns about personal behaviour, the professional culture of Parliament House (or lack of it), the proportion of women on the frontbench, sexual discrimination and workplace management. The behaviour of senior ministers raises one set of concerns; how workplace conditions are managed and regulated raises another. Why was there no interview with the Clerk of the Senate, who has oversight of human resources?

The program was poorly structured, strung together with a mish-mash of visual footage that might have been assembled from discarded offcuts. Ominous music accompanied panoramic shots of night-time Canberra. The camera peered up the hill towards Parliament House at dusk. Headlights swerved in the darkness. A full moon loomed. All this created a portentous mood, as if to suggest that Canberra is a sinister place and Parliament House — “a bubble within a bubble,” as Malcolm Turnbull put it — a secretive bastion where all manner of things go on.

As for what was actually happening inside the building, the answer was not much, at least at the time. Close-up shots of feet walking down corridors became a kind of leitmotif. They were anonymous and out of focus, and there were high heels in the mix, evoking a stereotyped female corporate look. A few days after the program went to air, it was a relief to see Penny Wong being presented by her colleagues with a birthday present of Converse sneakers of the kind worn by Kamala Harris.

Four Corners doesn’t often fall short in its endeavours. The program continues to make an essential contribution to national affairs. Time and again it has broken stories that spark major public enquiries and legislative changes, and this year was no exception. It’s in periods of turmoil and crisis that its role is most valuable. No government should be allowed to put such work at risk. •

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The scene is a way of showing how the players, constrained to roles of suffocating formality in public, are capable of having fun off duty in an exceptionally silly way. Though, of course, it is about more than is immediately apparent. Princess Anne, whose outstanding skills as an equestrian are displayed in other scenes, is the best player — quick, agile, astute. The Queen Mother, generally shown in the series to be oblivious to the family’s more troubled affairs, is enjoying it all rather too much and has made so many mistakes her face is covered with cork marks. Prince Charles, averse to all forms of exhibitionism, is otherwise engaged.

Though Charles’s engagements (plural) are central to later episodes, the primary focus of this scene is Margaret Thatcher, “number one ibble dibble,” who picks up on the rules of the game but entirely destroys its spirit. Warned about the mysterious protocols of the “Balmoral test” before her first experience as the Queen’s guest, the newly elected prime minister proceeds to make all the most obvious mistakes, including wearing her tailored blue suit and town shoes on a hunting expedition. She soon loses patience with the time-wasting activities of her hosts.

More seriously, the episode serves to illustrate how Whitehall and the Palace are diverging into parallel universes. This is largely a consequence of Thatcher’s own resolves, founded as they are in a set of notions about Britain that are entirely at odds with the symbolic aspects the Queen must represent. Inevitably, though, the monarchy is becoming anachronistic in more and more ways as the series travels further from the Queen’s postwar accession, when the constancy of the royal presence, and all the ceremony surrounding it, helped to restore national morale.

As season four opens in the late 1970s, tensions are escalating on several fronts. The Queen’s entry to Trooping the Colour is intercut with footage of rioting in Northern Ireland. Against the chaotic desperation exploding in the streets of Belfast, the meticulously orchestrated event at Buckingham Palace, before an adoring crowd, comes across as an offence against political reality.

Manipulative juxtapositions like that one recur in the portrayal of other significant events of the 1980s. Mark Thatcher’s disappearance for six days somewhere in the Sahara during the Paris–Dakar car rally is made to coincide with the start of the Falklands war, which in fact occurred six weeks later. The time-shift means that Thatcher can be shown reacting impatiently to being called away from an intensive conference about the search for her “favourite child” to respond to questions about the security of the troops she is about to send to war.

We are not meant to like Thatcher. Gillian Anderson is slighter than the original, so the big hair looks all the more grotesque, and her stooped posture and forward thrust of the chin sometimes evoke the Wicked Witch of the West. In the episode titled “Fagan,” which focuses on the social impact of growing unemployment, her voice seems to be in the background in every scene, issuing edicts from nearby radios and televisions.

This is perhaps the strongest episode. The dramatic structure is cleverly worked out, and the polemical manipulation seems more or less justified. In one especially effective juxtaposition, the camera cuts from a line of smiling guests queueing to meet the Queen at a garden party to people waiting in a dole queue to be quizzed by the battleaxe behind the counter. Fagan is the unemployed painter who notoriously evaded Palace security to find his way to the Queen’s bedroom with the intention of having a word with her about the state of the country. The Queen, in an entirely invented sequence of dialogue, responds to the situation with consummate presence of mind.

We are meant to like the Queen. Olivia Colman captures the over-schooled speech and manner while giving the sense that there is a thoroughly decent human being beneath it all. Others in the family don’t fare so well. When the Queen decides to have lunch with each of her four children in turn, they come across as self-involved, resentful and directionless — except for Andrew, who shows signs of more worrying traits. Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) seems to have only two moods: glum and glummer. Even when he allows himself to be charmed, he’s so awkward you know the backlash is coming in an outburst of annoyance or a personal attack.

The manipulation of perspectives is at its most concerning in the portrayal of individuals. A simplistic nice woman/nasty woman view of the Queen and Thatcher invites facile, judgemental responses in the viewer. In the case of Charles and Diana, the distortion is more emotionally loaded. Emma Corrin, all sweetness and innocence, has a chocolate box prettiness that is styled to give her an uncanny resemblance to the real-life Princess of Wales in the publicity stills for the series. But the clever replication of the image at iconic moments serves, if anything, to accentuate how this performance is all wrong. Released into motion, the shy smile becomes an excruciating simper, the coyness relentlessly insipid.

It’s not just the actor’s fault — the scenes involving Diana might have been written by Barbara Cartland — but this is an object lesson in how capturing aspects of manner and nuances of speech doesn’t give you the person behind them. Even as a teenager, Diana Spencer exhibited qualities far more distinctive than those of the average pretty teenager. There was a canniness about her, and a sophisticated instinct for managing the public situations in which she found herself. The half-smile was a guarded expression rather than just flirtation; there was a knowingness about the famous wide-eyed look from under the heavy fringe of hair, and, as with all truly glamorous people, there was often an air of austerity about her. The real Diana never simpered.

The Crown is a prime example of the current vogue for series showcasing a new genre of acting, in which techniques of impersonation that were once the speciality of satirists are taken to a level of subtlety and accuracy only possible courtesy of vast archives of video footage. Actors are trained to study behaviour and vocal characteristics minutely, coaches assist with specialised techniques, and costume and make-up artists become key collaborators in achieving the trompe l’oeil effect.

The commercial potential is huge. Olivia Colman as the Queen and Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher (or, as in other recent series, Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe and Jeff Daniels as James Comey): the effect of celebrities playing celebrities, it seems, is to double the fascination. But all this investment in creating the illusion of truth is something of a confidence trick. Dramatisation comes with artistic licence. What is on record from events in the public domain is supplemented by invented renditions of personal conversations, off-the-record meetings and consultations, or what happened when someone was alone in a room.

Observing the accuracies and inaccuracies of The Crown has itself become a journalistic sport. Did Diana really call Uluru “Ayers Dock?” Was the Queen wrongly dressed for Trooping the Colour? Did Michael Fagan have a conversation with the Queen when he broke into her bedroom? Many of those who have found themselves depicted in the events of this latest season, including Fagan, have had their say in the media. Earlier this week, even Four Corners issued a series of tweets itemising the misrepresentation of a 1983 interview with Bob Hawke about Charles and Diana’s Australian tour in February of that year.

Writer/creator Peter Morgan has defended the series, arguing that it should be seen for what it is — television drama, not a documentary, and therefore a work in which creative decision-making takes priority. Certainly he has done a formidable job of forging a compelling dramatic structure from a vast sweep of disparate events. There is some brilliant lateral thinking in the way scenes are composed and sequenced to accentuate key themes or (as in the ibble dibble game) underscore psychological tensions. The cinematography is stunning, especially in the Balmoral episode, and the series makes for addictive viewing. But it also raises ethical concerns that cannot be lightly dismissed.

In a culture obsessed with what is “not okay” in human communication, is it really okay to put words in the mouths of living or recently living people who said nothing of the kind? Surely it is not okay to portray family relationships in a highly pejorative way when those involved, directly or indirectly, will be significantly distressed by what may be downright falsehoods? And if artistic licence is the defence, what is the point of replacing a sophisticated, witty set of comments by Bob Hawke with stereotyped banalities? •

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The two-part miniseries was contracted on the basis of an agreed airtime in August, but the production company told Ray earlier this year that a decision had been made to move it to November. In protest, he made public a letter to the cast in which he claimed that “our movie, released in August of an election year, would have been very big news. Can you imagine the billboards? Comey Vs. Trump! A cast loaded with Emmy winners!”

Trenchant Trump critic Jeff Daniels, who plays Comey, lent his weight to the protest, and the decision was reversed. But this October has been rolling out a very different set of surprises from those in which Comey was involved in 2016, when his announcement of a reopened probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails just eleven days before the election may have done terminal damage to her campaign.

As Ray’s comments suggest, the purpose of the dramatisation is at odds with the driving principles of its central figure. In his book, in interviews and in testimony to Congress, Comey is insistent that his responsibility as head of the FBI was to ensure that its activities were free of political motives. “The notion that we had an impact on the election makes me sick to my stomach,” he said in 2018, in response to a question from Leigh Sales about the critical timing of the reopened investigation.

There’s an ambiguity here. Was it the prospect of a Trump presidency that made him sick? Or was it the breach of a protocol essential to the functioning of the FBI as an apolitical organisation? One of the advantages of dramatisation is that we can see how it was both, and can watch the unfolding of the situation in a scene-by-scene reconstruction based on Comey’s documentation of what was said, by whom, and in what circumstances.

The two episodes have a strong symmetry, portraying a political environment that undergoes a shocking reversal after Trump replaces Obama at the White House. What is palpably shocking to Comey, as to so many other senior people in American public service, is the sudden wrenching of the moral compass.

In the first episode, a newly inaugurated Obama calls Comey for an interview at the Oval Office. Kingsley Ben-Adir as Obama captures the syncopated rhythms of speech and movement that convey the essentially humorous intelligence with which the new president sizes up a key player in the structure of government. There’s no small talk in this scene. Obama asks a few straight questions, Comey offers one-line replies, and they agree to maintain the distance required to ensure the political independence of the FBI.

This is an administration that affords Comey the conditions in which he and his team can pursue their work with confidence in their designated authority. That, at least, is the theory. But political situations can throw a monkey wrench into the most stringently observed procedures. “You’re screwed,” Comey is assured, as he gets the news that the investigation into Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information may have to be reopened. This fact will be announced before the election, and it will indeed be white-hot.

Faced with choosing the least-bad option, he and his team start trawling back through 340,000 emails projected onto a panorama of screens from an array of laptops lined up as tagged exhibits. So this is what an FBI investigation actually looks like, in all its forensic technicality. But the politics of it have no such clinical precision, and those responsible for its pursuit are dominos in the line of fire.

Episode two shows us Comey scrutinised by Trump in the notorious “loyalty dinner,” in every respect an inversion of the conversation with Obama. Comey, who attended the filming of the scene, says he found it deeply unsettling to watch. The dialogue, much of it lifted verbatim from the notes Comey took immediately afterwards, shows us Trump without the public mask of sunny grandiosity. The pettiness of the egocentric pronouncements is all the more abject.

Comey listens dumbfounded, and here Jeff Daniels, with very few scripted lines, offers a masterclass in acting as an invitation to mind-reading. He captures Comey’s demeanour so accurately that he starts to look like him, though there is almost no physical resemblance. Brendan Gleeson as Trump has a more confronting task. The actor’s known reluctance to take on the role is understandable: this was not a job for an impersonator or caricaturist. It would involve an attempt to capture what is behind the extravagant persona at a time when its public impact is so explosive.

In many ways Gleeson’s performance works against the most familiar aspects of the persona. Trump’s features have grown into the form of the television smile, but Gleeson seems to be deliberately taking the gloss off, portraying him as grim-faced and dour away from the cameras. He replicates Trump’s intonation patterns exactly, but there’s something not right about the pitch of the voice, which kept reminding me of someone else. Watching the scene of their meeting again, the penny dropped. This was Brando’s Godfather voice, turning apparently casual chat to menace with his wheezy, plaintive undertones.

Comey has said in interviews that Trump reminded him of the mafia bosses he’d dealt with earlier in his career. In dramatic terms, this resonance creates compelling psychological tensions, though the series is purporting to offer us something close to documentary. As these two men face each other across a small table, what we are given belongs more to the mythos of American liberalism. Daniels left a Broadway run of To Kill a Mockingbird to take on this role. Are we being subliminally invited to view Comey versus Trump as Atticus Finch versus Don Corleone?

Far from creating an electoral debacle for the Trump campaign with its insider account of the counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the release of the series has actually served to inflame a controversy that is now two-sided. During the past week Comey has spent long hours being grilled by Republican senators on alleged attempts to skew the evidence. Predictably, Trump upped the ante, and has been issuing a volley of furious tweets claiming that the investigation itself was an Obama–Clinton plot to sabotage his campaign.

One of Comey’s acknowledged weaknesses is that he has poor political instincts. That problem extends to Billy Ray’s aims with this miniseries. There is no such thing as a bombshell accusation against Trump, who lives in a no-holds-barred world of accusations and counteraccusations. He has already served up a package of October surprises, starting with the Covid-19 diagnosis and his aggressively staged “recovery.” Whatever else may be in store, the odds are that he’ll be the one putting down the cards — and we are only halfway through the month. •

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Vidal, an authority on the history of the office, died before a Trump candidacy was even the subject of speculation. Now, as the presidency goes much lower, commentators search for new terms of censure to deal with the almost daily assaults on human intelligence issuing from the White House. For some of the leading program hosts — people like HBO’s John Oliver, NBC’s Seth Meyers, CBS’s Stephen Colbert and Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah — the challenge has become an overriding concern.

Every time they front the camera, it is to deliver yet another critique of the most recent Trump pronouncements, often accompanied by quotations read in a parody Trump voice. The aim is to be nothing less than annihilating, but if the attacks need to be mounted night after night then they clearly aren’t working.

“This week was the worst,” Seth Meyers announced at the start of Monday’s edition of A Closer Look. His topic was the controversy over the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but his commentary swerved to a general portrayal of Trump, illustrated with random clips of the president boasting of his achievements. “Did they take out all his teeth and replace them with gummy bears?” Meyers speculated. “He sounds like Siri after you dropped your phone in the toilet.”

On the matter of the Supreme Court nomination, Meyer’s clips of Trump denouncing Obama’s bid to make a nomination before the 2016 election were prefaced with a remark that “the whole sarcastic comment thing” would be redundant, but nevertheless there were remarks to be made. “It’s not just hypocrisy, it’s nihilism.”

As host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah features a segment titled Votegasm 2020, which does at least signal some satirical recognition that the pitch of the debate is an issue. Last week’s instalment, mainly about Trump’s handling of the pandemic, seemed designed to provide opportunities for Noah to put on a Trump voice and say things that were even dumber than what Trump actually said.

That’s standard satirical fare, and there is surely no political satirist in America who doesn’t do a Trump voice. In fact, one of the most irritating aspects of the Trump effect, at least as far as television is concerned, is the way it has triggered a pandemic of vocal impersonations. The only one who actually knows how to do it is Sarah Cooper, because she never tries to improve on the original.

Stephen Colbert has caught the virus worse than most, and finds it hard to go more than a couple of minutes without sliding into Trumpspeak. Like Meyers, he has also taken to declaring that he just can’t take it any more. Between now and the election is going to be a dark, dirty road, he announced on 22 September, “but on Friday it got so much worse.” He was referring to the death of Justice Ginsburg. With “Build that wall” having somehow fallen off the agenda, said Colbert, Trump has a new chant, “Fill that seat.” And a rear-view image of Trump playing tennis in tight shorts hit the screen.

The satirists don’t mind going low from time to time, when the game is being played that way, but that isn’t to say that their political engagement is not serious, or principled. Or genuinely witty. Colbert has a repertoire of finely tuned comedic skills, and as an interviewer he is capable of lightning responses to pretension and spin. He and John Oliver, his former co-star from the golden era of The Daily Show, have carried some of Jon Stewart’s sophisticated political instincts into their own shows.

As host of Last Week Tonight, Oliver has just won his fifth consecutive Emmy. He specialises in rapid-fire monologues in sentences that can run to a dozen clauses, accompanied by a suite of video clips whose cumulative effect is to portray Trump’s America as a domain under the sway of an infantile lunacy that rivals Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world.

Oliver is strong on detail. His team researches key areas of policy so that the program is ready to deliver with chapter and verse wherever the next flare-up occurs. When Black Lives Matter protests led to violent clashes with police in June, he went viral with a thirty-minute tirade on “how the fuck we got to this point.” It was part history lecture on how US policing is entangled with white supremacy, part sociological analysis of police training and deployment, and part summary of the legal obstacles to holding officers accountable. But it was the sustained six-cylinder outrage that made it a tour de force in the annals of television.

Oliver has acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining a wider focus on political issues when Trump looms so large. It’s a constant battle, he says, to avoid having Trump stories “cannibalise” the program. But the Trump effect on him, as on so many other leading talents in American satire and current affairs, is to create a form of tunnel vision. The more ineffectual their attacks, the more fiercely they adhere to the conventional weaponry of satire and caricature.

Faith in skilfully crafted language as a weapon against hypocrisy has a deep cultural history, but it is associated with a heritage of moral superiority concentrated in the educated classes, and may foster resentments among those who have never felt part of it. Trump has unquestionably inflamed a historical cultural division in American society, and the risk is that these ad hominem attacks serve to further inflate his role as a figurehead on whom wider enmities are projected.

George Orwell warned that satire doesn’t work during periods of severe political deterioration because language itself loses its anchors in reality. The looking-glass world evoked by Lewis Carroll sounds the warning in a different way, by focusing on how logic is reversible and can pull up the roots of human reason if it is not reined in. One of the hardest things to come to terms with during the current great divide is that both sides think they are logical and are equally convinced that their vision is anchored in reality.

A Trump supporter known as “Mr. Obvious” garnered over 100,000 views on YouTube for a recent denunciation that adopts John Oliver’s own techniques to reverse the attack. We see Oliver making wisecracks accompanied by hollow laughter — and yes, they do sound pretty feeble out of context. His monologue on the killing of vigilante Jacob Blake in Wisconsin is answered point for point by a counter-narrative in which Blake is portrayed as a local worker called in to help an employer under siege and then set upon by the two assailants he subsequently shot. “John Oliver is lying from the get-go,” says Mr. Obvious, and as for the overall critique of Trump and his supporters, the Oliver doctrine can be summarised as “Orange man bad!”

Chas Licciardello, co-host of ABC’s Planet America, avoids the traps into which too many of America’s own leading commentators have fallen. I’ve often been frustrated at Licciardello’s insistence on giving Trump’s pronouncements the benefit of serious adjudication. Isn’t this helping to normalise what are essentially preposterous claims? But I’m starting to see what he’s trying to do. As he put it during a recent appearance on The Drum, “I’m worried that we’re trapped in a cycle of escalation.” As opposing sides tip further and further away from each other, he said, we get closer to the point where one or other refuses to accept the legitimacy of government.

In one of the most powerful statements made during the Democratic Party presidential debates, outsider candidate Andrew Yang described Trump as “a symptom of a disease that has been building up in our communities for years and decades.” If it’s about Trump, he warned, we lose. And he meant more than just losing the election. He meant the continuing loss of lives and livelihoods, personal hopes and civil rights, in a political system that has itself become the enemy of the common good. •

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Why Skripal, when he was no longer active as an informer to the British intelligence services? Novichok, in the words of a chemical weapons expert, is “one of the most toxic substances on earth” yet, in this instance, it did not prove fatal. And was it purely coincidence that the incident occurred within a few miles of Porton Down, a “secretive government facility” specialising in researching nerve agents, plague bacteria and other hazardous substances?

This type of intrigue captures the public imagination, and it’s certainly a gift to any producer in search of ideas for a new television series. But the new British dramatisation The Salisbury Poisonings, showing on SBS on four consecutive nights this week, sidelines the politics of the case and steers clear of the conspiracies, focusing instead on its local impact.

During their several weeks living in Salisbury while preparing the screenplay, writers Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn decided there was a story to be told about “ordinary people in an extraordinary situation who did remarkable things under enormous pressure.” They worked in close consultation with Tracy Daszkiewicz who, as county director of public health and safety, was at the centre of events from the outset.

Daszkiewicz describes Salisbury as “an amazing town with unique communities,” an impression conveyed in the opening scenes, as journalists report how local residents have rallied to help each other in recent floods. Only three months into her role with the local health authority, Daszkiewicz found herself in a situation for which there was no guidebook, working to prevent what could become a large-scale catastrophe. Portrayed in the series by Anne-Marie Duff, she is the kind of person who is thoroughly versed in the professional protocols that decree where and how responsibilities are allocated.

In the first episode we see this routine professionalism kicking in as soon as the poisoning is reported. Staff at the police station get the alert that two people have collapsed on a bench in the town centre. An officer is on the scene. Daszkiewicz, who is getting her son ready for school, receives a call from the police station. “I’m on my way,” she says.

Prompt, casual, alert: those are qualities about to be tested as, hour by hour, the situation blows out in ways that prefigure the current pandemic. Countless ordinary lives are about to be forced off the rails as the quarantine implications are recognised.

Over the next few days, urgent discussions in the superintendent’s office expand to conferences involving experts from Porton Down, teams of forensic specialists, and military cohorts drafted in to assist. Outside, journalists from the local paper are joined by national television crews. Police in blue uniforms are replaced by teams of army personnel in hazmat suits.

When the two ambulances used to ferry the victims to hospital are taped up and loaded onto huge military vehicles, the transition from an ordinary to an extraordinary emergency couldn’t be conveyed more succinctly. Episode two commences with a convoy of military trucks headed along a country road at dawn. Strange forces are converging on the townspeople of Salisbury.

The Salisbury Poisonings is brilliantly effective in exploring the tensions between everyday competence and the bolder qualities of management and decision-making required in a crisis of this complexity. What works especially well on television is the detail and pacing. The drama is always in the detail. At no point does this commitment give way to the lure of a big scene; crises of many kinds are portrayed, but always with meticulous attention to the circumstantial realities.

For those directly involved, sudden transfers of authority and decision-making multiply the impact. Things really threaten to get out of hand when two government emissaries arrive to take over the response strategy. There’s a nice cameo performance from Kimberley Nixon as Whitehall’s chosen health adviser, a young woman with a prissy accent who thinks she knows best because she carries the authority of those whose job it is to know best regardless of what they do or don’t know. In this instance, it’s clear that although neither of the Whitehall duo is up to speed on the basics, they intend to take over.

Whether this actually happened, or happened in this way, is perhaps not relevant. It’s one of the few instances of a generic element from the sphere of detective drama. Isn’t there always a threat to genuine professional intelligence from some jumped-up pseudo-authority? Fortunately the scriptwriters don’t overplay it: wiser heads soon prevail, and Daszkiewicz is allowed to continue her work.

Overall, this is one of the best miniseries I’ve seen in recent years. It’s perfectly cast (always a key factor), tersely scripted and paced to wind up the tension as few full-on thrillers succeed in doing. Cancel your bookings (if you have them) for the next few nights. •

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The ABC’s three-part series Fight for Planet A was already in the making when last summer’s bushfire catastrophe began to unfold, and was completed before the pandemic hit. If the three-month deferral of the broadcast date was arranged in anticipation of some reprieve from the pandemic emergency, things haven’t worked out that way.

Presenter Craig Reucassel delivers a brief introduction to camera explaining this unforeseen convergence of events. Watching it now, though, the series unavoidably comes across as something of an anomaly. Reucassel’s buoyant approach and the program’s whole “yes we can” premise seem out of tune with what looks like a depression looming.

Five Australian households participate in a challenge to see how much they can reduce their carbon footprint. The presumption is that they are all, in their different ways, guilty of ecological extravagance, but how does this come across now that the livelihoods of so many households are in jeopardy? The ABC’s manager of documentaries, Stephen Oliver, sees some advantage in shifting the focus from the pandemic, which leaves us “sitting there waiting for the experts to find a vaccine,” back to climate change, where we can all be instrumental in finding solutions.

At the beginning and end of the series, the five households assemble in the studio for an audit of their joint carbon emissions, represented as a bouquet of black balloons attached to a model house. In episode one, the house is in midair; the challenge is to reduce the balloon count enough to ground it. To achieve this, they must change diets, modes of transport and household energy consumption.

On its own, this aspect of the series could make for fairly bland lifestyle television. But Reucassel never allows us to lose touch with the sterner dimensions of his subject. The flair for performative interventions he demonstrated in The Chaser’s War on Everything (2002–09) comes to the fore as he uses forms of street theatre to engage passers-by in the broader challenge.

“The hardest part is getting people to visualise emissions,” says Reucassel. He heads for the beach with a cloud of carbon balloons attached to his back, intending to head off the prime minister, who is taking a weekend stroll in board shorts. Per capita emissions in Australia are among the highest in the world: can he get Morrison to “see” what this means? As it turns out, the strongest visual image is of the prime minister scrambling awkwardly over the beach wall to escape the encounter.

Reucassel has more success persuading ordinary people to front up to the problem. While the household challenge is under way, he sets off around the city and across the country to tackle the larger issues. As a nation, we emit 539 million tonnes of carbon each year, which makes a massive contribution to the melting of 463 billion tonnes of ice in Greenland and Antarctica. But what do such abstract statistics mean to most of us? A 6.5 tonne wall of ice, trucked into a square in the city centre, is a good way to draw attention. Curious onlookers are invited to guess how long it takes for the average Australian to melt this much ice. The bids come in. Ten years? A year? A month? Ten days, is the answer. People literally stop in their tracks.

Closer to home, though still remote from city dwellers, is land clearing. A road trip to a cattle station 300 kilometres from Cairns provides another kind of shock. Australia has one of the highest rates of land clearing in the developed world. Drone shots show trees falling in rapid succession, keeling over like infantry under machine-gun fire. Some 390,000 hectares are cleared in Queensland in a year, but when the drone shows what a 2000 hectare expanse actually looks like, the larger figure defies comprehension.

Back in the city, seventy volunteers assemble on the banks of the Yarra in Melbourne, holding up green umbrellas to represent a forested area the size of a modest free-standing house. Up on the bridge with a loud hailer, Reucassel starts another bidding game. How long does it take to clear this much land in Australia? “Every hour?” someone ventures. He encourages the punters to go lower, then eventually turns to the group below him and makes the call. The umbrellas snap closed in an instant, and the shock is palpable.

Our eye-watering national deficit to the planet continues to grow while governments prioritise anxieties about the economy. Yet what is the economy, after all, without the underpinning of natural resources? Fight for Planet A is structured so that the carbon audit of the five participating households is counterpoised by snapshots from the bigger picture. Ledgers of debit and credit are checked intermittently, with the implication that there is a clear analogy between the household economy and the macro economy of the planetary ecosystem.

There’s a risk of a significant misconception here, just as there is when household budgets are cited as a model for government budgets. For overarching questions of resource management, it’s the bigger players who call the tune and determine the parameters within which the rest of us operate. We’ve seen some outstanding environmental documentaries from Four Corners, focusing directly on corporate and government responsibilities for our woeful national report card. Linton Besser’s investigation into water management on the Murray–Darling (2017) is a prime example, but it also demonstrated how the politics of it all can leave us feeling angry and hopeless.

There’s plenty of anger among the respondents in Reucassel’s experiments, but his refusal of hopelessness is wonderfully effective. He has a gift for engaging the public imagination and galvanising community spirit. Whether he’s talking to ten-year-olds in the schoolyard, the guys in a student share house, the three generations of a well-heeled suburban family or an outback farmer, he has a way of connecting that is energising without ever being patronising.

Reucassel’s previous series, War on Waste, involved groups of high school students in skilfully organised campaigns that proved remarkably effective. It was a runaway success in 2017 with a sequel the following year. A youth perspective remains at the heart of this new series, reinforcing the message that renewal is not only necessary but also possible. •

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Surely, then, this is also a good month to watch a new series based on the H.G. Wells classic, The War of the Worlds, a story of Martian invasion originally published in 1898? The Fox version, an Anglo-French collaboration currently streaming on SBS, begins at the IRAM Observatory on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps. Astrophysicist Catherine Durand (Léa Drucker), who has been responsible for compiling an anthology of signals to be transmitted speculatively into remote space, sees unusual activity on the radar.

It’s a well-paced, atmospheric opening. Yes, this could happen, and there’s a convincingly gradual transition from technical curiosity to the recognition that troubling developments are in train. Durand flies to Brussels to deliver a briefing at NATO headquarters, a scene intercut with Bill Ward (Gabriel Byrne), professor of neuroscience at University College London, giving a lecture on electronic interventions with brain circuits.

“We send music,” Durand explains to her elite audience, the idea being that music — also encoded in a binary system for species without auditory function — may act as a universal language. The response has come in electromagnetic waves that look like some kind of musical translation. Across in London, Ward pauses his lecture to address a recalcitrant student. “Am I boring you?” The delegates in Brussels stir in their seats with a different order of attention. They want to know why this is happening now. “Perhaps they were looking for us,” ventures Durand.

So far so good. But the problem with nineteenth-century science fiction is that it doesn’t stay in this register. The full horror show must unfold, with towering monsters and cities crumbling in burning chaos. Once that starts to happen, technological realism is left behind, and with it all the intricacies of information tracking, decision-making and clandestine politics of the kind we saw in Chernobyl.

As events in the storyline spin off into fantasy, the only kinds of realism left are social and psychological, as Steven Spielberg understood when he brought The War of the Worlds to the big screen in 2005. Tom Cruise starred, getting caught up in the trauma with two children from a broken marriage, so it was all about his learning to be a father. Cheesy, perhaps, but very well managed.

Wells presented the original story as an exploration of human nature: what kind of species are we and, when it comes to the crunch, are we worth saving? His narrator commences with reflections on the vanity and cruelty of a race whose doctrine of survival of the fittest led to the extermination of the Indigenous Tasmanians. “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

In this new television version, the alien contact is announced in a news broadcast with the speculation that perhaps this may bring the people of the world together. Those who escape the first strike find themselves trying to survive in a city in which all resources and services have collapsed. Personal and social priorities clash. The neuroscientist is bent on reuniting with his ex-wife and adult son. A mother and her two teenage children find themselves in a hospital where a sole nurse is trying to keep thirty infants alive: will they help, or are they only bent on saving themselves? A boy who has escaped from a refugee camp, used to surviving against the odds, blends generous instincts with feral strategies.

The problem is that none of these characters is particularly interesting. That may be a shortcoming of the casting, but the writing doesn’t always deliver either. Series creator Howard Overman seems insufficiently clear about where the dramatic heart of his story really lies.

Since this is, in essence, a horror story — however freely adapted — the heart of it should be some experience of terror. On Halloween night in 1938, a young Orson Welles delivered a purportedly “live” broadcast of an alien landing, drawing his script from The War of the Worlds, and so terrified the listening public that many of them fled their homes. Listening to it now, one might be impressed at its verve and inventiveness, but it is lodged firmly as a vintage curiosity in the comfort zone of the twenty-first-century imagination.

Keen as we may be on conspiracy theories, the prospect of interplanetary surveillance doesn’t seem to generate much collective anxiety in the current media environment. Even with news of a robot probe seeking traces of alien life on Mars making headlines, I searched the twittersphere in vain for signs of apprehension. My curiosity was piqued by a reference to “seven minutes of terror” in the ABC news report, but this turned out to be insider jargon from the control room, describing the interval of suspense between the time when the probe entered the Martian atmosphere and the moment of its landing.

Perseverance, with its armoury of probes and sensors and spooky musical tastes (it is programmed to sing itself happy birthday), might surely strike terror into any alien life form, but it is our own creature. An intelligent strategy for the series, then, might have been to try to gain traction by exploiting this irony. Certainly it was a smart decision to portray the invaders on a smaller scale than Wells did, as an army of probe vehicles similar to the real-life robot dogs produced by Boston Dynamics.

The deployment of those dogs really has inspired public consternation, and fears of sinister conspiracy, especially when they were trialled by Massachusetts state police in anti-terror operations. Boston Dynamics advertises them as ingenious, entertaining (they dance), quirky and stylish (they come in sporty yellow as well as black). They only look really dangerous when accompanied by heavily armed humans in black riot gear.

If it is no longer possible to scare an audience with H.G. Wells’s fantasy of Martian invasion, surely we can be unnerved by a vision of alien invaders as a mirror image of ourselves — colonisers, predatory adventurers, ruthless destroyers. This was, after all, a key element in the original story, with its prefatory allusions to genocide in Tasmania. It’s disappointing that this new television version fails to take on the challenge with any serious dramatic cogency. •

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There are a few things wrong with the chronology here. To start with, the original series, which ran from 1957 to 1966, would have been over before anyone who is sixty now was old enough to make sense of it. It did, however, undergo a significant revival with Perry Mason Returns, a television film aired in 1985, which led to a further twenty-nine movie-length episodes over the next decade.

As someone who was old enough (just) to be among the viewing audience for the original series, though, I have to say Rhys has got the cultural demographics all wrong. To my generation, the solidly built and grey-suited Raymond Burr had nothing on the protagonists in The Avengers, the racy crime series launched in 1961, who were lean, mean and trained in the martial arts. When Perry Mason returned to the screen in 1985, he was already an anachronism, a throwback to a complacent moral world that no longer existed.

This matters because demographics, culture and chronology are of the essence in HBO’s recreation of the character as a young investigator in the Depression era, when the very idea of a moral world seemed a chimera. The story is set in Los Angeles in 1932, the year the Dow bottomed out, the FBI opened its first crime laboratory and the infant son of celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped.

The Lindbergh kidnapping, a landmark case for the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, has the perennial draw of an unsolved historical mystery. Bristling with false leads and bizarre clues, it captured the national imagination at the time, and continues to haunt. It is also the plot base of too much TV drama: pull on the thread of this story, and every conspiracy scenario of the time comes out.

Treated with a sophisticated, tongue-in-cheek genre-consciousness, though, that is exactly why it works here. Director Tim Van Patten (whose portfolio includes Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood and The Sopranos) and writers Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald have made Perry Mason an emblematic figure of his era, and it is a fascination with the story of the times that motivates this revival of the character.

In moving the time frame from the fifties to the thirties, they recreate Mason as the antithesis of Burr’s persona. Rhys portrays a man who has already lost his youth to war trauma, drink and depression. He doesn’t shave and wanders around in a sweaty vest until someone forces him to get dressed for a visit to the office, where defence attorney E.B. Jonathan (John Lithgow) occasionally commissions his services to dig out useful evidence. Jonathan’s new client, the mother of the kidnapped baby, is facing a murder charge, and it doesn’t look good.

The bereaved couple are nothing like the aristocratic Lindberghs; theirs is a Depression-era story of joyless lower-middle-class domesticity. Questions are raised about the source of the ransom payment, with a trail leading to untrustworthy bankers and corrupt police. Fortunately, the writers have the dramatic instinct to counterpoint this downbeat scenario by introducing Sister Alice McKeegan, a charismatic preacher backed by a gospel choir, who also decides to involve herself in the case. Tatiana Maslany is great casting in this role; she takes on the full-throttle oratory with gusto and her face in close-up glows with euphoria.

But when it comes to fighting on behalf of the afflicted, does Sister Alice offer anything more than psychodrama? Is the good-hearted attorney Jonathan too old and naive to front up to the dark forces he is uncovering? Or will Perry Mason pull himself out of the doldrums and become the moral force with which his name is associated? It is in these questions that the real suspense lies, rather than in the conventional lures of the murder story.

Rhys is one of those actors who can draw you into the psychology of a character, and although this is badged as a “limited series” it sets Mason up as someone with a long road to travel, one that could play out over many seasons. Here the series concept accords with the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner on which the 1957 dramatisation was based. Gardner published fifteen of these stories during the 1930s, each of them involving Mason in the direct investigation of a murder. It is not until the end of the decade that he starts to show his prowess in the courtroom.

The idea of Mason as emblematic of the times raises the question of how he changes with them. Given how seriously the production team has taken the challenge of evoking the period, it would be good to see the series amount to something more than yet another thirties noir mystery, however well done.

As the Depression receded after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1933, the nation began to shake off its image as a gangster-ridden social quagmire and acquire some moral authority in the world. Mason’s evolution from feral private investigator to courtroom maestro works in parallel.

It’s hard to envisage Rhys’s portrayal moving towards the unassailable gravitas of Raymond Burr, but that in itself is an intriguing point of speculation. Putting my adolescent prejudices aside, I can see now that Burr was an actor of exceptional warmth and subtlety who won deep and abiding trust from a generation of viewers. They mapped that trust onto the legal system itself: no judgement ever went awry in Perry Mason’s courtroom (and it was always his courtroom).

After Roosevelt took the US currency off the gold standard in 1933, the law became another kind of gold standard, ensuring the stability of the nation. For viewers in 2020, any such image of the US justice system is surely beyond credibility, and so the door is open for a more sophisticated, retrospective form of realism.

This involves the evocation of a social world that extends beyond that of the white male professional surrounded by appealing women. Mason’s colleague Della Street, played by Juliet Rylance, is stylish (of course), bossy, and quicker witted than the men around her, and has a same-sex romance. Although that’s a bit too much like a checklist of everything that gets the 2020 tick of approval, Rylance gives her a convincing directness and, again, there’s much potential for development in her storyline.

Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), a young African-American cop, is the one with gravitas at the start of the drama. Self-possessed and impeccably groomed, he has a thing or two to teach the dissolute Mason, but he’s up against it in the corrupt power play of the LA police department. His is, as the actor puts it, a story with a hard arc.

Judging by the opening episodes, they’re going a bit too hard in playing the antithesis of “your grandmother’s Perry Mason.” It may take a while for the series to hit its stride, but when it does, it should be all about what kind of character the law gets to play. What could be of more urgent contemporary relevance? •

The post Who is Perry Mason? appeared first on Inside Story.

He tells a story. When he was seven, his family moved to a housing commission house in Alice Springs. It had a backyard, but it was thick with bindies, so he couldn’t play there. “My mother asked what I wanted for my birthday, and I said I’d like a pile of dirt. And she went, ‘All right.’” A fortnight later, two tons of beautiful red desert dirt was deposited in the yard. It was the best present he ever had, he says. He played in it for years, driving matchbox cars through it, making tunnels and fortresses, escaping the world he was living in.

Thornton’s new six-part documentary, The Beach, chronicles a more recent escape. Abandoning the crazy cycle of life as a successful filmmaker, with its pressured schedules and endless round of after-parties, he retreated to the shack to fend for himself for a couple of months. He took along a crate of chickens and a few bare necessities. And a film crew.

The camera work is under the direction of his son Dylan River, whose fabulous aerial views of the shoreline, with slowly emerging dawns and theatrical sunsets, recalls the cinematography of Mystery Road. Opening shots of a vehicle tracking along a desert road towards the water are a direct echo of Thornton’s own footage at the start of the detective story, though this time it’s not death that greets the driver but a kind of rebirth.

Thornton pulls up on the beach, gets out and strides towards the ocean, still wearing his jacket and akubra. He plunges into the water, coat spreading round him, as if surrendering to a baptism. The need for cleansing runs through the episodes: on one level, this is an archetypal story of the solitary individual striving to shake off the unnecessary trappings of life in the city, and with them the burdens of personal and collective guilt.

Here in the vast terrain of the Dampier, Thornton sets up a version of Thoreau’s Walden for another continent in another epoch. But Thornton’s chronicle is also the antithesis of Thoreau, most obviously in the landscape but also because television offers a different kind of poetic communication. The human presence is a quirky intermediary in the relationship between camera and landscape, and the scale of the place would make a mockery of the literary language and philosophical reflections of a nineteenth-century gentleman.

Thornton leaves the philosophy to the land, the sea and the sky. He talks to himself and his chickens, swearing and cajoling as if trying to slough off the excrescence of a personality he just doesn’t need now. “I’ve no idea what I’m doing,” he says. That makes sense as a statement of mood, but one of the fascinations of this situation is how it reveals that this curmudgeonly, out-of-condition middle-aged man is so deeply skilled in so many things.

To begin with, it takes a special kind of savvy to know what equipment will be needed, and how to maintain it. There are the essentials: a brazier, a tin bucket, the broken crate that serves as a chicken house, insect netting, a couple of oil lamps and a guitar. All of it is old and none of it is plastic. To anyone else, it might be a random assortment of junk.

Thornton collects eggs and starts to cook, at which point it becomes evident that he’s also assembled a batterie de cuisine that would put Elizabeth David to shame. He pours spiced oil into a bowl, chops herbs, grinds spices in a mortar, cranks up a massive old bellows and gets the brazier flaming. Aside from the eggs, the menu consists largely of seafood, caught underwater with a homemade tackle.

Days are structured by the passage of the sun and the gathering and preparing of food. We watch as he expertly fillets a glistening fish, lowers massive prawns into a seething pan of chilli oil, sprinkles garnish over a dish of crab. Thoreau surely never dreamed of taking such trouble over his meals — he prided himself on their simplicity — but the centrality of Thornton’s cuisine raises questions of fundamental human need in a different way. As he speaks of fighting off the black dog of depression, this display of virtuosity comes as an expression of the vital energy and intelligence also necessary for survival.

Tradition comes into it, too. Thornton’s grandmother was known as the best cook in the Northern Territory. His mother got used to being served up wonderful dishes, but she never learned herself. So he started to do his own cooking. Perhaps these crafts skip a generation, he speculates. Yet his three children are all brilliant cooks. “So that idea’s fucked.”

His mother, though, had other skills. She worked at a photography store where Albert Namatjira used to come to sell his paintings, and her fascination with the documentation of life through images led to the foundation of CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association. This is the woman who didn’t miss a beat when her seven-year-old asked for a pile of dirt for his birthday, and who gave her grandson Dylan his first camera at the same age.

Whatever journey Warwick Thornton is on during this retreat, lines of heritage run through. Towards the end of the series, he has a confessional moment as he sits on the doorstep, his chosen place for speaking to camera. He talks about an uncle who had a special gift for healing, but something went wrong and, at a critical moment, when he was in a bad state and himself needed help, Thornton failed to offer it. Perhaps that has something to do with recurring appearances from the black dog.

But Thornton also knows how to lighten the mood, driving his wreck of a motor along the beach with the wind in his hair, sweet-talking his chooks, sprinkling seeds into the cells of an egg-carton and crooning softly, over and over again, “grow you little bastards.”

The Beach doesn’t really fit the category of “documentary.” It’s a chronicle, a visual journal, as slowly evolving as the great wide days on the beachfront. And, of course, the photography is superb, a glorious reminder of the scale of a world that will outlast us all. •

The post On the beach appeared first on Inside Story.

In six pacy episodes, the ABC drama series Operation Buffalo takes its viewers on a cold war adventure. From the red-and-blue regalia of Cranky’s lodgings at Maralinga, viewers are whisked into the burnt-orange mulga-dotted landscape where Britain’s Operation Buffalo is taking place. But the story stretches well beyond the perimeter of the nuclear weapons testing site to 1950s Adelaide suburbia, the dark corners of Whitehall and the corridors of Parliament House in Canberra, all under the ever-present watch of ASIO, MI6 and the KGB.

In these settings, among the sex, scandal, intrigue and espionage, the true tale of Britain’s nuclear testing program in South Australia is synthesised, dramatised and satirised. Despite the humorously exaggerated characters, each episode is introduced with a reminder that Operation Buffalo was real. “This is a work of historical fiction,” the producers tell the viewer. “But a lot of the really bad history actually happened.”

While the satirical elements of Operation Buffalo can make it difficult to discern fact from fiction, several of the series’s key themes hew closely to the documented history of the Maralinga operation. Between September and October 1956, Britain tested four nuclear weapons in the heart of the South Australian desert. Because the tests were deemed essential for imperial defence, Australian soldiers were heavily involved, though not well informed. British scientists ran the show, and little was known — or at least revealed — about the likely effects of radiation on Australia’s landscape and population. Aboriginal people were gathered into missions to keep them off Country, though the efforts of just one man, Walter MacDougall, were not enough to secure Maralinga’s perimeter completely. Each of these elements is enough to ensure that the Maralinga story has been cast as one of the great betrayals of Australia’s land and people by the British Empire.

Much like those who served at real-life Maralinga, the characters in Operation Buffalo search for the facts about the operation. But will we ever know the “truth” about this episode in Australia’s history?

As that interaction between Cranky and Leo shows, Australia’s place in the British Empire is fundamental to this story. Nuclear weapons emerged from the second world war as the ultimate measure of scientific prowess and military might. The image of a mushroom cloud ballooning upwards was a sign of virility; a dud weapon, lying on the sand in the outback, was a sign of impotence. Or, in the case of the bumbling boffins whose task it was to ensure detonation, a sign of imperial incompetence.

Through Cranky and his colleagues in Whitehall, viewers get a glimpse of the imperial intricacies of this historical period. Before he was posted to Maralinga, Cranky served for decades as an Empire soldier, fighting “Boers, Hun and Nazis.” He is as befuddled as he is British, and has been sent to Maralinga to see out his days. Donning his military redcoat, he spends his days drinking bloody marys in his private dining room.

In other words, Maralinga is the place where Britain’s doddery former heroes and disgraced career diplomats are “sent to die.” But even in an area as remote as this, the Empire lives on. “God Save the Queen” is frequently played over the speakers, and a portrait of Elizabeth II hangs in the mess hall. Maralinga’s new meteorologist, harking from Cambridge, is none other than Dr Eva Lloyd-George (Jessica De Gouw), the fictional granddaughter of former British prime minister David Lloyd George.

Interestingly, several of the series’s most devout servants of Empire struggle to reconcile their involvement in the nuclear tests. In much of the literature on Maralinga, this was a moral position held only by Australians. By building this complexity into characters who have traditionally been cast as unquestioning followers of Queen and country, Operation Buffalo raises one of this history’s key anxieties: to what end were these tests actually striving?

It is not only government officials or those in charge who question the point of the testing through the series. The viewer is provoked to ask whether anyone understands the consequences of what they’re doing. Tests are nonchalantly rescheduled, often for the sake of drawing attention away from other events in camp. The scientists squabble like children. The meteorologist ignores unfavourable weather patterns. The soldiers and nurses know to keep quiet about the horrors they witness.

The viewer is slapped by the lack of understanding of — or concern about — the effects of radioactivity, acutely represented by the multitude of characters struck down by radiation sickness and delivered to the Maralinga hospital under the care of nurse Corinne Syddell (Adrienne Pickering). Most of these characters are left unnamed — they are simply soldiers undertaking daily manual labour around the camp — but these scenes point effectively to the real experiences of Australia’s nuclear veterans. Many fell ill and died young, without having had confirmation of what they knew to be true, that this had something to do with their work at Maralinga. They were not compensated.

The soldiers and workers on the ground were not the only ones exposed unwittingly to radiation. Little heed is given in popular accounts of this history to the families of those who served at Maralinga. Veteran testimonies from the 1980s Australian royal commission into the British nuclear tests demonstrate that it was not uncommon for wives to be exposed to radioactivity when they washed their husband’s uniforms. In Operation Buffalo, Leo Carmichael’s home and work lives collide violently when a balloon tracking radioactive fallout floats into the backyard of a young family in Adelaide and attaches itself to their Hills hoist, where two children play with it happily. Word of the balloon travels fast and Leo’s own children are invited to marvel at the mysterious object.

While there were no reported cases of meteorological balloons finding their way into suburban backyards during the tests, historians can confirm that invisible clouds of radioactive fallout tracked across the country. High readings of radioactivity were taken as far away as Queensland. As the series suggests, all of this was made possible by countless administrative errors and the impatience of two governments desperate to prove their military might.

Australia’s Anglophilic prime minister Robert Menzies is usually seen as bearing a heavy responsibility for this episode. But other Australian ministers and departmental officials were also complicit in the testing. Placated by booze and women, these politicians toddle along behind their British counterparts, leaving a trail of destruction. But for fictional attorney-general Dick Wilcox (Tony Martin), who has hopes of overthrowing Menzies, the happenings at Maralinga present an opportunity to win favour within the party.

Despite their vices and ambition, the one thing the politicians in Operation Buffalo seem conflicted by is the presence of Aboriginal people at Maralinga. At the beginning of the series, the defence minister asks Wilcox about the inhabitants of the Maralinga lands. “We both know there are people out here Dick, don’t we?” he asks nervously. Wilcox responds with a sigh, “Depends how the Constitution defines people.” This sentiment slowly unravels as several of the main characters are confronted head-on with the reality that Aboriginal people inhabit the test area. No amount of denial — government or otherwise — can change that fact.

But Britain’s testing program needed to maintain the illusion of terra nullius in order to be legitimate. This meant denying the presence of Aboriginal people, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Having intimately researched this history, I found Operation Buffalo’s depiction of the systematic erasure of Aboriginal peoples to be its most important contribution. Characters in the series look an Aboriginal woman, Ruby (Frances Djulibing), and her children in the eyes and deny their existence. The lack of humanity afforded to Ruby’s family will evoke shame or disbelief in many viewers.

Ruby’s fictional story echoes the tale of a very real Aboriginal family, the Milpuddies. Mother Edie, father Charlie and their two children were found with their dingoes within the Maralinga testing range in 1957. Having spent the night sleeping on the sand near the bomb crater of Marcoo, they were decontaminated by soldiers and driven to Yalata mission. They spoke no English and didn’t understand why they weren’t supposed to walk on Country. In Operation Buffalo, Ruby’s story follows a different trajectory, but her very existence highlights the stark fact that this was not terra nullius.

One character in Operation Buffalo is more aware of this reality than others. Dalgleish (Angus McLaren) — nicknamed “Orange” by Ruby and her family — is Maralinga’s “border rider” whose job is to secure the perimeter of the testing zone. This is official jargon for keeping Aboriginal people out. Dalgleish’s character is cleverly spun off the real-life figure of Walter MacDougall, who patrolled the missile testing range at Woomera, in South Australia, from 1947 on. Once the nuclear tests commenced, he was promoted to native patrol officer and given the job of patrolling 100,000 square kilometres of desert. MacDougall’s knowledge of Aboriginal people is echoed by Dalgleish, who provides the camp’s only means of interacting with Aboriginal people.

MacDougall’s real-life role at Maralinga, and the effects of the tests on Aboriginal communities, was captured in the documentary Maralinga Tjarutja. Screened the week before Operation Buffalo’s first episode, it was intended to provide viewers with a better understanding of what unfolded at Maralinga. The documentary was created in close collaboration with the Maralinga Tjarutja community, which has been displaced from the lands encompassed by the Maralinga Prohibited Area since the early 1950s. Photographs, paintings, landscapes and stories highlight how this vibrant landscape was peopled for tens of thousands of years prior to the tests. Viewing the series in tandem with Maralinga Tjarutja makes Operation Buffalo’s satire all the more striking and uncomfortable.

In taking its viewers into South Australia’s deserts and the centre of Australia’s nuclear past, Operation Buffalo grapples intimately with the history of Britain’s nuclear testing. While the story of Maralinga is a decidedly Australian one, the series encapsulates the broader peculiarities of the cold war period. Through its quirky characters and engaging plot, viewers are provoked to laugh, to question, to feel emotions ranging from guilt to disbelief, and — it’s to be hoped — to pursue the history of this period further. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Before the dust settled appeared first on Inside Story.

Behind the series is an impressive team of creators and commentators, including executive producer Alan Erson, former head of ABC Factual, and director Nik Wansbrough, who has made a range of documentaries that push the boundaries of presentation and special effects. Greg Wilesmith, with his distinguished track record as a foreign correspondent, shares the writing credits with journalist and filmmaker Simon Nasht.

It’s an ambitious venture, based on the premise that the world has changed at unprecedented speed and scale over the past three decades. Unprecedented? Tell that to Vasily Grossman, who lived through the Russian revolution, the siege of Stalingrad and the darkest phase of Soviet terror. Tell anyone who lived through the two world wars, with all the consequent geopolitical, industrial and technological transformations.

Perhaps what is unprecedented is how events are recorded and relayed across the world in an around-the-clock feedback loop of ever more sensational “breaking news.” Yes, this is a crisis-ridden era, but we have become addicted to crises.

This means that a retrospective account of the biggest crises of our time might be an opportunity not just to gain some perspective on the events themselves but also to explore how they have been imprinted on public consciousness. Is this series offering that kind of critical distance?

The narrative arc of Road to Now begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which is revisited at the start of each episode. “It was pandemonium, but it was good pandemonium,” says former foreign correspondent Peter Cave, who was there. There was “a huge sense of history,” adds former foreign minister Gareth Evans, “a sense that the tectonic plates really had shifted and the world was a different place.”

As one oppressed country after another broke free, the Soviet Union disintegrated. But, as British historian Niall Ferguson reflects, the complacency in Washington about the apparent triumph of Western democracy and capitalism was soon shaken. When the tectonic shifts broke up Yugoslavia, the result was civil war and then genocide. The Blair government in London joined with Washington to force NATO’s hand on military intervention and discovered a taste for “hard power” that would lead to dire consequences in Iraq. The most important lesson to be learned, in Ferguson’s view, is that things fall apart.

So do thematic and narrative lines. In some respects, this series is a response to the loss of narrative cohesion in public consciousness. In a movie or a novel, the fall of the Berlin Wall would either be the buoyant ending or the beginning of an arc that moves through trouble and trauma to a state of renewed hope. That’s not what has happened, and it’s not where we are. Traditions of storytelling could make sense of a Trump presidency followed by the election of Obama, but how do we deal with it backwards?

The first episode of Road to Now seems to pose exactly that question. CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour strikes a sombre note, speculating that history moves in circles. “I hope there’s incremental progress,” she says. But with the 9/11 attacks on America, and the ongoing mayhem caused by the US response, it’s hard to sustain such a hope.

When Shakespeare’s Othello declares, “Chaos is come again,” the disasters that follow are more a consequence of how he sees things than of any objective state of affairs. He’s too ready to listen to perniciously distorted reports from his counsellor Iago, who steers events in the opposite direction from reason, responsibility and justice. It’s not hard to see an analogy here with manipulative agents in the twenty-first-century media who trade in wilful distortion.

Curiously, the media is not a key focus in any of the episodes, which are organised on the themes of conflict, leadership, freedom, dictatorship, global communications and natural disaster. (They left out pandemics, too.) As the current rolling cycle of breaking news presents what former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang calls “a crisis on top of a crisis on top of a crisis,” we are in a new order of immediacy. One of the problems for this documentary is that last month, last week and even yesterday are no longer “now.”

That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the series had more structural and thematic clarity. Because the episode themes overlap, the same events are revisited several times, often without any deepening of perspective. Presenter Chris Bath is not at her best with this kind of material, and her rather leaden delivery only highlights the problems of an undercooked script. We really do need some verve and command in the voice, and Amanpour’s appearance as an interview subject only serves to remind us of what is missing.

The compensating factor is a suite of interviews with people with valuable insights and perspectives. Stan Grant speaks from his extensive experience as a foreign correspondent who has had to cut through the political spin as conflicts and crises were unfolding. Niall Ferguson has a genuine flair for metanarrative — perhaps you need to be a historian to have a cogent grasp of the present as a manifestation of evolving factors — and few people in Australia are better placed to comment on strategic and defence policy than the ANU’s Hugh White.

Perhaps the series would have worked better if, rather than chopping up the interviews and interspersing them with the archive footage, these authoritative voices had served to carry the whole narrative. Or perhaps the quest for perspective and authority is itself misguided.

A sense of “how things connect” may be a futile expectation. We are used to thinking that hindsight has some special value, and that the “judgement of history” will be greater and wiser. But there are times in history when the road to now is so rocky and haphazard that attempts at coherent understanding will be shaken apart at the next swerve in the road. How do we prepare for that? •

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Television’s arrival in 1956 brought a fierce new competitor. Movie theatres closed around the country, further damaging the prospects for a local industry. But the new medium also laid the foundations of the 1970s revival of Australian filmmaking by training cinematographers, producers, directors, writers and actors and enabling them to develop professional careers at home. It also taught audiences to enjoy dramas about people like themselves, helping create an appetite for Australian feature films and the kind of theatre that emerged in the 1970s.

As they became aware of the opportunities likely to open up in television, many Australian writers headed to Britain to learn about the new medium first-hand. Some of Australia’s leading dramatists spent most of their careers in Britain or America: Sumner Locke Elliott, whose Rusty Bugles of 1948 foreshadowed the postwar theatre revival, spent the 1950s as a television writer in New York; and the authors of two other suburban-realist plays, Richard Beynon (The Shifting Heart, 1957) and Alan Seymour (The One Day of the Year, 1960), soon followed Ray Lawler to British television. Ralph Peterson was writing for stage and television in Britain in the early 1950s and Peter Yeldham headed there in 1956, convinced that prospects for television writers would be limited in Australia.

Writers who stayed home, meanwhile, struggled to teach themselves how to write in the new medium. Hugh Stuckey had been writing radio sketch material for years when he was asked to write comedy material for the television variety show Sydney Tonight in 1957. His training consisted of a visit to the studios and an explanation of the set and positioning of the cameras. Then he was sent home to write. Like other writers in early television, he watched how the American and British writers tackled the task — though they, too, were transferring skills learnt from radio.

Cliff Green was working as a schoolteacher in a Victorian country town when he wrote his first television script, Christmas at Boggy Creek (1963), based on a Christmas play he had written for his students to perform. He had sent it to the ABC as a potential radio play but they suggested he adapt it for television. At the time he had no access to a television — country Victoria had no television reception — so he relied on a BBC how-to-write-for-television book. “I did an adaptation of it and I sent that off and they made it,” he told me. “So here I was — first script produced!”

After writing the children’s series Riverboat Bill for the ABC and lots of educational scripts for the state education department, Green was snapped up by Crawford Productions, which was desperate for writers. In 1969, he made the big decision to give up the security of schoolteaching for the life of a television writer. With Yeldham and Eleanor Witcombe, he was to become one of the leading adapters of classic Australian novels for television.

Tony Morphett had more conventional literary ambitions, publishing three novels and writing plays while he did interviews for the ABC’s Talks Department and made documentaries for radio and television. On the strength of his published novels, he was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant to write another novel. But then he met the Welshman Glyn Davies, a veteran of British television, who went on to pitch a series based on Morphett’s novel Dynasty (1970) to the ABC. The series was a success and Morphett became a television writer.

“What I found, at the age of thirty-four, years ago, when I went out into the wide world from the ABC and stumbled into being a television drama writer, I found I loved it,” he said in an interview for the Australian Writers Foundation/Foxtel Oral History Project. “I loved the collaborative process. I didn’t at first; I was a monster! I wouldn’t let them change a comma. I would go to a read-through and give an actor line readings. I mean, I was a beast!”

Advertising was so closely allied to commercial radio and television that the shift from one industry to the other seemed logical. Ted Roberts, for example, was working as an advertising manager for Johnson’s Wax in 1968 when he was asked through friends to write the words for the theme music of the children’s series Skippy. He took the results to Lee Robinson at Fauna Productions, who suggested he try writing a script for the show and gave him a sample script to take home. When he turned up on Monday morning with his own script, Robinson was surprised but gave him a cheque on the spot. It was more than a month’s salary at Johnson’s Wax, so he quit his job to write for television. “I got into it by sheer accident,” he told me. “Sheer accident! And I loved it. I had no experience; I had no training; I had nothing. But I just sort of took to it somehow.”

Though the evolution of television drama is often discussed separately from developments in film and stage drama, the small screen played an important role in reinvigorating both art forms. By the end of the 1960s, with a new generation of actors and playwrights emerging from the universities and drama schools, stage drama had begun a resurgence. In Sydney, the conglomerate of drama interests around the University of New South Wales (the National Institute of Dramatic Art, the School of Drama and the Old Tote Theatre Company) set up a theatre in a disused church in Jane Street, Randwick, to produce new Australian plays. Its success was mixed until 1970, when Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis’s The Legend of King O’Malley energised its audiences with a mix of satire, music, vaudeville and some serious political comment on Australia’s rowdy history and its current involvement in the Vietnam war.

Histories of Australian drama refer to these developments in Australian theatre as the “New Wave,” marking its Sydney emergence with King O’Malley and the growing number of actors and producers studying at NIDA. Simultaneously in Melbourne, the Australian Performing Group grew out of small-scale experimental productions by university graduates at La Mama cafe and later the Pram Factory. This group of writers, actors and producers, influenced by the political crisis brought on by the Vietnam war, were determined to make theatre that was radical in its style and its politics.

This group, which included David Williamson, John Romeril and Jack Hibberd, participated in every aspect of production, sometimes acting in their own or each other’s plays and collaborating with other young creative people. They were aware of the history of Australian theatre and the importance of vaudeville and musical traditions in popular theatre, and some of their productions were agitprop or influenced by the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.

Plays like Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola (1969) and John Romeril’s The Floating World (1974) mined some of the same traditions that Boddy and Ellis employed in King O’Malley. Indeed, Dimboola and King O’Malley have remained popular, making them two of the most performed Australian plays in amateur theatre.

Much has been written about the New Wave drama of the 1970s and its revitalisation of Australian theatre. It seems important to emphasise that this drama was written by people who had encountered Australian television and participated in its production, and that the producers of stage drama and television drama were not separate groups of people.

What would the history of Australian drama look like if its list of the significant productions of the 1960s was broadened to include Charmian Clift’s television adaptation of My Brother Jack (1965) and Richard Lane’s of You Can’t See Round Corners (1967)? Looking at drama history that way would certainly extend the range and depth in the criticism of national attitudes evident in stage productions of the time. It might lead to a more sophisticated account of the development of realism as a dramatic style, rather than its simplistic dismissal as an outdated and conservative form.

The excitement of working in a new or revitalised industry in the 1970s was shared across stage, television and film. The writers, actors and producers of television drama were likely to see all the new local films and stage dramas. Some of them were also writing, acting in or producing these films and stage dramas.

When he became the ABC’s senior television drama producer in Melbourne in 1970, Oscar Whitbread went to every production of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Australian Performing Group, keeping a look out for talent, particularly acting talent. As a result, APG actors appeared in many of the ABC’s televised playhouse productions in the 1970s, becoming familiar to much bigger audiences than they reached in the theatre.

One example of the interchange between television drama, film and the theatre was Whitbread’s casting of APG actors including Graeme Blundell and Kerry Dwyer in Cliff Green’s four-part drama Marion in 1973. When Peter Weir was seeking a screen adaptation for Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) he approached an overcommitted David Williamson, who recommended Green on the strength of the scripts his APG colleagues had shown him. In this way, Green, the scriptwriter for children’s shows, Crawford’s Homicide and ABC miniseries adaptations, came to write the film generally regarded as the turning point for the New Wave of Australian filmmaking in the 1970s.

Tony Morphett, now known mainly as a television writer, co-wrote the screenplay for Weir’s second success, The Last Wave (1977). Weir hired him because he had seen Morphett’s television series Certain Women (1973) and wanted the writer to give the film a grounding in contemporary reality to support its more fantastic elements. Morphett commented that his television work effectively subsidised his writing for the film. In a similar way, Australia’s pre-eminent playwright, David Williamson, became better known to many Australians as the writer of Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) than for his stage plays.

These three writers, Green, Morphett and Williamson, were integral to the success of Weir’s early films, just as they were important to the development of quality Australian television drama. Weir himself had begun his screen career as a television production assistant on The Mavis Bramston Show.

Other television writers wrote the screenplays for the landmark Australian films Sunday Too Far Away (1975, John Dingwall) and My Brilliant Career (1979, Eleanor Witcombe). The training they received writing for television was an essential background to the revival of Australian film, and for most of them television provided the financial support that stage and film could not.

The development of the “New Waves” of Australian stage drama and Australian film occurred in tandem, pushed along by a range of social and political changes. Australian television was the third part of that New Wave — except that, of course, it was not a revival of a previously existing phenomenon but a new and rapidly changing technology. •

This is an edited extract from Susan Lever’s new book, Creating Australian Television Drama: A Screenwriting History, published this month by Australian Scholarly Publishing

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In the mangrove swamps that harbour crab colonies, a lone fisherman has found another kind of catch: a headless body. The lurking crocodiles are not the only predators claiming territory here because they, it seems, are not responsible for the decapitation.

Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), sent from “down south” to investigate, arrives at nightfall. In the opening frames of the first episode, a low-angled shot, backlit by the tail-lights of his truck, gives us a close-up of boots hitting the ground as he walks to the crime scene in darkness.

This sequence echoes Swan’s arrival in season one, as if to remind us that whatever happens here will be discovered by those who tune in to the lie of the land. Nothing stays buried permanently, as archaeologist Sandra Elmquist (Sofia Helin) is determined to prove, though she unearths a lot more than she bargained for.

Swan’s presence stirs everything up — or rather, everyone. He interferes with established hierarchies at the police station, has a stand-off with a community lawman and clashes with the owner of a major trucking station outside the town. He also pays an unwanted visit to his ex-wife Mary (Tasma Walton), who hands him a box of his possessions and leaves him standing on the doorstep.

Given his propensity to do and say almost nothing during these confrontations, he’s an odd sort of catalyst, impervious to all the passions, convictions and determinations that drive people to do what they do. Jay Swan just wants to know what they’ve done; the strategies they use to prevent intervention, however ingenious, are irrelevant. So he stands there, feet firmly planted, arms in gun-ready position, watching for whatever might come up. Nothing unnerves him.

It takes some nerve for an actor to sustain the unvarying stance and monotone delivery, and draw instead on an inner authority in the character to sustain the confidence that the performance won’t fall flat. Australian television drama is so plagued with overblown sentiment (Stateless being a recent culprit) that I wish there were an Aaron Pedersen school of acting.

In interviews, Pedersen talks about maintaining “the framework of the character” over the seven years since Ivan Sen made the original Mystery Road feature film. This, rather than the display of emotion, is the television actor’s job. Everyone is to some degree an enigma in a good crime series, and no one more so than the detective at the centre of it. There are mystery roads in everyone.

Pedersen’s command of this stoic principle invites comparison with Sofia Helin’s compelling performance as Saga, the detective with Asperger’s syndrome in The Bridge. The scenes between the two of them in Mystery Road are brief but create a meeting point between two wonderfully nuanced interpreters of human communication.

The storyline surrounding Helin’s character, an archaeology professor from a Swedish university, adds a new edge to cultural tensions already in play among the Indigenous community of Gideon, the small town where the murders are taking place. Obsessive and self-involved, she works at her dig site alone, continuing into the night hours to the accompaniment of “Laudate Dominum” played on a portable sound system. The music, along with the variety of spirituality it expresses, is an alien import.

Sandra’s overriding determination to find evidence of prehistoric Aboriginal technologies combines with an obtuseness towards the cultural life going on around her in the present. As the local people talk, sing, drink and quarrel, she literally has her head in the sand, desperate to resist any interference, including that of a roaming detective who might take an interest in some all-too-recent human remains.

Strong performances also come from Jada Alberts as the young local officer assigned to assist Swan in his enquiries and Stan Yarramunua as Jimmy Two, the self-appointed guardian of traditional law and lore. But as in season one, this is essentially an ensemble cast, again brought together by casting director Anousha Zarkesh. It is the mood and milieu of community life that gives the series its dynamic psychological texture.

Everything about the production communicates a sense of natural authority. There are no indulgences. The writing team has created a script that’s as dry as the land, relying on the inherent power of the story and setting to carry the impact. If emotions run high around here, it’s in ways that don’t communicate through dialogue. Fights are part of life.

So is music, and songs bring out emotional dimensions that are suppressed in the Spartan dialogue. In the evenings, the community gathers round the outdoor bar, bringing their quarrels with them, and listen to an array of live performers including the Saltwater Band and Fitzroy Xpress. Thematic keynotes are carried on the soundtrack, with abrasive renditions of “Rainmaker” and “Break the Silence” from Southeast Desert metal, “Rise Up” from Daphne Willis, and the haunting lyrics of RillaKill’s heavy metal “My Time Is Comin’” playing across the opening titles of each episode.

And then there is the cinematography. Warwick Thornton, who in collaboration with Wayne Blair also directs, has taken over the photographic direction from Mark Wareham (cinematographer for season one) and continues the visual romance with landscape and natural light. This place is stunningly beautiful, but also so vast and strange it dwarfs all human affairs, even the most extreme. In one scene, a man is being tortured and his scream as the ordeal ramps up is merged with the cry of birds; the scene cuts to an image of the flock rising high over the waters in deep twilight.

There are too many detective series on television. I weary of murder stories (even though I used to write the damn things myself), but every so often one with some real originality emerges. For its stringent scripting, its ensemble performance and its visual poetry, Mystery Road is in a class of its own in Australian television drama. •

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What makes a television drama addictive? This is a very different question from that of what makes good viewing, episode by episode. It’s less about the objective qualities of acting, script and production and more about what draws you into an imagined world and holds you there. This might account for the prevalence of fantasy in the list of recommendations, despite the fact that most of my respondents were of a sceptical turn of mind.

While many of the strongest dramatic series explore how fantasy and realism leak into each other, it is usually clear how the two are weighted. Genre elements with origins in manga, supernatural mythologies and tales of parallel worlds figure prominently on the fantasy side of the equation. Doctor Who and The X-Files (neither of which appears on my list) led the way in establishing mass audiences and an enduring, largely juvenile fan base.

Twin Peaks (1990–91), which did get mentions, took supernaturalism to another level with its portrayal of a small-town community invaded by powerful dark energies. A plot centred on the mysterious disappearance of seventeen-year-old Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the town’s homecoming queen, allowed auteur director David Lynch to create a wry blend of conventional thriller elements and metaphysical themes. The metaphysics became more overt as the story progressed, but if it sometimes burdened the episodes with too much portentous meaning, the allure of a youthful cast and the stunning mountain scenery of Washington State kept you charmed.

The long-awaited sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return, a form of epilogue aired in 2017 with a cast that had aged twenty-five years, took off into an esoteric phantasmagoria that was strictly for Lynch addicts, leaving the original Twin Peaks fans largely baffled and resentful. Sophistication can be a drawcard — one frequently rejected, or at least underestimated, by producers — but it needs to be combined with some more directly appealing elements.

Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things (2016–) gets the formula just about right, balancing ingenuous fantasy with complex social and psychological perspectives. Season one, with a group of perfectly cast child actors to inject humour and vitality, was equal parts ET and X-Files. In accord with convention, when a portal opens between worlds, children become the go-betweens, outpacing the adult detectives as they hare off into the night on their bikes, hot on the trail of missing school friends, paranormal monsters, nefarious scientists or groups of dangerous feral teenagers just a few years older than themselves.

No good fantasy series lacks a virus on the loose, and conspiracy theories are of the essence. “A virus is alive. It has intelligence,” pronounces a white-coated expert, and furthermore, “it’s connecting all the hosts.” Teamwork — as demonstrated by our redoubtable gang of twelve-year-olds — will be required to defeat it, as they too are brilliant at making connections.

Portal myths are traditionally associated with a coming-of-age theme, and in Stranger Things this is handled with genuine insight. The children at the centre of the story are a lot more interesting as individuals than the Harry Potter crew. We are spared hackneyed scenes of first romance or identity crisis. This is an adult perspective on the trials of youth, though appropriate for family viewing with children over twelve.

The Leftovers (2014–17), one of the most confronting portal dramas in the television repertoire, is strictly for adults. As one of my respondents said, it is a flawed masterpiece: highly original in conception, and with multiple storylines running in unexpected directions. At times this makes for rather messy episodes — too much happens and every event is laden with backstory — but if you stick with it, the series rewards with a potent evolution of its dramatic world over three seasons.

Season one is set in a town in New York state in the aftermath of “The Departure,” a global event in which 140 million people suddenly and unaccountably vanished. Some have interpreted this as the biblical Rapture, that moment when those who are to be saved are swept up from the earth. A cult calling itself “the guilty remnant” have formed around this conviction. The presence of local branch members, standing white-clothed and silent on street corners, casts a pall over the town.

The storylines involve a group of local people who refuse to embrace the misery. A police officer (Justin Theroux), whose wife has joined the cult, a woman who has lost her whole family (Carrie Coon), and her brother (Christopher Eccleston), a priest who battles against the Rapture doctrine, are each in their different ways striving for sanity in a world in which the very foundations of meaning have been shattered. This is a wounded society haunted by the ubiquitous figure of the cult leader (Ann Dowd), who personifies its trauma.

A new upbeat theme song for season two — Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be” — signals that the series has hit its stride and found its tone. The group of determined survivors heads for a town in Texas where there were no disappearances. Here another kind of cult prevails, a new-age movement that promotes miracle healing and has turned the local park into a permanent psychic fair evocative of the hippy renaissance at Haight-Ashbury. But the need for faith grips like a vice, with violent consequences.

Season three, where the scene moves to the open landscapes of central Australia, progresses more slowly. There’s an aura of David Lynch about it as encounters between isolated figures in the vast outback terrain alternate between absurdism and surreal nightmare. David Gulpilil, who makes a cameo appearance, allegedly unnerved the producers by saying he doesn’t read scripts. But Gulpilil is a script. Although he says almost nothing, the face speaks volumes and conveys a form of knowing that the relentless seekers in this drama crave.

If portal dramas can play across a spectrum from stern rationalism to the domains of the psychic, The Leftovers is situated about midway. Let the mystery be. If you are a confirmed sceptic, that series might help to soften you up for The OA (2016 and 2019), the brainchild of writers Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, who also plays the lead role. Here we have an inverse situation: missing people return from another dimension. The first of the reappearances is a young woman who has been gone seven years. Once blind, she can now see. Declaring herself the Original Angel (OA), she claims she can bring back other missing people if only she can convince those in our world to follow her lead.

It’s a bold and genre-defying venture, unashamedly dispensing with accepted dramatic logic but staunchly keeping faith with its own terms of insight. Netflix produced only two of its planned five seasons, but its cult following has spawned a “renewal movement” on the internet.

Exchanging the OA for the austere environment of the OI (Office of Interchange), a strange UN bureaucracy based in Berlin, Counterpart (2017–19) offers a treatment of the portal theme that is more Kafka than Jung. The OI monitors a secret interface between dimensions. In its grey corridors and offices, the work seems as banal as anywhere else to Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons), a self-effacing middle-aged employee. But Silk suddenly acquires importance when his double — a confident and assertive negotiator — appears on the other side and demands an exchange of places. Dramatically cogent and superbly acted, it repays the concentration needed to follow the complex power play that unfolds.

“The past is a foreign country” L.P. Hartley famously wrote in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, and if you are in the mood for going between worlds, many historical series offer this kind of imaginative tourism. Nominations on my list included Versailles, Wolf Hall, Babylon Berlin and Mad Men.

Hartley’s dictum should be heeded. Producers and dramaturges who take on a period piece in order to show how very contemporary its world really was can be just as annoying as tourists who tramp around foreign countries wanting things to be just like home. The real challenge is to take on the strangeness of another era: in its language and codes of behaviour, its power structures and habits of life.

As befits its subject, Versailles (2015–) is a dazzling visual extravaganza. No expense has been spared in evoking the legendary theatrical tableaux of the Sun King’s reign, and every aspect of costume and setting is expertly researched. For all its research, though, it’s a quasi-historical epic, bent on showing us how like today’s young adults these cavorting aristocrats really were. They were into sex and power, and sex as power, and all that. Their sense of image set a standard no Vogue cover shoot could emulate. And, of course, the cast are young and beautiful and seductive.

A trawl through the portrait gallery on Google provides abundant evidence that Louis XIV was never pretty. He had enough Habsburg blood to ensure he was endowed with the ironic curse of that dynasty: when it came to the attributes of human beauty, inbreeding had earned them a genetic bypass. His sense of theatricality and image was indeed extraordinary but had little to do with the kinds of aspiration that drive today’s fashionistas. He was a hardhead who reinvented the divine power of the monarch for an age in which pre-eminence was assured through a blend of mesmerism and intimidation. The iconography of the Roi Soleil was drawn from esoteric symbolism, occult architecture and an alchemy created from the new technology of mirrors. Apparently, though, talk about sex is so much more interesting to twenty-first-century audiences.

Wolf Hall, reviewed here in 2015, doesn’t succumb to the temptations of pseudo-contemporaneity. Hilary Mantel, author of the novels on which the series is based, declares that history is “the absolute foundation” of everything she does, and by that she doesn’t just mean getting the costume details right. Mantel understands the psycho-dynamics of Tudor power play like no one else, and from this weaves a suspenseful narrative in which each of the lead characters knows their destiny is at stake at every turn. A stellar cast is led by Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell.

When it comes to historical dramas of the modern era, there are nuanced generic elements to draw on. The production team for Babylon Berlin (2017–), set in the Weimar era, decided to go for the sepia tones and misty cinematography of neo-noir rather than the jarring expressionist aesthetic characteristic of the period. This gives it a certain softness around the edges: no one is ever quite sure what they are seeing, or hearing.

Scenes of squalid domestic life are offset by the glamour of the cabaret scene, evoked through a recreation of the Moka Efti, the largest and most extravagant venue in Berlin. There are topless flappers, banana-dance troupes, and drag queens. Singers — including Bryan Ferry, who advised on the music repertoire for the series — exude dark sexuality and drool insinuating, apocalyptic lyrics into the microphones.

This is a world on the edge, but on the edge of what? At the time, nobody knew, though disturbing international movements were afoot. A strong central plotline, involving liaison between a Trotskyist organisation and the German Communist Party, keeps the dramatic momentum going through the first two seasons. With season three, world events heat up as the Berlin stock exchange crashes, assassinations and bombings disrupt the life of the city, and the Hitler Youth are on the rise.

It’s compelling stuff, but dark. If you need something more exuberant to get you through the lockdown, history and fantasy meet in the unique world of Mad Men (2007–15), whose all-round brilliance and freshness is undimmed by the passage of time. •

Read Jane Goodall’s earlier lock-down selection…

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But in these days of confinement, television has its place as a form of domestic escapism, and escapism doesn’t have to mean the televisual equivalent of a tray of donuts. The fact that we can easily draw on a vast repertoire of fine programs means it’s worth revisiting some of the best series for a binge viewing experience that takes us into the more diverse realities of a world before Covid-19 monomania took hold.

Aware of the variety of tastes and moods catered for in television drama, I asked friends on social media for their nominations. They certainly were eclectic. So much so that I decided to turn this review into a double episode covering the widest possible range of suggestions.

Three dozen respondents nominated more than fifty programs, with only seven scoring more than one vote and none scoring more than three. All of which serves to endorse my instinct that, as far as television is concerned, top-ten lists don’t mean much. With nominations distributed across Scandi-noir, sci-fi, the western, the spy thriller, period dramas and political sagas, there was no convergence on genre either.

For all the diversity, though, one of the fascinations of revisiting past favourites is a refreshed awareness of how series talk among themselves, their themes and preoccupations often merging in counterintuitive ways. Among the nominations were some vintage series that, viewed now, present sharply predictive scenarios.

The BBC series A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–88), scripted by Andrew Davies, is set in an English midlands university where an ethos of 1970s radicalism and permissiveness is degenerating into a form of institutional psychopathology. Peter Davison, following a four-year term as Dr Who, plays a very ordinary doctor who is recruited to the campus medical practice, where his first experience is a team meeting at which ominous signs of cultural change are evident. The vice-chancellor is “baying for cuts” and his emissary, a prissy corporate numbers man played with subtle comedic genius by David Troughton, announces that the sick bay is no longer cost-effective.

Over the course of two seasons, the old-guard academics who drink on the job and invite students home for group sex are progressively replaced, along with most of the disciplines they taught, or at least were supposed to. The medical practice and its services are relentlessly stripped back and converted to the new corporate model. Those working in universities now are still living with the consequences of the zealotry with which changes like those really were made. As a portrait of cultural transition, the series is stringently incisive and very funny.

For my money, Edge of Darkness (1985), a six-part thriller from the same era, is one of the best-ever BBC series. While very much a reflection of its time, it also remains uncannily contemporary. Troy Kennedy-Martin’s stark script is free of the naiveties and indulgences that often jar in the dramatic visions of an earlier generation. The cast, led by Royal Shakespeare company stalwarts Bob Peck, Zoë Wanamaker, Charles Kay and John Woodvine, work as an ensemble, giving intuitive pace and tone to every scene. And with theme music by Eric Clapton, the atmosphere reverberates long after the credits have rolled past.

Set in Yorkshire mining country, the series tells an essentially grim story. Peck plays Ronnie Craven, a senior police officer whose daughter is shot as they make their way home together one rainy night after a student protest in which she played a key role. Was she, or her father, the intended target? As he delves, Craven discovers that his daughter has been involved in planning a daring underground expedition to expose the existence of an American-sponsored plutonium reactor in an old mine shaft.

When CIA agent Darius Jedburgh (Joe Don Baker) arrives on the scene, it isn’t at all clear whose interests he’s serving. But he strikes an immediate rapport with Craven, despite the two men being opposites: Craven a thwarted idealist, shrewd, steely and (understandably) melancholic; Jedburgh a born cynic and ever-smiling rogue who rushes back from negotiations in Afghanistan to be in time for a round of golf and the next episode of Come Dancing. Together, they embark on an underground odyssey to penetrate the hot cell, through which they wrestle a form of anarchic triumph from tragedy. (Baker’s performance is so winning that his character still has an active fan base on Facebook.)

What these two BBC classics have in common is the sense of a world being steered into a prolonged and ultimately disastrous endgame. In both, the arc of dramatic tension is driven by the mounting urgency of a moral reckoning. More than three decades later, as the powerful recent BBC/HBO series Years and Years shows, we are still in this endgame.

Revisiting some of the American repertoire that has appealed to my respondents, I am struck by the contrast in mythos. The West Wing (1999–2006) and The Sopranos (1999–2007) were epoch-making sagas whose influence brought television into a league of political and social relevance that had previously been reserved for classic theatre. How do they stand up to reacquaintance?

Aaron Sorkin, with his reinvention of Marx Brothers smart talk as a form of rapid-fire professional dialogue, was the genius behind The West Wing. But he created a genre that needed the right actors to bring it to life. Groucho’s lines only work when Groucho speaks them. Martin Sheen led a cast that combined psychological rigour with the timing of higher-end vaudeville performers. Episodes were brilliantly structured, weaving threads of romance, farce and political intrigue into a mosaic that deepened over the years.

And yet. In the era of Trump, much of this comes across as painfully self-indulgent. There’s something tacky about the insistent cleverness of the talk. President Jed Bartlet, whose guiding lights are the Bible and the dictionary (both of which he seems to know by heart), sets out to demonstrate that you can say a lot of good things in the rarefied domain of the West Wing and then go right ahead and do them, with The American People as appreciative but silent witnesses. Bartlet is surrounded by smart, honourable men — and a few smart, honourable women, though the only one with any professional clout is the redoubtable press secretary, C.J. Cregg, played with suitable aplomb by Allison Janney.

And the Republicans, too, are honourable men. This is Capitol Hill as John Winthrop might have dreamed it when he preached about “the city upon a hill” in 1630. Meanwhile, in the real world, the neocons were in command of a White House buzzing with hysterical propaganda about weapons of mass destruction. The West Wing gives us the administration that never was, a daydream of Democrats whose image of themselves as super-smart, ethical citizens provoked Steve Bannon into driving a cleaver through the moral high ground they claimed as their own.

The series explored some serious moral ambiguities in its later years but never lost its self-deluding sentimentality. Idealism and sentimentalism may be false friends, but they are often found in company, blocking out the more confronting realities of the world. Bannon is a figure beyond the ken of President Bartlet, and John Winthrop would surely never have envisaged the horrors of a mafia regime, or the depravities of the Wild West.

The Sopranos, exactly contemporary with The West Wing, tells an alternative American story about the dynamics of power. “They needed us to build their cities, their subways and to make ’em richer,” says Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). “Some of us wanted a piece of the action. We had the balls to take what we wanted.” Gandolfini, whose performance drew comparisons with Brando, had the method actor’s way of absorbing the entire physiology and psychology of the character. Asked in an Actor’s Studio interview what he would like to hear God say when he arrived at the pearly gates, he didn’t miss a beat. “Take over for a while, I’ll be right back.”

The language of the Bronx is a world away from the repartee of Harvard graduates, but it has an equally finely tuned range of nuances, with an added element of dramatic tension. In The Sopranos, an exchange of smart talk is usually just foreplay to the next outburst of violence. The series’s intricately scored but unrelenting succession of violent reprisals raises questions about how deep the American heritage of civil society really runs, even at the turn of the second millennium.

That question continues to haunt in The Wire (2002–08) and Deadwood (2004–06), each of which gained a couple of votes from my respondents. Deadwood’s violence has nothing intricate about it, and nor does its dialogue. If you don’t know the series (and I didn’t), don’t expect instant immersion. A newly imagined account of small-town life in the black hills of Dakota during the gold rush years of the 1870s, it’s a maelstrom of punch-ups interspersed with competitions in verbal obscenity and terminal engagements with the liquor bottle.

Once you get accustomed to the milieu, though, other qualities emerge. The language is a kind of punk poetry in which the repetitive swearing creates bizarre cadences and cross-rhythms. It’s as if the limited vocabulary is a straitjacket, putting human communication under constant, violent pressure, but if you stick with it, the series evolves into a portrayal of wider possibilities in human life and community. As an exercise in historical sociology, Deadwood is extraordinarily insightful and well researched, and has a first-rate cast. Robin Weigert’s performance as Calamity Jane is a tour de force.

The Wire is also an acquired taste. It portrays life on the “killing streets” of Baltimore, as previously documented by scriptwriter and showrunner David Simon in Homicide, his book about a year as a journalist assigned to report on the activities of the Baltimore police. In the dramatisation, Simon set out to show that what was going on was not so much a war against drugs as a war on the underclass.

The series follows the attempts of detectives Moreland (Wendell Pierce) and McNulty (Dominic West) to penetrate the gang culture surrounding drug barons Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). In keeping with the real-life demographic, the majority of the cast members are African-American, many of them locals, and the dialogue, which captures the quality of gangland communication, is not always easy to follow or even hear.

Each season focuses on a different aspect of local culture: the drug trade, the waterfront, town hall politics, the school system and the press. With its exploration of the interplay between feral and institutional forms of power, The Wire takes a quantum leap in complexity. As much of a challenge to the concentration as a Conrad novel, it’s definitely not one for couch potatoes.

And that’s it for part one. In part two, I’ll look at some of the most original productions of the past decade. •

The post Compulsory viewing appeared first on Inside Story.

The trailer for the ABC’s new drama series Stateless is a succession of emotional surges, crosscutting scenes of distress, exultation, hysterical altercation and exuberant celebration. From the outset, it has been sold as a series built on great emotional intensity — a familiar strategy of the national broadcaster, which seems convinced that high drama is a drawcard.

No doubt there is a case for intensity in a series based on the story of Cornelia Rau, the German-born Australian citizen wrongfully incarcerated in Baxter detention centre for four months in late 2004 and early 2005. Rau’s story, recounted in meticulous detail by Robert Manne in the Monthly later in 2005, is strange and compelling, and continues to resonate in the national consciousness as a symptom of the disturbing political culture that took hold in the immigration department during the Howard years.

Rau was in her early thirties, and had been involved in Kenja, a Sydney sect run by a couple who preached a doctrine called “Energy Conversion,” when she began to experience psychotic episodes. Over the next five years, she led a chaotic existence punctuated by enforced hospitalisation. In 2003, she began attempting to escape the country by claiming to be a German backpacker and seeking a European passport. Found wandering on a remote road in Cape York the following year, she was questioned by Queensland police and turned over to the department as an illegal immigrant.

Interwoven with her story in Stateless are the experiences of an Afghan refugee, Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), who has lost all but one member of his family, and a newly appointed guard, Cam Sandford (Jai Courtney), who has taken on this well-paid work in order to keep his young family in a spacious home with a swimming pool. Yvonne Strahovski as Sofie Werner, the Rau figure, brings star power, along with Marta Dusseldorp as Werner’s sister, Asher Keddie as the director of the detention centre, and Cate Blanchett and Dominic West as the couple running the Kenja cult.

With such a strong cast, expectations run high. And these actors certainly help anchor the sprawling storylines by bringing vividness and presence. Yet there is little opportunity for them to give their characters psychological depth. Blanchett and West perfectly capture the behaviour of the cult leaders, but we get no sense of what might underlie it. It’s as if their scenes with Strahovski are a string of “moments” designed to show off the actors rather than explore the dangerous tensions arising as a vulnerable subject comes under the influence of a creepy mesmerist.

Sophie is being drawn into a psychodrama here, which is probably an accurate rendition of what happened. But psychodrama has a cheapening effect when it’s allowed to leak across to the wider story. As the camera lingers over faces in close-up, giving us protracted reaction shots during every tense exchange, the dramatic texture becomes relentlessly expressive and overly explicit.

Little room is left for irony or implication. When skilled actors try to create it — as Keddie does when her character attempts to hold to some kind of human rationality in the face of a departmental boss focused on “controlling the narrative” — they are undermined. The scripting and filming techniques have their own ways of exercising narrative control, and are designed to create the shortest route to the next showdown. As the conflicted Sandford, Courtney is likewise steered into scenes of angry confrontation and teary meltdown.

Perhaps my response to Stateless was exacerbated by having been subjected to repeated screenings of the trailer during promotion breaks in last month’s Four Corners special on the bushfires, one of the most powerful pieces of television I’ve seen. A protracted replay of a father and daughter, caught in an ember storm, trying to contain their panic as they battled to save their home and their lives, was intercut with clips of stagey hysteria and grief.

In real life, the most rational and controlled aspects of human behaviour often come to the fore in the midst of extreme experience. Emotional responses of terror, anguish or grief are not synchronous in the way some dramaturges like to pretend: they may occur a day, a week or even years later.

American essayist Leslie Jamison has written insightfully about dramatic empathy as “emotional theft.” While she resists censoriousness, she nevertheless finds “something troubling about a certain sort of fixation on pain.” Especially so, perhaps, when the pain is being experienced by people whose situation and experience are remote from our own. In the case of those held under cruel detention policies, can an invitation to empathy really be honest or meaningful?

As Ameer, Fayssal Bazzi carries an impossible burden of pathos. What do we know about this man other than that his life and his family have been destroyed? Bazzi works to give the character a more moderated register of behaviour and reaction. Called in for an interview that will decide his destiny, he behaves with impeccable courtesy and apparent composure, but under the table, one of his feet trembles. It’s the kind of subtle detail the series generally lacks, but it is spoiled by the camera zooming in for the inevitable close-up of the tremor.

Some of the supporting cast in the detention centre are former detainees. Collectively, they communicate something of the ambience as they experienced it. These places were not settings for personal dramas. Most of the time they were places of dismal monotony, filled with people thwarted for years on end in their quest for a longed-for change of destiny.

When the breakdowns came they were not in a form any camera would want to capture in close-up. On the testimony of psychiatrists eventually admitted to Baxter, some detainees were so deeply traumatised that they could no longer walk, and resorted to crawling to the toilet. Some refused to venture out into the daylight. Some had screaming fits. Self-harm was rife.

Manne’s summary of the psychiatric reports is grim reading. The truth is, few people would want to watch a dramatisation of what life in an immigration detention facility really was, and is, like. Rau herself was more than just volatile and unstable; at times she was in a state of severe psychosis. Strahovski’s performance shields us from the more confronting aspects of her condition, allowing us to “empathise” with a character who comes across as a free spirit caught in a trap.

“Mental illness should never be sentimentalised,” Manne says. “It is frightening and uncharming.” All the more so in the case of detainees stripped of hope and dignity. Although the story arcs for the main characters in this series don’t distort the harsher realities they faced, the overall rendition is governed by the conventions of sentimentality.

No doubt the intentions of those who created the series were ethical and responsible. Cate Blanchett, whose company Dirty Films was a production partner with Matchbox Pictures and Screen Australia, also had a hand in the script. Her stated concern with “the erosion of empathy” and determination not simply to preach to the converted has driven the project from the outset. But perhaps creating a dramatisation that is both widely engaging and true was always going to be impossible. •

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In each new season of Homeland, the opening episode presents a challenge. Viewers are pitched into situations of unrelenting complexity as CIA agents Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) dive deep into Middle East conflicts. As the main story arcs build in intensity, concentrated attention is well rewarded.

A close-knit team of writer/showrunners has been credited with astute anticipations of events in the real world. Threats to security have come from within the homeland as well as from the sinister heartlands of al Qaeda. Season seven featured a crazed shock jock planning a reprise of the American civil war and a president with a propensity for exercising military control when she feels herself threatened.

Since its debut in October 2011, soon after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the series has reflected the evolution of American political culture in ways that bring out the ironies of its title. The Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the attacks, immediately attracted cynicism, not least for the choice of its name. In the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan commented that the word “homeland” was “un-American and creepy.” But she also urged that Rudy Giuliani be appointed its inaugural head. “He is the symbol of Sept. 11 leadership and Sept. 11 suffering, of Sept. 11 success and American toughness,” she wrote.

That statement, like Giuliani’s public standing, has not aged well. Nor has the reputation of Giuliani’s own favoured candidate for the position, Bernard Kerik, who was subsequently imprisoned on an assortment of federal charges including tax fraud and making false statements. The cynicism vector has magnified over the eight years in which Homeland has been spinning its storylines. Have we reached a stage where the very project of “national security” is a self-defeating fantasy?

What keeps the series going is that the lead characters still somehow continue to believe in it, and yet each season brings events that brutally assault their belief. At the start of this one, Mathison has just returned from 213 days in detention in Russia at the hands of intelligence agents who withdrew the medication for her bipolar condition, reducing her to a state of prolonged psychosis.

Now in recovery and under the eye of her longstanding mentor, Berenson, she appears to be experiencing a state of amnesia, interrupted by sudden flashbacks. But when she fails three questions on a polygraph test, the inevitable question arises: has she been turned?

According to the series showrunners, having a central character with bipolar disorder was designed to introduce a fundamental dramatic instability. Mathison’s condition would make her unreliable in the eyes of the authorities, yet they would depend on her as a uniquely skilled agent with a critical role to play in the security of the nation.

For all the ambitious global canvas of its storylines, Homeland remains at its heart a drama of loyalty and betrayal. It was John le Carré who perfected the art of rendering the spy story as a psychological thriller in which the destiny of a nation hinges on the loyalty of an individual. In obvious ways Mathison is the antithesis of le Carré’s enduring protagonist George Smiley. She’s volatile, driven, ruthless and frequently incoherent, yet, as with Smiley, there is a bedrock of consistency. However bizarre her actions may seem, she is never in the business of betrayal.

At least that’s how the story has played out thus far. In this final season, the original team of writer/showrunners has been reassembled to create a storyline mirroring that of the first season, broadcast in October 2011. Again, we have the repatriation of a heavily traumatised American who may (or may not) have been turned by captors. In season one, US Marine sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had indeed been turned. Back in the homeland, he struggled unsuccessfully to resume an identity founded in patriotism.

The question of what underpins loyalty and what motivates betrayal is of the essence in all spy dramas. In the real-life cases of Burgess, Philby and Maclean, the inspirations for the figure of “the mole” in le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there was a kind of integrity in betrayal. Over the course of decades, these embedded agents remained loyal to a foreign power. Why? In the context of mid-twentieth-century cold war politics, the answer was ideology. Traitor-spies were profoundly convinced that the political system of their own nation was morally bankrupt.

In the twenty-first century, we are no longer dealing with a bifurcated picture. The storylines of Homeland explore the multilateral tensions arising from American involvement in the Middle East. Although characters are often motivated by ethical convictions, every situation is so loaded with complexities that any judgement is compromised.

There are loyalties to home and family, but these don’t always take precedence. “I have a wife and two kids who I love,” declares Brody in the video he has prepared for broadcast after a planned suicide bombing. “I love my country,” he goes on, but the true terrorists are the vice-president and his national security advisers “who I know to be liars and war criminals.” The bombing plot is derailed, but Brodie remains on a suicide mission that can’t be impeded. The very certainty of his convictions, and his overriding need for that certainty, will inevitably have fatal consequences.

Mathison and Berenson, the two characters who have remained at the centre throughout the series, are survivors — political hardheads, virtuosos of the tactical manoeuvre. Whether or not they love their country, they love their work. And that, essentially, is what makes the series so compelling.

As a psychological thriller, its weave of action and motivation is as sophisticated as any that might be encountered in the real world. A high commitment to accuracy in the portrayal of secret service operations has been sustained by annual “spy camp” retreats for the showrunners and leading cast members. Here they put in fourteen-hour days with an intense schedule of question-and-answer sessions with former CIA operatives, ambassadors, military strategists, foreign correspondents and security advisers. It is, they attest, “an avalanche of unsettling information.”

Actors often bring special knowledge of their own. One of the showrunners recalls being interrupted in an extended briefing to a new cast member playing a Mossad agent to be told, “I was in Mossad.”

Action scenes on the streets in Kabul, Tehran or Peshawar alternate with dialogue scenes in Washington. Writers and actors seem in perfect coordination, creating razor-sharp enactments of how people versed in every strategy of deception try to read each other.

“The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment,” says Magnus Pym, the central character in le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. Pym learns this art early in life, but for Carrie Mathison, battling to regain some form of orientation after her ordeal in Russia, the problem is remembering where and who she is. That might be a dilemma shared by a nation whose quest for homeland security is a chimera. •

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Speers departed from the informal style of his distinguished predecessor Barrie Cassidy, making his debut in a sharp suit, commencing with a longer monologue to camera, and offering some explicitly judgemental commentary in place of Cassidy’s sly irony. Perhaps we are beyond irony in this new landscape. Adjudication is part of the job of political journalists, and when things get seriously rocky, the pressure is on to show their hand and reveal where they draw the line on matters of principle rather than simply scoring the key players on how successfully they manage the narrative.

If there was some prevarication in Speers’s opening remarks, it was more than compensated for by the brilliantly incisive video montage that preceded them. It’s hard to know whom to credit for these sequences, but the pace of the cross-cutting and the killer instinct for juxtaposition did more to expose deceit, hypocrisy and incompetence than any verbal commentary.

The panel discussion, featuring veteran insiders Niki Savva and Phillip Coorey with newcomer Renee Viellaris (political editor of the Brisbane Courier Mail), led off with the bushfire crisis. Savva was not mincing words. The PM’s Hawaiian holiday was a big mistake, she said. Coorey agreed. A mistake compounded by the attempted cover-up. “They lied about it,” said Savva. It was Viellaris who sought to fudge the issue, suggesting that the real problem was an ineffectual deputy.

Underlying the task of adjudication is the fundamental distinction between political issues and matters of government. Politics is a game of perceptions; government is consequential. A good commentator should never confuse those registers.

Here it was Savva who stood out, refusing at every point to revert to a merely political view of what had transpired by focusing, laser-like, on how Morrison’s essential failure has been his incapacity to act and think like a head of government. An attempt to rescue his image with a party-political ad, she said, was revealing in precisely the wrong way. “The last thing people needed at that stage,” she said, “was a reminder that his driving instincts are political instincts.”

Speers is less firm on where political instincts need to be called out. He deserves his accolades as an interviewer, but the interview with treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday was a mixed bag.

Starting off in low gear with questions about the evacuation and quarantine of citizens caught up in Wuhan, Speers almost immediately steered into a gotcha moment of some significance. What about the plan to charge them $1000 each for the flight to Christmas Island, he asked. “Why do you have to do that?” “Well, we’re not,” was the stark response. Frydenberg was here contradicting a statement by the prime minister that Peter Dutton had reiterated that very morning. The Department of Foreign Affairs, Frydenberg said, had given the wrong advice. This was surely a major embarrassment for the government, especially since Morrison had explicitly pronounced that this was the standard rule.

At this point many interviewers would have gone in for the kill, but that is not Speers’s style. He has a very effective way of increasing the speed of questioning without raising the intensity, especially as his quickfire comebacks are based on meticulous command of the relevant facts and figures.

On the topic of sports rorts, though, he missed an opportunity to push home the case for the prosecution. “Do you admit the government used taxpayers’ money for blatant pork-barrelling?” sounds like a confronting question, but the choice of words actually let Frydenberg off the hook. This was so much more than the traditional political game of pork-barrelling, with its folksy connotations. It was something planned and executed in knowing contravention of due process, a matter of government, not politics, and of behaviour that dangerously tests the boundaries on ministerial — and prime ministerial — integrity. As Coorey put it, it was at the least “an abuse of ministerial discretionary powers.”

Insiders looks set to continue its strong track record. When it risked degenerating into a coffee morning for sparring political umpires, Cassidy always managed to get it back on track, building a cohort of serious-minded journalists who know the importance of holding government to account. With these stalwarts to depend on, Speers brings pace and agility, and his own form of authority. The succession plan, it seems, is working out well.

The following night, Four Corners and Q&A presented coordinated perspectives on the bushfire crisis, both introduced by Hamish Macdonald. In place of Four Corners’s trademark style, the inferno was documented by citizens caught in its path. They reported in conditions so terrifying and perilous no professional journalist, however intrepid, would have been authorised to venture into them. Some of those caught up, though — like Macdonald — were journalists who continued to front the camera without any assurance that they would find a way out.

On the Gold Coast hinterland in September, the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales in November, Gospers Mountain and the Adelaide Hills in December, East Gippsland and the NSW south coast as the new year turned, and Kangaroo Island in January, the catastrophe unfolded. The images recurred: a chopper against an amber sky, silhouettes of firefighters dwarfed by seventy-metre flames, vehicles moving through ember attacks so dense that the surrounding environment looked like molten lava. The colours of the natural world were gone, sucked into blackness and then erupting in bursts of crimson and fluorescent orange.

People spoke of the fires as if they were a motivated enemy force, attacking with ever greater fury and vindictiveness. Just to watch it all was an ordeal. We were blitzed with every mythological human nightmare: the fire-breathing dragon towering over some tiny human adversary, the great snake working its way across the landscape. It was darkness at noon, the inferno, the apocalypse. But it is happening now.

The immediacy was like nothing else I have seen on television. As a fire truck is engulfed in bushland south of Nowra, the driver continues to report over the radio. The crew speak to each other in steady voices, focused on the practicalities. A father and daughter experience the full onslaught of the fire front as they defend their home with ordinary hoses. People survive because they are quick-thinking, collaborative and disciplined.

But now, in the aftermath, those same people are in need. Many will suffer traumatic recall, and are faced with intolerable ongoing stresses. Homes and businesses have to be rebuilt, stock must be fed, fences replaced, injured animals tended. Where are the resources, and how are they to be channelled most swiftly and effectively? That was the overriding question for the studio audience of Q&A, assembled in Queanbeyan from the fire-ravaged towns of the NSW south coast and northeastern Victoria.

Practicalities were to the fore. Panellists Kristy McBain, mayor of Bega Valley, and Cheryl McCarthy of Surf Life Saving NSW have been on the front line, working to provide safe refuges and essential resources to evacuated communities. Both have exercised exemplary leadership. They understand how survival depends on responsibility, cooperation and generosity, and that was the spirit in which they responded to a succession of urgent questions about what happens next.

But Macdonald, in the chair, wanted to go beyond the practicalities, to generate “a big conversation” about causes and consequences. That meant talking about climate change. Here Michael Mann, billed as a “renowned US climate scientist,” faced off against Liberal senator Jim Molan. In one exchange that immediately went viral, Molan said his mind was open, and Mann quipped back that it was good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. With almost the entire studio audience now audibly hostile to Molan, Macdonald intervened to point out that his views were representative of a recently re-elected government and therefore reflected widespread public opinion.

It was a significant moment — not because the exchange between the senator and the climate scientist mattered, but because it did not. We learned nothing from Mann, who didn’t even explain what he was an expert in, and less from Molan, who was very good at hogging the airwaves but had done no new thinking in response to the catastrophe. Why were they on the program at all? This is a serious question for the producers. If Q&A is losing audience, it is because so many people have lost all tolerance for the “both sides of politics” convention in public discussion.

More time needed to be spent with those on the panel who had something substantive to offer, like Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen, who left us in no doubt about what he knew and how. For twenty years or more, he said, elders had been talking about changing conditions. We need to listen to those who are trained to read landscapes, who understand the soil and how to reduce fuel in the right ecosystems at the right time. Introduced vegetation has changed the flammable potential of ecosystems. “What would you say to the authorities about what we could do ahead of next summer?” asked Macdonald. “I would say jump in the passenger seat and let us do the driving,” Steffensen responded, without missing a beat.

A truly big conversation can only happen if everyone in it knows when not to speak, and can give the floor to someone who really has something to say. Just as Four Corners showed how these fires are so much greater than the human scale, Steffensen was showing how we must enlarge our thinking to meet the emergencies we face.

People don’t come through those emergencies unchanged, and part of the change is a fundamental shift in priorities and perspectives. Andrew Constance, Liberal MP for Bega, contributed to the discussion not as the representative of a political agenda but as someone who had been brought to the limits of his own abilities. Constance is calling for an embargo on political wrangling over the causes of the fires and a focus on community-generated response strategies. His is the kind of voice we need on Q&A if it is to have a future.

Macdonald is a dynamic and original figure, one of the most promising talents in contemporary Australian media. There could not be a better choice of host for the program, but please, can we dispense with business as usual in the choice of panel members? •

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He’s right to call for a cooling of tempers, but the claim that people are “angry about the debates” makes no sense. We are in a situation in which anger and debate can’t be separated; they are fuelling each other in an escalating feedback loop. Every day of this unfolding calamity has seen a flare-up go viral, as firefighters and displaced community members vent their fury on those they hold responsible.

Some, in accord with the Morrison government’s line of rhetoric, blame environmentalists and “inner city raving lunatics” for impeding hazard-reduction plans. Others blame the government and its backers in corporate media for fostering what former prime minister Kevin Rudd calls “a denialist cult,” which resulted in a response that was “evasive, tepid, tone deaf and above all, too late.”

When arguments get so heated that they explode in a volley of accusations and counter-accusations, we no longer have a debate, we have a slanging match. It’s something of an irony that this inflammatory exchange has come to a head over the matter of hazard reduction, one of the most complicated and uncertain aspects of bushfire management.

Brian Gilligan, former head of New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, wrote recently about the challenges he faced in trying to explain why reducing fire hazards is far from straightforward. “I worry,” he said, “that the ill-informed commentary that passes for debate is rolling around again.”

Twenty years ago, faced with the same “repeated haranguing” about burning off, he took a group of media representatives on a flight along the Kosciuszko Range to show them the mountain ash forests along the ridge. Mountain ash’s natural relationship to fire is very different from that of the eucalypts on the slopes. Its life cycle, moisture content and reproductive methods mean it can’t be managed with the same techniques.

All this was explained in fascinating detail in the Catalyst documentary Earth on Fire, aired on the ABC in June 2014. I reviewed it at the time, and it has remained in my mind as a model of public communication about bushfires and climate change, outstanding in its unassuming, concentrated engagement with the learning curve on which rangers and forest ecologists are travelling. Reporters Anja Taylor and Mark Horstman followed teams conducting parallel research into megafire behaviour on opposite sides of the globe: in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, where the Las Conchas fire swept through in 2011, and in Victorian and Tasmanian forests where preconditions for megafire are at their peak.

US ecologist Craig Allen, who studies the deep history of forest fire, explained the changing conditions created by increases in average temperature and decreases in rainfall. The Las Conchas fire caused a paradigm shift in his understanding because it burnt the topsoil, a new phenomenon in fire behaviour. Much of the area is now a moonscape.

The capacity of megafires to traverse cleared ground by burning the earth itself has changed how researchers in Tasmania are modelling potential spread patterns. On a worst-case scenario, they could extend right through the city of Hobart.

David Bowman, a forest ecologist working in the Victorian alps, focused on how the whole bio-region is irreversibly changed by mega-fires. While government ministers make aggressive proclamations about the inadequacy of fuel-reduction programs, he and Peter Jacobs, chief ranger for the area, were confronting the loss of vast areas of forest that will not regenerate. Human-induced changes to the three key components of fire — oxygen, fuel and heat — have created a whole new scenario. “I’m not sure if there is a natural fire anymore,” said Jacobs.

Forget the noisy debate. There’s no substitute for following these professionals into the remote forests they have spent their lives observing and documenting. They don’t offer opinions, just detailed knowledge along with all the uncertainties that genuine researchers must acknowledge.

If politicians want to make pronouncements on such specialised matters as fuel reduction, they had better educate themselves in the physics and biochemistry of forest fires. They could start by watching this documentary. I would urge the ABC to show it again: it might help to calm things down and enable better public communication about how best to respond to the emergency we are faced with.

Rewatching Earth on Fire has strengthened a conviction I have long held that disastrously misconceived communications strategies took hold after Al Gore launched a worldwide campaign for action on climate change with his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

One of the film’s highlights was a graph tracking temperature and CO2 concentrations over a 650,000 year timespan, showing how CO2 suddenly breaks through the glass ceiling of 350 parts per million at the turn of the second millennium AD. Gore used a scissor lift to show how far and how steeply the graph shoots upward — “off the charts” if the present trend continues. He cited a study that sampled 10 per cent of all peer-reviewed scientific articles on global warming in the previous decade, finding all 928 supported an anthropogenic view.

The challenge of persuading the public was never going to meet idealistic dreams of enlightenment. Nor, for that matter, was the science itself. Ray Evans, co-founder of the Lavoisier Group, a right-wing group devoted to contesting climate change research, was quick to use Gore’s own tactics against him, claiming that this level of certainty and belief amounted to “preaching a gospel.”

Gore’s political affiliations as former Democrat presidential candidate played right into the hands of those who — like Evans, a crusading neoliberal closely associated with mining magnate Hugh Morgan — sought to politicise the debate. Evans alleged that Gore’s “hockey stick” graph had been debunked by two Canadian researchers who demonstrated that the same statistical pattern could be produced from almost any data using the algorithm from which it was generated.

Gore’s stridency took its toll. His invocation of the unassailable authority of science has done the opposite of what he intended. Instead of capping the debate and sealing off all avenues of viable opposition, he threw a grenade into the arena.

What if the process of developing public awareness had instead been led by rangers, wildlife workers, farmers and fire chiefs? What if, rather than issuing proclamations of absolute certainty at square one, they had taken us with them on a journey on which doubts and uncertainties were part of the process of coming to an understanding?

I recall a conversation I had with a neighbour in Toowoomba — a retired farmer from a property on the Darling Downs — soon after the massive flood of January 2011. It’d happened before, he said. The trouble with all the talk of climate change was that people didn’t study the records. Reports show that Toowoomba had indeed experienced similar events in 1873 and 1893. Farmers often have weather logs for their property going back several generations, and are not easily persuaded by claims that any particular event is unprecedented.

It was a brief discussion, but I’ve often thought about it since. My neighbour wasn’t trying to engage me in an argument; he was just making an observation. He was sceptical in the genuine sense, unconvinced of the evidence and keeping his distance from beliefs and commitments. What if he were invited to join David Bowman and Peter Jacobs in one of the evening discussions we saw in Catalyst, deep in the Victorian forest? That’s the kind of communication we need. •

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In the Shakespearean tradition, great dramas are spun from points at which structures of power come unhinged. In the fallout, all manner of human ambitions and motivations come to the fore. Bonds are broken and loyalties realigned, while those at the centre of it all try to wrestle with great philosophical questions about fate and the order of nature.

Game of Thrones, by the far the most ambitious television series to date, sustained its dramatic power through seven seasons. A cast of over twenty principals set new standards in television acting. The cinematography challenged the limits of the small screen and made many of us buy bigger ones. Ramin Djawadi’s music supported the mythic stature of a vast narrative design, and show-runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss kept on delivering the goods.

And then, in season eight, they had to resolve it all in just six episodes. The consensus among critics is that this didn’t work. How could it? We were used to having lead characters abruptly killed off — the very first season set us up for that — but there were just too many lifelines to tie up or sever. And yet. Watching it again, with anticipations laid to rest, I’m impressed by how much it does deliver: the control of tone and pace, the orchestration of the great battle scenes, the genuine substance of the dialogue as human intelligence sparks to break the deadlock in critical negotiations. Or fails to do so.

The council scene, in which the remaining stakeholders in the main game converge to decide who should sit on the iron throne, has ironic resonances. “Perhaps,” ventures Samwell Tarly, the Everyman character, “the decision about what’s left to everyone should be left to everyone.” Anyone watching the playout of last week’s election in Britain might be prompted to join in the round of contemptuous guffaws with which the suggestion is greeted.

When it comes to elections, pundits always speak too soon, while the wheel’s still in spin. But when the wheel spins right of its axis, to land who knows where, all bets are off. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote W.B. Yeats, reflecting on the state of Ireland as further dark prospects loomed on the horizon in the aftermath of the first world war. A century later, the image evokes the state of things in Britain, and England in particular.

The Manchester-set BBC/HBO series Years and Years (SBS On Demand), envisages England in the near future, when the country has descended a few more steps into the social and economic turmoil that has already taken hold. This is no dystopic fantasy, and the inventive aspects of the scenario are kept on a tight leash. In the first episode, we jump just five years on, to 2024, and from there the storylines proceed year by year to 2029.

Events spin out in many directions, but writer Russell T. Davies anchors the narrative by following the fortunes of the Lyons family — Stephen, Edith, Daniel and Rosie, and their children and partners. Stephen (Rory Kinnear) loses all his wealth in a bank collapse and falls into a downward spiral as he struggles to make a living in the ever more stringent and adversarial gig economy. His teenaged daughter Bethany (Lydia West) is involved in early experiments with biologically implanted communications systems. Daniel (Russell Tovey) develops an impassioned relationship with Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a refugee from Ukraine, and uses some dangerous moves to get him back into the country after he’s deported.

Edith (Jessica Hynes) is a political activist who engages in internet sabotage, while Rosie (Ruth Madeley) falls under the spell of a rising demagogue. As the years roll on, Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson) makes the transition from the maverick outsider making outrageous statements on television panels, to local candidate, to party leader with the balance of power and thence, inevitably, to prime minister.

The inevitability is in the dramaturgy; in reality there are pitfalls between those steps, as we’ve seen in the careers of Pauline Hanson or Nigel Farage. And, as several recent elections have proved, the most unhinged contenders for head of state are emerging from the major parties. It is the only significant aspect of the predictive exercise that the series gets wrong. But Emma Thompson’s performance — an all-too-credible mix of the earnest and comedic, of preposterous suggestion and downright common sense — is one of her best.

Heads of state, media moguls and captains of industry continue to feature prominently in television series. Clearly, the viewing public is fascinated by the lead players in the power games. Succession explores the mystique through another family drama, featuring a dynastic battle for control of a corporate media empire, Waystar Royco. Yes, the parallels with the Murdoch family are obvious, but the series is so much more than a veiled dramatisation.

A sophisticated plot design sets the four adult siblings in conflict, first with each other but ultimately with their father, who plays each of them even as he holds them together in some fierce bond. Is it blood loyalty, common destiny or a tangle of self-interest that binds them? Brian Cox as ageing mogul Logan Roy heads a superb cast, with outstanding performances from Jeremy Strong as the melancholic elder son Kendell and Kieran Culkin as his brother Roman, who talks like a stand-up comic on crack but increasingly defies expectation as season two progresses towards its cliffhanger finale.

Jesse Armstrong’s compelling script is aided by a musical score that communicates as eloquently as the dialogue. Described by composer Nicholas Britell as “dark, courtly classical music crossed with hip hop beats,” it is dominated by an accelerando piano theme that promises melody but almost immediately veers off course.

A very different approach to theme music is taken in ABC’s Total Control, where a sequence of original songs by Missy Higgins and others works to establish thematic keynotes. Hard-hitting lyrics break the convention of theme music as an instrumental support to the dramatic line.

Alex Irving (Deborah Mailman), an Indigenous woman from the remote community of Winton, is parachuted into the Senate following a display of what looks like total control in a local shooting incident. But early on, she announces, “I’m sick and tired of pretending I’m okay.”

As she continues on a rollercoaster ride through events in which she was supposed to be a pawn, Alex’s emotional instability amplifies the human impact of the games being played in Canberra. Prime minister Rachel Anderson (Rachel Griffiths), who likewise appears in total control at the outset, falls victim to a party coup. The Canberra storyline is resolved in a rather hackneyed manipulation of plotlines, but the events played out in Winton have more depths of field, and carry potential for a planned sequel.

While it’s been another good year for complex drama, lighter forms of entertainment were harder to come by. Killing Eve, hugely entertaining in its first season, overplayed its hand in season two and risked killing off a comedic edge that depended on eruptions of lunacy embedded in a carefully structured plot. If there is a plot in this latest venture, it’s not worth following.

Killing Eve is one of two stellar creations from scriptwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose comedy series Fleabag has been throwing all other contenders into the shade at awards ceremonies. Comedy it may be — and yes, it’s very funny — but Fleabag is never exactly fun. Waller-Bridge plays the title role herself, portraying a woman whose surface charm and glamour barely conceal the misery of someone who is falling apart. Her incessant sexual encounters leave her not so much exposed as flayed. It is at times very confronting, but season two, which I was able to see in England earlier this year, lifts the mood by introducing a new suitor who actually falls in love with her. Known to his rapidly growing fan-base as “the hot priest,” he’s played with off-beat allure by Andrew Scott. Look out for it next year. •

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Poet, philosopher and polymath, with an intellectual range that has swept through the works of Dante, Proust and Samuel Johnson, the major poems of Browning and several hundred of the best twentieth-century novels in the years since his diagnosis, Clive James is also something of a media junkie. He likes watching TV. A lot. For a couple of decades he liked being on it, until in 2000 he decided that the “Blaze of Obscurity,” as he put it, was getting to him. So he wrote a book about it, and retreated to more contemplative pursuits, though those did include regular contributions as a television critic for London’s Daily Telegraph.

His gifts as a humourist were his passport when, having managed to infiltrate the inner circle of Private Eye editor Peter Cook in the early 1960s, he began to make his mark as a journalist who could execute the equivalent of a stand-up comedy routine on the page. As a television presenter, James’s style was like that of a virtuoso bowler on the cricket field. He’d set up a statement with an opening gambit, spin the cadence through several parentheses, and deliver the shot from an angle no one else would have found. His Postcard from London opens with a dry narrative voiceover: “A long time ago some hairy character painted blue slung the carcass of a recently slain stag, grunted ‘this is the spot’ and told his wife to build a house. Before she even finished pouring the mud floor, distant relatives were already arriving and since then, no one has ever gone home again except the Roman army and the German air force.”

Clive James the stand-up comic has a way of making reappearances in the writing of Clive James the contemplative. It’s as if the very texture of the prose gives him an entry. A sentence takes a particular turn, and you can actually hear the grain of the voice as it winds around to deliver the zinger. But the relationship between these two personae is a little uneasy. In Play All, a new collection of critical essays on “box set” television series, the comedic voice is muted: always there, as if trying to resurface, but only making it in brief forays. The mood spectrum of the later James just has too much melancholy in it to allow those improvisational tours de force to take shape.

Binge-watching, as he acknowledges in the opening pages, became a way of managing what he had been told was the closing phase of a life span. There will be some who approach this book as fellow travellers in states of severe illness, needing something to do with the days and nights. And for many of us, binge-watching is now a way of life, a new form of fiction addiction that offers better-quality material than the thriller shelf in the bookstore.

The binge-watching trend is a consequence of a minor cultural renaissance in television drama production. James tracks the new canonical works of “quality TV,” a phenomenon that arose when the box became the flat screen and a high culture began to infiltrate via the box set. There’s a broad consensus that the trailblazers are Warner Bros’ The West Wing (1999–2006) and HBO’s The Sopranos (1999–2007), followed by the Hanks/Spielberg produced miniseries Band of Brothers and HBO’s Six Feet Under in 2001, then HBO’s The Wire, starting in 2002.

By 2007, when The Sopranos is over and the addicts are scanning the scene for the next fix, the options are opening up. The Scandinavians enter the arena with The Killing, Lionsgate’s Mad Men provides a bold change of genre and Breaking Bad, starting early in 2008, manages to get a following for a middle-aged hero in Y-fronts. After that, the competition for canonical status is stronger by the year. What makes the cut is a matter of Emmy Award counts and personal judgement, and James’s selection is unashamedly arbitrary.

In one sense, Play All is a misleading title. James favours the US repertoire, contributing to the presumption that quality TV wasn’t really quality TV until the Americans came up with it, regardless of such landmark British precursors as Prime Suspect, House of Cards (the BBC version), Edge of Darkness, The Singing Detective, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. The Scandinavians get short shrift from James, and he seems to have no time for such recent British successes as Sherlock, Line of Duty, Happy Valley, The Fall, Wolf Hall or London Spy.

So this is essentially a book about American canonical television – part story of its evolution, part critical diagnosis of what makes or fails to make great television drama. James begins at the beginning of The Sopranos: a close-up of Tony Soprano’s face “creased with effort on its various levels and terraces” as he responds to a sudden and unanticipated loss. The ducks have taken off from their winter habitat in his swimming pool. James ponders on how the actor James Gandolfini, so good at fading into the background on film, occupies the television screen as “a magnetic mountain, pulling toward him all legends of haunted loneliness and seismic inner violence.”

Clive James is at his best when he’s mining for depths of field, as in this chapter on The Sopranos and, at the end of the book, on Game of Thrones, where it’s as if he’s trying to mediate between the facetious and contemplative halves of his own mind. Fascinated with kitsch as he always was (and hilariously fascinated by his own fascination with kitsch), James admits to a prejudice against swords and dragons that caused him to leave the GoT box on the table for months before mustering the determination to fight his way through the shrink wrap.

His account of the series is a narrative of his own conversion. He’s won over first by the image of a throne of a thousand swords, with its binding political symbolism, and then by the masterful economy of the script: one of the salient qualities of the long-form television drama, he says, has been to employ the utmost sophistication to face us with the primitive. Most of all, though, the addictive lure into the five-episode binge session is Peter Dinklage as the dwarf Tyrion Lannister, whose “big head is the symbol of his comprehension, and his little body the symbol of his incapacity to act upon it.”

It’s a brilliant formulation, even if it’s actually wrong. Tyrion fights his way through one of the most gruelling battle scenes in the series, and engineers a succession of shifts in the balance of power as he journeys through the seven kingdoms. James’s verbal brilliance habitually leaps ahead of his critical judgement, though not always. And when it comes to being a genius of eloquence, it takes one to know one. Tyrion’s eloquence gets him through one scrape after another, but in the trial scene where it is on full display, James is impressed with how Dinklage pays attention to “what he looks like when he listens.”

Eloquence is a fine thing, but it can run into a form of hyper-articulateness, and here James finds another fellow traveller in Aaron Sorkin. The younger Clive James is indeed a character who might have been written by Sorkin, and who better than James to provide insight into the quirky mystique of the Sorkin script? Although it’s ten years now since The West Wing was laid to rest, it remains, says James, “our first frame of reference for thinking about the presidency,” though I suspect that line was written before Trump became a serious White House prospect. Imagine Trump making a beeline for the Oval Office while being briefed by Toby Ziegler or C.J. Cregg. Even they would not have got a word in edgeways. When I rewatched The West Wing a year ago, I was bothered by how the characters are all at least 20 per cent Groucho Marx and talk alike. Or, as James observes more knowledgeably, Sorkin transplanted the rapid-fire dialogue of classic Hollywood prewar comedy and gave it a new lease of life for television cameras that were good at moving fast down corridors.

As a book, Play All has some problems. James seems to lose direction and momentum in the middle, steering all over the road as he tries to cross reference one series with another, making comparisons in the rather random way you do in discussion with your fellow couch potatoes between episodes. Why, when he finds a series that isn’t worth watching, does he think it’s a good idea to spend three pages telling us about it? Of course, James can always find a few critical points to make, to diagnose, for example, where the configuration of elements in Treme doesn’t work with the dynamism that made The Wire a succès d’estime among such connoisseurs as himself and Barack Obama. But this isn’t really critical analysis, it’s just a way of rabbiting on to fill up the chapter, and while Clive James’s rabbit may be better than most people’s best paragraphs, readers bore easily these days, more easily than television viewers, and there’s no end to the good work that can be done with a delete key.

His descriptions are brilliant but his judgement is erratic, and he’s never at his best when he indulges it, especially when it comes to the appraisal of female cast members. James was always captive to a 1960s culture of the male gaze, and that hasn’t changed. He’s seduced by the “outstandingly disarming” and “radiantly intelligent” Birgitte Nyborg in Borgen, but not by Sarah Lund – “a thin bundle of neuroses plunged into the gloom of a bad sweater” – in The Killing. He fancies Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones for combining “shapely grace with limitless evil” but not Daenerys Stormborn, who is “not much more than the average princess next door.” It’s enough to make Don Draper blush and Groucho Marx head for the nearest punchline. The convention for this kind of erotics-driven judgement is to turn it into a kind of self-abnegating gallantry: “Personally I can’t get enough of being told what to do by powerful women, but I’m half dead.”

Personally, I don’t care too much about these lapses in protocol. Television is a culturally permissive medium and must remain so if it is to survive. James’s recognition of this is one of his great gifts as a TV critic. He winds up his discussion of GoT by forgiving it for being a crowd-pleaser, dragons and all. “To despise that, you have to imagine you aren’t part of the crowd. But you are.” It’s the lesson the twentieth century taught all intellectuals, he says, and in this new century, they must go on being taught. And television remains the medium best placed to teach it. •

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Yet the chief executive of one of the world’s most successful creative enterprises is virtually a one-company man. Robert Iger joined ABC television in the United States as a studio supervisor in 1974. About a decade later, ABC was bought by Capital Cities Communications. Ten years after that, the Walt Disney Company acquired ABC/Cap Cities. One of Iger’s bosses and mentors at Cap Cities, Tom Murphy, told him, “Pal, if you play your cards right, one day you will run that company.” He was right. In 2005, the Disney board chose fifty-four-year-old Iger as just the sixth chief executive of the company founded by Walt Disney in 1923. He is still in charge, with a contract that will keep him there for another two years.

The first part of The Ride of a Lifetime, “Learning,” is about Iger’s path to the top of Disney. He rose via ABC’s Wide World of Sports and ABC Entertainment, where he commissioned shows like the original Twin Peaks and NYPD Blue that helped ABC to overtake NBC’s prime-time dominance with viewers aged between eighteen and forty-nine.

The second part, “Leading,” covers Iger’s remarkable period at the top of Disney. Four of these seven chapters are about the big acquisitions that transformed the company. Disney+, the streaming video service launched in the United States on 12 November and in Australia a week later, is a major threat to the first-mover Netflix thanks to Disney’s expanded archive, sequel and merchandising rights that came with takeovers of Pixar (2006), Marvel Entertainment (2009), Lucasfilm (2012) and 21st Century Fox (2019).

Each of these four companies was controlled by an idiosyncratic visionary who cared about more than the price. Steve Jobs started out with many more “cons” than “pros” about selling Pixar to Disney, but thought “a few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons.” Before he died, five years after the sale, Jobs thought they had “saved two companies.” Disney was re-energised and Pixar had flourished in ways it never would have without the older, larger studio.

Jobs joined the Disney board, and Marvel’s Ike Perlmutter said a call from the Apple co-founder was crucial in persuading him to do the deal with Iger and Disney: “He said you were true to your word.” Perlmutter “hated Hollywood and didn’t care about the films themselves,” says Iger, but he did love controlling Marvel’s wildly successful studio.

George Lucas was always going to struggle to let go of the Star Wars franchise he founded, and was disappointed with the first Disney-produced sequel. Iger had been immovable on this aspect of the deal. Where Pixar’s creative principals were brought inside and put in charge of Disney Animation, Lucas would have to surrender creative control of “perhaps the greatest mythology of our time.”

Murdoch had spent his life building an empire that many imagined would be passed on to his children. He realised even 21st Century Fox didn’t have the scale to compete with the emerging giants of digital, online video. He liked the strength of Disney’s stock price, and he thought it would get the necessary regulatory approvals faster and do a better job of merging the businesses. (He was apparently keen, as well, to find out if Democrat-supporting Iger would be running for president in 2020!)

One of the things Iger brought to these acquisitions was his own early experience with taken-over media companies. Employees at ABC, one of the Big Three US TV networks, were stunned to be acquired by the much smaller Cap Cities in the 1980s. The “homespun” Tom Murphy and Dan Burke turned out to be “no-nonsense businesspeople who focused on the work… had zero interest in the glitz… and sensed which way the winds were blowing” in the media business.

The sale of ABC/Cap Cities to Disney a decade later came as another huge shock to many, though not to Iger. Disney made clear it wanted him to stay and run its new media division once Murphy and Burke were gone. Paradoxically, Iger found the aggressive Hollywood studio “centralised and process-driven,” in contrast to the decentralised, accountable culture that Murphy and Burke fostered. As chief executive of Disney, Iger would later dismantle the central strategy team he thought was sucking too much responsibility from individual business units.

Eventually serving as second-in-command at Disney for several years before chief executive Michael Eisner was effectively forced out in 2005, Iger needed a “narrative” to convince the board he was the right person to lead the company out of the crisis. With a political spinner, he tested out the priorities he was thinking of pitching. Reaching the fifth or sixth one, he received a blunt response: “You only get three.”

Iger settled on high-quality content, technology and global scale. He has been selling those messages ever since. All the Big Four acquisitions offered content; Pixar especially had technological expertise; Fox brought scale. The highlight of it all, so far, is Shanghai Disney Resort — “authentically Disney and distinctively Chinese” — opened in 2016, which Iger has been involved in since selecting the site in 1998.

The neat-sounding ascent to the corporate stratosphere has had disruptions. Twice, it called for moves from New York to Los Angeles that didn’t suit Iger’s marriages to women with their own big East Coast media jobs. The first, to an executive producer of news at WNBC who never liked LA, broke down. She moved back to New York with their two children and Iger spent a “terrible year” visiting. The next promotion took him back to New York, where his engagement to Good Morning America’s weekend anchor, Willow Bay, happened around the time of the Disney/Cap Cities takeover. She was “unequivocally supportive” of Iger’s move back to Los Angeles to run Disney’s media division and “trusted that she and I could figure out whatever we needed to figure out.” They are still together: Bay later became a senior editor for Huffington Post and was appointed dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2017.

As the negotiations between Disney and News/Fox were beginning, another change “more profound than the mega-technology changes” was under way. This “transformative social change” came from serious allegations about sexually predatory behaviour, equal opportunity and equal pay for women in Hollywood and elsewhere. According to Iger, it “became the catalyst for long overdue action.” For Disney, this included one of Pixar’s legendary principals, John Lasseter, who took a six-month sabbatical in 2017 and did not have his contract renewed at the end of 2018. It was Iger’s “most difficult and complex personnel decision.” Disney’s board, chaired by Iger, now comprises five men and four women. Its fourteen-member executive leadership team has three women — the chief financial officer and the heads of communications and human resources.

Lessons are what the subtitle of the book promises, and Disney’s CEO offers many. Some are familiar — “Innovate or die” — and some are specific to the enterprise — “When animation soars, Disney roars.”

Most are a good deal less formulaic. Long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem. Value ability more than experience. Ask the questions you need to ask and do the work to learn what you need as quickly as you can. From Dan Burke: Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil (small projects that don’t give much back). Communicate to your team that you share their stress, not that you need them to deliver to alleviate yours.

After fourteen years at the top of Disney, Bob Iger has some lessons for himself. “It’s not good to have power for too long. You don’t realise the way your voice seems to boom louder than every other voice in the room.” His predecessor Michael Eisner was untouchable for a decade after rescuing Disney from its post-Walt funk, but stumbled in the second decade of his long reign.

Iger wanted to walk away in June 2019, forty-five years after starting at ABC. The Murdoch deal required him to stay on. He has understood for a while that his teams are planning a future that will “happen without me” and is wary of “a kind of wistfulness creeping in.”

He has been a surprising superhero, a one-company adventurer, a guy from sports who rose to the top of a dream factory, a New York suit whose movies dominate the US box office, a merger king whose safe hands clasped the messy media legacies of ageing mavericks.

There is always a sequel. Disney+ is a massive investment in a highly competitive market. The rivals are giants from other sectors — Amazon Prime, Google/YouTube, Apple, AT&T — not just fellow imagineers in the Hollywood hills. Disney is a company that attracts a special level of scrutiny. Bob Iger needs the story to continue. •

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How many storylines might be drawn from this incident? Behind it, there’s a dismal tale of domestic violence and wider privation and stress. Media reports concentrate on the heroic intervention of Alexandra Irving (Deborah Mailman), a regional health worker from an Aboriginal community in the remote town of Winton. Two and a half thousand kilometres away in Canberra, prime minister Rachel Anderson (Rachel Griffiths) watches the drama on the news.

Three months later a young staffer arrives in Winton to prepare the ground for an important mission. Jonathan Cosgrove (Harry Richardson) is greeted at the door by Alex’s mother Jan, who is unimpressed at the sight of this outsider in white shirt and tie. But nothing fazes Cosgrove. He invites himself in for a cup of tea while he waits for her daughter to return from work and, observing the collection of royal portraits on the wall, engages her in agreeable chat about the Queen. “Ninety-three years old,” says Jan, “and never missed a day’s work in her life.”

Having knocked back Cosgrove’s overtures, Alex receives a visit from the prime minister herself. Unlike her staffer, Anderson dresses for the occasion in faded jeans and an Akubra. From her point of view, all the cards are now in place: a pressing policy matter involving native title negotiations with the Winton community; a vacancy in the Senate; an Indigenous woman with conveniently conservative values and proven qualities of grit and courage. Anderson won’t take “no” for an answer.

It’s a promising start to the series, with four interestingly balanced players about to embark on an enterprise fraught with political and personal hazards. And, given recent reports that the Queensland government has “quietly” extinguished native title over the Adani mine site, it’s topical. The challenge is to explore the political tensions in a convincing way.

Here, Deborah Mailman in the lead role is a major asset. Mailman is always convincing. As a new senator unversed in the ways of Parliament House, she needs to be advised how to dress, and what to say and not say. There is some nice interplay between her and Cosgrove, appointed her minder, who insists on protocols she has little interest in observing. Gradually, as the newcomer starts to impose her own rules, the cocky twenty-seven-year-old must confront his limits.

Mailman and Griffiths make effective counterparts, one grounded in the physical realities of a life on the land, the other shaped by the artificial environment of Canberra, groomed and poised for whatever occasion presents. Griffiths faces the more difficult task. Television drama offers an endless parade of prime ministers, presidents, queens and emperors. It’s as if no actor is really at the top of the profession until he or she has played a head of state, and it’s not an easy task: there’s a risk of creating a persona without enough psychological substance behind it. As Anderson, Griffiths is not entirely successful, evoking a version of Julia Gillard that is cooler and less vibrant than the original.

Anderson is something of an ice queen. As she battles with a brash, ebullient right-wing challenger to her position, she is more adept than, say, Malcolm Turnbull in negotiating the political trap, but along the way she dispenses with some of her principles — or is it just the pretence of them? — in order to retain her position. Alex, and the Winton community whose interests she represents, “are the collateral.”

By the end of episode three, midway through, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about where this was all going. Why start a series co-produced by Blackfella Films and directed by Rachel Perkins, only to subordinate the Indigenous storyline to an all-too-familiar portrayal of blood sports in Parliament House? “It’s another country out there,” remarks Indigenous affairs minister Kevin Cartwright (played by David Roberts as a cadaverous-faced Machiavel). If this is about bargaining between two countries, wouldn’t it be more interesting to make Winton, rather than Canberra, the centre of gravity?

In episode 4, the dynamics shift in just that way. While the prime minister is fighting for her political life, Alex learns that her mother has collapsed and died. She returns home to face a community that sees her as an agent of betrayal, and a sense of devastation that almost breaks her. It becomes clear that her mother has been the source of her strength in ways that go deeper than the family bond. Jan Irving was brought up on a reserve, where they belted her and lied to her about her own mother, who they said was dead. “She was never angry,” Alex reflects in a conversation with her brother, “but I fuckin’ hate ’em all.”

From here on, rage — Alex’s, and that of her brother and the betrayed community of Winton — becomes the driving force of the series. In Parliament House, anger is stringently controlled, channelled into heavily coded exchanges and strategically managed forms of vindictiveness; in Winton, it breaks open as an elemental force of clean fury.

Jan Irving makes one final appearance in spirit, but leaves an impression that galvanises the next phase of the action. Trisha Morton-Thomas, an Anmatyerr woman from the Northern Territory, invests her character with a presence that imprints itself on the memory. Rob Collins as Alex’s brother Charlie and Aaron Pedersen as a local ringleader give psychological depth to the two figures now closest to Alex, showing how the anger twists itself through different life courses.

Anousha Zarkesh, who was casting director for Mystery Road, has again shown her exceptional gift for matching actors and roles. In a location-based drama like this, with the presence of a community evoked in the drama, so much depends on a sensitivity to how individuals channel the natural and social environment.

Not everything is right about this series. The scripting is uneven. Some scenes are deftly managed, but the dialogue is sometimes heavy-handed and lacks pace. It may be a case of too many cooks. Four people (including Rachel Griffiths) are credited as co-writer/creators, and most series work best when the steerage is in the hands of one or two showrunners. Given the costs of producing drama like this, it would be good to see the series taken up in international markets, but the competition is fierce and scripting can be the make-or-break factor. •

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Under questioning by two male police officers, Marie’s childlike face registers mounting confusion. She’s vague, and her recounting of what detail she does remember is inconsistent. Given that no forensic evidence exists to support her story, the officers respond as they would to any unreliable witness, turning the interview into something more like a cross-examination.

Here we have television working close to documentary. The script draws on transcripts, reports and recollections to reconstruct key scenes like this. But crucial elements are added, allowing the viewer to see things that those involved in the original exchanges could not. For the police, Marie was an easy witness to misread, but Dever expresses emotional and psychological nuances that the camera, working in close-up, never misses.

Television viewers, as secondary witnesses, are left in no doubt about what is really going on here, or its human costs. Docudrama works with this illusion of greater insight to heighten the emotional landscape and load the moral perspective. Overplayed, it can easily cheapen the drama and distort the ethical issues. In this case the temptation must have been acute.

Marie’s story, reconstructed in a meticulous chronological account for ProPublica in 2015, is that of someone already exposed to the rougher side of life. Abandoned by her parents, she suffered various forms of abuse in childhood and then spent her teenage years being moved from one foster home to the next. At the time of the rape, just past her eighteenth birthday, she was enjoying her first real chance of independent life in community-run accommodation.

Her most recent foster-mother, Judith — played by Elizabeth Marvel as dour but good-hearted — attempts to provide some kind of support in the crisis. Given Marie’s perverse behaviour and inability to provide a clear account, though, Judith has her own doubts about what has actually happened, and decides to share them with the police. The upshot is that Marie is browbeaten into retracting and then charged with false reporting, with the prospect of a one-year jail sentence.

This is outrageous, of course — “unbelievable” in another sense — but the challenge in the dramatisation is to control the sense of outrage rather than to push it. Dever’s performance brings out the grit as well as the pathos in her character. Driven to the brink, she rides her bike onto a bridge at night, intending to throw herself into the river. She climbs the railing and hangs there for a moment, staring at the raging waters below, then climbs back. Next day, she shows up for duty as usual at the dreadful megastore where she’s employed.

As a shambolic but well-intentioned attorney (John Hartmann) works to get her off the legal charges on a plea bargain — a good behaviour bond, a formal admission of lying and the payment of $500 court costs — it is the procedural rather than the human aspects of Marie’s treatment that are shown to be brutal. Adverse publicity means she is moved from the shop floor to the storerooms at her workplace and, deemed to have breached the conditions of the housing community, she is evicted.

If that were the end of the story, it would hardly make for satisfying drama. But this is one of those cases that takes a turn irresistible to a television producer. Some 2000 kilometres away in the town of Golden, Colorado, another rape with the same characteristics occurs, and this time is met with a contrasting police response.

A female detective answers the call. The victim is a woman of twenty-six, a very different physical type to Marie, and remarkably self-possessed. She remembers every detail of the attack, including the fact that the intruder had a large birthmark on his calf. He took photos, she says, and gave orders in a way that suggested he was carrying out a practised routine. Again, searches reveal almost no forensic traces, but this time there is no question of putting pressure on the victim. Rather, the “clean” crime scene suggests they are looking for someone who knew enough about forensics to make sure there was nothing to find. He’d done this before, and would do it again.

In reality, all this didn’t happen until two years after Marie’s experiences, but the series intercuts the later train of events with the scenes of Marie’s ordeal, creating interconnecting strands of tension and some very effective suspense.

Detective Karen Duvall follows a lead to a Colorado case currently under investigation and contacts the detective in charge of that, another canny female investigator. She and Grace Rasmussen (the series uses pseudonyms) have everything it takes to make a successful television crime-fighting duo: they operate in contrasting styles, sparring and sniping but ultimately adhering to the protocols required to get the job done.

Rasmussen (Toni Collette) is brusque and charmless, but as a seasoned operator she has no problems sharing the investigation and knows the system well enough to get support from further up the line. Soon, an FBI team is assigned to help with the search. Human communications are Duvall’s forte, and Merritt Wever plays her as a restrained observer, always listening; when she speaks, the low tone of her voice cuts through surrounding stress, raising the level of concentration.

After the culprit is apprehended, a cache of evidence is found, including graphic photographic records of each of his attacks. Marie is identified as one of the victims, and from here events begin to turn in her favour.

It’s a great storyline, as any scriptwriting team would acknowledge. The main characters are sharply defined, each with her own strong narrative arc. But, though good stories are fascinating, moving and instructive, trauma itself is none of those things. The risk in dramatising this kind of subject matter is that it may delude us into thinking we do understand or, worse, that we have somehow accompanied the victims on a satisfying imaginative journey.

Credit is due to the production team on this series for steering clear of obvious forms of moral point-scoring and emotional gratification. The story is handled throughout with tact and the kind of finely tuned attention Duvall and Rasmussen show towards those whose lives are damaged by the crimes. •

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Perhaps this is indeed another order of humanity, an evolving subspecies whose dynastic concentration separates them from the wider gene pool. Their habitats are cordoned off at the summits of highrise buildings or in sprawling mansions in remote locations; they communicate in heavily coded exchanges mostly incomprehensible to outsiders.

At the start of the first season of Succession, media mogul Logan Roy, the central, patriarchal presence, suffers a stroke that looks as if it will be terminal. He remains comatose for long enough to put the company fortunes in a tailspin and galvanise his son Kendall into making a trial run as chief executive of the family firm, Waystar Royco. Kendall plans to foreclose on any possibility of a reversal by killing his father off in the corporate world. “We’re the ones with the nuts to fuckin’ revolutionise,” he informs his younger brother, Roman.

Roman is indeed nuts, but not in a way that is useful for high-end strategy, and Kendell bungles the attempted ccorporate patricide. By the end of the season, Logan is back in control and Kendall, having taken a serious dive on fortune’s wheel, looks like a broken man. Through the course of ten episodes, the lifelines of Logan and his four children, Connor, Kendell, Roman and Siobhan (“Shiv”) intertwine in a co-dependency that is both vital and toxic.

From a dramaturgical point of view, it’s an ambitious venture, requiring an equal distribution of focus across these principle characters and those they draw into their inner circle. In the final episodes of season one, their story arcs converge as they all assemble in the English stately home for Shiv’s wedding.

The scenes here are consummately orchestrated. The formalities are presided over by Shiv’s mother (Harriet Walters), a lady of the manor with no manners at all, who circulates between groups quietly dropping poison pills into the conversation. Shiv’s fiancé Tom, meanwhile, has discovered she has been having an affair. Tom is a clutz. Ernest, obtuse, but with an alpha male streak that drives a desperate quest to be included in the power base of the inner family. English actor Matthew Macfadyen, who excels at playing on the boundary between pathos and farce, gives him a perverse appeal that has won something of a cult following.

Logan’s younger son Roman (Kieran Culkin), clueless about business, sex and pretty much everything else, issues a stream of unfiltered remarks, in which every other word is “fuckin.’” It’s a kind of defence system: he may not measure up to any one else in the family in terms of achievements, but in his chirpy way he can deliver as many insults per minute as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, another of scriptwriter/showrunner Jesse Armstrong’s triumphs.

As that first season approaches its denoument, the breakdown in family relations looks terminal. Logan, in recovery, has fallen out with all of them. Brian Cox plays him as a flinty rock of a man, to be neither shifted nor worn down. Others collide with him at their peril. He is forgiving to his children, treating their callow attempts at treachery as learning experiences, but there are reckonings to be made for any blunders they make in the corporate environment. It is Kendall (Jeremy Strong) who suffers most. Made of less adamant stuff, he takes the knocks hard, and resorts to substance abuse as the only available escape. Shiv (Sarah Snook) combines sensual charm with a quicksilver instinct for the shifting gameplay in the family.

Season two commences with Shiv’s emergeance as the chosen successor. But with Logan back at the helm and driving dangerously, the road ahead is anyone’s guess. He dominates the boardroom with tactics ranging from sophisticated charm to brutish intimidation.

The suave manners are on display when an emissary from a prestigious dynasty of the old New York business world arrives to negotiate. Holly Hunter plays the visitor with brittle poise, never wavering from the tone of quiet courtesy as she says “on behalf of the Pierce family and their media organization that has been privately owned for 150 years, the message would be a typically balanced, nuanced and objective ‘fuck off.’” The benign smile on Logan’s face doesn’t falter while Kendell, standing in the background, quietly recites the numbers. He’s simply raising the bid and she, entirely disingenuous, eventually starts to listen.

Thematically, Succession invites comparison with Billions, which explores the same paradox of the ruthless operator who subordinates the lives of all around him to the obsessive quest for ever more wealth, but in doing so becomes a mere conduit for the imperatives of the corporate world itself. Conspicuous consumption is no longer the pay-off for the all-consuming enterprise of acquiring wealth. Bobby Axelrod in Billions likes to splash it around on occasion, but spends most of his time in jeans and trainers, all his acquisitive instincts concentrated on deals. Logan Roy has a voracious appetite for corporate take-over, moving on other companies like a general whose only need is to gain more conquests.

A nostalgic title sequence in Succession shows the lost world of his childhood, where wealth meant a fine homestead, tennis courts, elegant clothes and carefree play. In the present, no one in the family seems interested in what money can buy. Tom’s attempt to impress Logan by presenting him with a Patek Philippe watch as a birthday present elicits no more than an embarrassed shrug in response. When Shiv learns that Kendall has been shoplifting vape fluid, she is perplexed. “Vape fluid? But he could buy the whole industry.” In one scene, Logan orders the removal of an elaborate cordon bleu dinner, calling for pizza instead.

It is not simply that there is no association between wealth and wellbeing, or even between wealth and gratification. It’s rather that extreme wealth exhausts all forms of gratification other than those on which it feeds: deals, trades, takeovers. The trappings of conspicuous consumption that make up the world of The Great Gatsby are now irrelevant; the ultimate consumer is the corporation, ever more voracious as it grows.

Succession offers obvious analogies with the Murdoch empire and its dynastic challenges, but its creators make no attempt to match the characters to real life. This is a drama in its own right, with its own ethos and tone. Armstrong, teamed up with director Adam McKay (whose recent credits include The Big Short), works at a level of sophistication that might give some commercial producers pause, but it pays off. Audiences, it seems, are greedy for shows that make intellectual demands but promise real insight and dramatic cogency.

Both are delivered, and with more wit and less affectation than the Aaron Sorkin repertoire, where the smart-talk is so generic it really doesn’t matter who says what. Here, every character is as distinctive as an instrument in an orchestra, and the whole effect is one of meticulous composition. The award-winning score by Nicholas Britell feeds allegro piano music through the episodes, adding an at times ludicrously buoyant air to the psychological mayhem. •

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Ailes’s game plan was arrestingly simple. All the other networks were competing with each other for the same demographic: liberals with left-wing leanings. No one was catering to the conservative audience. Cable, he said, was about “the loyalty of the passionate few.”

Not so few, either. The strategy of appealing to those who don’t want so much to be informed as to feel they are informed soon gave the new channel a massive and enduring lead over its rivals. In countless homes around America, Fox became the loudest voice in the room.

According to Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the book on which the series is based, that strategy proved double-edged once Fox News came to play a decisive political role. The voter base targeted — and largely created — by Ailes holds at around 43 per cent of the electorate. For Murdoch, the owner of Fox, that ceiling means huge profits, but for Donald Trump, whose survival depends almost exclusively on that 43 per cent, the hold on an election-winning majority is precarious.

The combative political tactics over which Ailes presided have also spawned counter-offensives like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. And one of the paradoxes of The Loudest Voice is that the appeal of any series about Ailes or Fox News will be primarily to the wry, dry, cynical viewers who follow Stewart and his successor Trevor Noah. “High-information” audiences want and need to know what they are up against.

That is what Robert Greenwald’s 2004 documentary Outfoxed set out to show. It started with a polemical statement from David Brock, chief executive of the liberal watchdog Media Matters, about how the prevalence of misinformation in the media environment is “fundamentally undermining democracy.” The film’s most strident figure was Bill O’Reilly, who freely tells guests to “shut up” if he doesn’t like their views.

O’Reilly is not among the dramatis personae of The Loudest Voice. Perhaps scriptwriters Tom McCarthy and Alex Metcalf felt that so forceful a personality would distract attention from Ailes. One of the consequences, though, is that we get a toned-down view of the whole enterprise.

As Ailes, Russell Crowe brings out an introspective dimension. The camera shows his face from the side as he watches the 9/11 attacks unfolding on a bank of monitors, the light from the screens reflected in his glasses. This affects him profoundly, but he must remain in control. He orders cameras to be stationed on the roof and demands that the images be played on a loop, hour after hour, without interruption.

Crowe seems at home inside the layers of prosthesis that transform him into a man of entirely different physiognomy and stature. Following Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher, Gary Oldman’s Churchill and Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney, the uncanny second coming of public figures on our screens is becoming a familiar phenomenon. You have to admire these tours de force, but they are high-risk enterprises.

The actor can become too focused on the physicality of the character. Although Crowe claims he found make-up artist Adrien Morot’s silicone creation “really liberating,” it constrains the performance by becoming its defining element. The heavy jowls, the bright eyes almost drowning in pillows of flesh, the lumbering walk, all communicate an impression of agile intelligence trapped in suffocating encumbrance.

There’s pathos in this. Crowe almost manages to elicit sympathy as he battles to express his own sensuality in painfully awkward scenes with the young woman he has co-opted as his mistress. The real-life Ailes exuded a more dangerous potency. In this portrayal, the vindictive aspects of his behaviour are also muted by the suggestion that he is driven by ingenuous passions for the America he loves and the foreign enemies he hates.

Ailes’s relationship with Rupert Murdoch is central to the series, and although the balance of the two personalities works well in dramatic terms, it again involves a distortion of the power dynamics. Ken LaCorte and John Moody, who held executive positions during Ailes’s tenure at Fox News, testify that he was a controlled and judicious operator, capable of strategic detachment as well as impassioned involvement. Murdoch, too, could switch quickly between these modes.

The series writers have opted to accord all the detachment to Murdoch and all the passion to Ailes. It works effectively to convey a hierarchy of power: Murdoch weaponises a volatile personality to do the dirtier work of propaganda, reining him in only occasionally when the stakes are too high (when Ailes insists, for instance, that all references to Obama include an emphatic enunciation of his middle name, “Hussein”). Simon McBurney as Murdoch captures the behavioural minimalism that goes with the confidence of absolute control. He gets the craggy voice, and the relaxed articulation.

Both actors, though, teeter on the edge of impersonation. Every wrong note in McBurney’s Australian accent (and there are a few) jars. The crumpled features that at times evoke an extraordinary resemblance to the real-life figure also show up awkwardly at certain angles.

Overall, though, the strength of the series is in its casting. Sienna Miller is absolutely believable as Beth Ailes. Naomi Watts alternately sparkles and snaps as Gretchen Carlson, the Fox and Friends host who becomes Ailes’s nemesis. Seth MacFarlane reveals the conflicted psychology of Ailes’s protégé Brian Lewis, who finds himself burdened with a dawning conscience.

As MacFarlane comments, in an interview about how the Fox enterprise comes across in the series as a whole, “It’s hard to hate up close.” And clearly we are not invited to hate Ailes, or Murdoch. Yet Fox itself exudes hate, and perhaps did so more overtly during Ailes’s term than it does now, though the impact on American politics is still playing out. Any effective dramatisation of that needs a much sharper edge. •

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It’s the voice of the land you hear first: the drone of insects, the bird calls, the leaves rustling. Then the sound of humans walking barefoot blends in, the leaves rustling more sharply as sprays of foliage are pulled from the trees and added to a pile in the clearing. At the click of a lighter, smoke rises. We hear the voice of an elder recite the names of the land: “Arrkuluk. Arrkuluk. Injalak. Mandjawulbinjdji. I ask these places to take back the spirit.” His voice, too, is low and intimate, as if taking its pitch from the sounds around him.

This smoking of the spirits is a quiet business, and one not usually observed by outsiders. Much is at stake: establishing boundaries between the living and the dead is critical to securing the cycle that links new and coming generations with the ancestral presence.

On this occasion, though, outsiders will be witnessing the ceremony on film. “The reason why those men wanted to smoke the hard drive was to protect you while you watch,” Thomas explains. It is important that we watch, because “we,” who are the inheritors of broken traditions arising from a settler culture, are implicated.

Thomas’s film, co-directed by Béatrice Bijon, documents the repatriation and burial of stolen ancestral bones. It also tells the story of how the bones were taken from their resting place in a cave at Gunbalanya in Arnhem Land in the first place, weaving in extracts from a documentary made by a party of ethnological researchers in 1948.

First, though, we hear about those events from two local men, one of whom is the artist responsible for the paintings on the sacred rock face leading to the cave. As they climb the hill, music is introduced: rising cadences on stringed instruments, elegiac and melodic. The dialogue between the men is almost matter-of-fact. “The white people got those bones from this cave, they took them down the hill… They put the bones in a box and took them overseas.”

The bones are restored now to their original resting place and life in Gunbalanya goes on in a steady weave of sound and motion. A rhythmic soundtrack of didgeridoo and guitar accompanies images of children circling each other on bikes, bats hanging in sleep, dogs lazing in the sun, women chatting as they wander across the street, a crocodile floating downstream.

“We want to keep this place as strong and as normal as it was many, many thousands of years ago,” says Jacob Nayinggul, the elder who is in every sense the presiding spirit of the film. With its river, hill caves and flourishing native plants, this is a stunning place. In a final poetic flourish to this first part of this account, a flock of birds takes off against a flaming sky reflected in the still waters below.

Then, a jarring note. A fanfare cuts in, and an announcement comes in the strident tones of postwar BBC English: “Expedition to Arnhem Land.” Nothing could more effectively express the shock of an alien cultural intrusion. There is no need for commentary, and none is offered. A small plane lands, discharging a cargo of Europeans dressed in khaki shorts and shirts. Bulky provisions are unloaded from a boat, and the whitefellas set up camp with Australian and American flags hanging side by side above the tents.

This 1948 expedition was led by Charles Mountford, a photographer and ethnographer from South Australia, and Smithsonian curator Frank Setzler, who had interests in the racial characteristics of human anatomy. Both were in search of relics and artefacts they could take home with them. We see Setzler taking facial casts from the young men, who patiently cooperate. Then a couple of teenage boys lead him up to the caves where the bones are held, and take a nap while he explores. The trust is painful to witness. While they are asleep, Setzler nips into the cave, and like any common cat burglar, helps himself to what, back at the Smithsonian, will be received as a prize haul.

Here Thomas intervenes with a brief account of the Smithsonian enterprise and the late nineteenth-century fascination with evolutionary ethnography. The museum was founded with a bequest from English scientist James Smithson, who died in Genoa in 1829 and “lay there for seventy years” until, in one of the most striking symmetrical ironies of this whole situation, his own remains were repatriated.

They are now installed in a marble shrine in the original Smithsonian building known as “the Castle.” Opposite this fine Victorian edifice is a clinical modern construction designed for the high-density storage of a vast archive of specimens. Numbered skulls and bones are packed into trays in massive shelving units.

In 2010, following negotiations with the Smithsonian, representatives from the people of Gunbalanya, East Arnhem Land and Groote Island travelled to Washington to receive the bones Setzler had taken. Thomas and cinematographer Adis Hondo went with them, and filmed the simple ceremony they performed as the boxes were wheeled out on a trolley draped in Aboriginal flags.

At almost exactly the midpoint of the documentary, we return to Gunbalanya to follow the stages of reception and repatriation in the homeland. This is overseen by Nayinggul, who serves as a commentator on the significance of all that must be done. Each bone and skull is painted with ochre and wrapped in paperbark. He talks to them, offering reassurance that they have come home. “We’ll follow,” he says. “We’ll go after them, too.”

Over the five years between Thomas’s first visit to the community and the burial ceremony, Nayinggul has declined physically. A frail figure in his early sixties in 2006, he is a near skeleton when he directs the ceremonial proceedings from his wheelchair in 2011. It’s as if his presence in the physical world is fading. There is a lightness about everything he says and does. He switches effortlessly between English and traditional language, alternately addressing the spirits of the dead and making explanatory comments to the film crew.

Soon after his ancestors were laid to rest Nayinggul did indeed follow them. Etched in Bone took eight years in all to complete and, as Thomas explains in his 2013 essay, “Because It’s Your Country: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land,” a number of years had to pass before the taboo was lifted on speaking the name of the deceased or showing his image. It is a tribute to Thomas and Bijon that it is essentially Nayinggul’s film. He establishes its tone and controls its message.

This is an exceptional piece of filmmaking, governed by qualities of restraint and attunement that are essential to its subject. Thomas first visited Gunbalanya in search of recordings of Aboriginal song, and the musicality of the film as a whole — with compositions by Yolngu musician Joe Gumbula and original music by Eric and Joseph Bijon — is one of its most appealing characteristics. •

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The central figure in Chernobyl (screening in Australia on Foxtel) is Valery Legasov, a nuclear physicist sent to assess the reactor immediately following the initial explosion on 26 April 1986. Jared Harris portrays him as a committed professional who becomes the voice of conscience within a corrupt regime, dominating the final episode with his testimony at the criminal trial of Chernobyl personnel in July 1987.

Legasov’s speech, aimed at the cohort of observers from scientific institutions who constituted an unofficial jury, overstepped the bounds of what the Politburo was prepared to hear. The rest of his story is all too predictable. Made a “former person” and relegated to obscurity, his interventions were largely wiped from the record. Shortly after the second anniversary of the meltdown, he committed suicide.

One of the few remaining traces of his presence is a brief interview on NBC’s News Today at the time of the August 1986 conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, to which he was sent as chief Soviet delegate, still bearing the Kremlin seal of approval. The American interviewer is keen to ask the leading questions: “Are you saying as much as you know?” and “Should all the reactors be closed?”

To the first question he responds that the detailed report he has submitted “tried to produce precisely the kind of material that would enable the experts to consider the measures and draw conclusions for the future.” As for closing the other sixteen reactors of the same design, he shrugs. (Yes, he really does shrug, in a slow, inexpressive movement.) It’s the first thing that occurs to anyone unfamiliar with the history of the breakdown, he says. “Experts” — a word he uses repeatedly — understand things differently.

Legasov’s expression is impenetrable throughout, that of a technocrat reciting an authorised doctrine. The fuller story of his involvement suggests that there was a complex, principled human being behind the mask, and therein was a key challenge for scriptwriter Craig Mazin and actor Jared Harris. Mazin avoids the obvious choices: there’s no attempt to portray Legasov as a family man, although he had a wife and daughter who stood by him throughout the ordeal. Instead, he sits alone in a dismal little apartment, with a cat as his sole companion.

The real-life Legasov was also a man of some national standing, an esteemed party loyalist who held a senior position at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. There was potential for high drama in the authority figure torn between symbolism and realism: a version of Thomas More behind the iron curtain. Instead, he is introduced as a conscripted subordinate, a thorn in the side of party official Boris Shcherbina, the man entrusted with the political management of the crisis.

Harris, who excels in the role of the ordinary man cast onto the frontline of history (as he did as the reluctant monarch George VI in The Crown), plays Legasov as someone driven by a stubborn fixation on technological accuracy rather than by any moral commitment to “the truth.” That comes later, as an evolution of his growing insight into the causes of the catastrophe. This psychological evolution, subtle and gradual, forms a central line of tension through the five episodes.

As Shcherbina, Stellan Skarsgård is a perfect dramatic counterpart to Harris. Harris is light-voiced, slightly built and unobtrusive; Skarsgård, a solid, conspicuous figure in the landscape of devastation, speaks as if he has swallowed a handful of gravel. Yet it is Shcherbina who gives way, the realist in him called out by the sheer scale of what he is witnessing.

According to Craig Mazin, this is a story “about the cost of lies and the dangers of narrative.” The culpability of a state apparatus built on a false narrative is a central theme, but herein lies the danger of another one-dimensional narrative — that of Chernobyl as the symbol of a failed state and its fallout. Those following the story in Western media, Mazin says, “had no sense of how multilayered the situation was.” So the series also sets out to show the forms of genuine heroism exhibited by the Soviet citizenry.

In the opening episode, viewers are subjected to an almost minute-by-minute re-enactment of the unfolding disaster as it is experienced by those in the control room, where a test experiment goes wrong. The quintessential irony is that they are running a safety test. But those pressing the buttons and pulling the levers are under pressure from a bullying supervisor who has himself been leant on by a superior determined to complete the required procedures in an arbitrarily imposed timeframe. And so the machinery of the state has an impact on the technologies of the reactor: it is almost as if the escalating rage of the supervisor is feeding directly into the system, driving the rapidly scrolling numbers on the electronic counter.

Then, in one of the most vividly realised scenes, miners from Tula are called on to dig a channel underneath the core and install a liquid nitrogen coolant. The coal industries minister emerges from his vehicle dressed in a pale blue suit and faces a group of forty-five men whose skin and clothing are permeated with coal dust. It’s a stand-off of the starkest kind. He issues an order; the leader of the miners stonewalls. Why should they do this? The minister signs to the two armed guards behind him, and threatens to shoot. The miner shrugs, “You haven’t got enough bullets for all of us.” The impasse is broken when the miners understand what is at stake and accept their role, each of them leaving a black hand print on the minister’s suit as they pass him to board the convoy to Chernobyl.

This is dramaturgy, not realism, but the actual courage of those miners is well attested, and the scene serves to convey another dimension of the “Soviet Union.” There was an extent to which it remained true to its name among the people, if not in its many levels of government.

Aware as they may have been of the dangers of narrative, the series creators also deal in it by infusing the dramatisation with conventional forms of stirring and sentimental encounter. Emily Watson’s role as Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear physicist who enters the fray to offer a challenge to Legasov’s diagnosis, is a fictional composite. With her natural candour, Watson invests the character with rather too much moral colouring, especially when she incites Legasov to go out there and tell it like it is in the trial hearing. Was it really like that?

The final episode, in which scenes from the courtroom are intercut with flashbacks to the opening scene in the control room of the reactor, turns into a kind of show trial of the Soviet state. It is dominated by Legasov, whose lecture on the factors leading up to the meltdown turns at the last minute into a grand denunciation of the culture of lies in which they are all embroiled. “To be a scientist is to be naive… The truth doesn’t care about our governments, ideologies, religions. It will lie in wait for all time and this at last is the gift of Chernobyl. I once would fear the cost of truth. Now I only ask, ‘What is the cost of lies?’”

In the 1980s, Soviet Russia was, in the eyes of the Western world, the prototype for the failed state. Four decades on, Legasov’s words ring out as a statement for our times, an indictment of the fraudulent political cultures now well advanced in Western democracies. The global financial crisis might be seen as the capitalist equivalent of the Chernobyl meltdown, but what, ultimately, were the consequences? With the ascent of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson’s likely instatement as prime minister, we’re still waiting for the truth to catch up. It may be that the popularity of Chernobyl is a reflection of wishful thinking. If only the truth actually would come home to roost. •

The post Eventually the truth catches up appeared first on Inside Story.

The prime ministers also featured as caricatures in the Talking Pictures retrospective presented by program regular Mike Bowers. Quick-fire visual editing and witty juxtaposition has been one of the hallmarks of Insiders. The program has given us the dramatis personae of the political world as miniaturised cartoon figures racing through a phantasmagoria, or as all-too-human personalities trapped in a chair by Cassidy’s steadily relentless questioning — or sometimes caught on camera during moments of flailing desperation, in what are badged “Matt Price moments.”

Cassidy was determined to share the honours of his own curtain call with an acknowledgement of Matt Price as a defining influence on the Insiders approach in its early years; Middleton described the late journalist as “garrulous, withering and hilarious.” But Cassidy’s own manner is much less confronting. “He could charm and disarm,” said Josh Frydenberg. “You would enter into a conversation on a Sunday morning without your tie,” and relax at your peril. Cassidy never interrupted; when he pulled off a gotcha moment, it was by deftly catching his subject off guard. Guests might have had memorable spats, but Cassidy managed to sustain an overall mood of ease that encouraged clarity rather than contentiousness.

Over his eighteen years as host, the program’s loyal audience has expanded steadily, even during periods when politics has been hard to watch. The stakes are so high, the issues so fraught and the dishonesty so persistent that many of us find television interviews and debates something of an ordeal. Somehow Cassidy’s presence served as an anchor in the true sense: as an embodiment of trust and stability amid the swirling tides of propaganda.

The debut episode of Insiders, on 15 July 2001, led with the story of the Aston by-election. The Liberals retained the seat with a reduced majority, but the votes they lost didn’t flow Labor’s way. Interviewed on the program, prime minister John Howard was keen to draw the inference that, contrary to the prevailing view of the commentariat, his government was on course to win a third term.

With all the apparent momentum on Labor’s side, the 2001 election played out in a way that was in some respects echoed last month. A 2 per cent swing to the government kept Howard in power, leaving those on the left of politics with a sense that public discourse was so thoroughly skewed by manipulation and misinformation that there was no hope of change through the democratic process.

But other factors were in play. That was the Tampa election, and it followed the chaos and trauma of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Phillipa McGuinness’s recent book on 2001 as The Year Everything Changed portrays the gathering sense of an epoch turning, or rather churning, in dangerous and unpredictable ways.

Cassidy’s career included a period as press secretary to Bob Hawke during the most stable political period of the postwar era, but at the helm of Insiders he had to respond to a succession of profoundly disorienting events: the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the dissemination of fake news, the ongoing climate crisis and the election of Trump.

Last weekend’s program led with the story of the Australian Federal Police raids on the ABC. They were intended “to send a message,” said Atkins, designed to intimidate journalists and media outlets. Cassidy interviewed deputy Labor leader Richard Marles, pressing him on why had Labor backed the legislation that set the framework for such an unequal balance of power between the press and the authorities.

It was classic Cassidy. Marles was vigorous in condemnation of the government’s assumed role in the raids, but gave a somewhat bland response on the key question of espionage laws and their impact on freedom of the press. Keeping the tone steady, Cassidy dug deeper rather than just reasserting his key challenge, as too many interviewers do when they think they are being tough. He gave viewers what was needed here — not a gotcha moment, but an exposure of how, on such a critical matter, when the role of the opposition as the guarantor of democracy is tested, the Labor position just doesn’t hang together.

There is widespread consensus that David Speers is a worthy successor to Cassidy on Insiders. He will take on the role at a time when the political and economic churning shows all the signs of leading to wider and more serious kinds of turbulence. Cassidy and Speers represent state-of-the-art approaches to political dialogue and commentary, but we may need something more than this, or something quite different, in the coming months and years. Rather than the endless commentary on the day-by-day, week-by-week cut and thrust of politics, it’s time to look at the underlying principles of government. No one is doing that. •

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