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.” •

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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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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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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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Margaret Simons acknowledges the crude misogyny implicit in such a remark, but also that it was “in line with the views of most political hardheads.” The hardheads are not all misogynists: Julia Gillard and Penny Wong lean in that direction, though they would reject Latham’s terminology. Others, Plibersek a leading voice among them, would argue that bringing issues like childcare, domestic violence, human services and social inclusion to the centre of the policy arena is some of the toughest work around.

Taking this difference in perspective as a central theme, Simons begins her new biography, Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms, by paying her respects to Jane Austen, for whose work she and Plibersek share an enduring love. Given that Austen is not a political novelist, it’s an unlikely starting point. If you read all her works twice over you’d be forgiven for missing any reference to major national crises of the time: the madness of the King, the Highland clearances, the Luddite riots and (aside from the appearance of handsomely dressed soldiers) the Napoleonic wars.

And yet. She is the first English-language novelist to portray social and family relations as a form of politics. Social hierarchies display the dynamics of control and subjugation. Personalities are formed and deformed through ambition. Economic factors determine the composition and management of households, and underlie the all-important negotiations over marriage partners. At the heart of each story is the question of how personal integrity may play out in the midst of all this.

What piques Simons’s interest from the outset is that Plibersek has a special admiration for Elinor Dashwood in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, a character remarkable for “strength of understanding and coolness of judgement.” Dashwood’s good sense enables her to steer through thickets of vested interest and covert motivation towards a secure future. “It is rare, in fiction as in politics, for sensibleness to be cast as heroic virtue,” Simons observes, as she embarks on a political narrative that will have little in the way of major intrigues, crises and dramas, because these are not Plibersek’s milieu.

What she presents is an interesting case study in female ambition. Simons cites some stern remarks from Anne Summers on a 2001 interview in which Plibersek responded to a question about her ambitions by saying she was “not desperate to be a minister.” She’s known as a good communicator, never a fiery orator. Colleagues say she lacks “the vision thing.” Her career has been one of steady ascent, slow at times and rather predictable.

The daughter of Slovenian migrants whose skills and hard work brought the family to middle-class prosperity in a single generation, Plibersek grew up in Oyster Bay in Sutherland Shire and graduated as dux of Jannali Girls High School in 1987. Her association with the Labor Party began earlier, at the age of fifteen, and it was then that she first encountered Anthony Albanese as a fellow member of Young Labor.

After completing a degree in communications at the University of Technology Sydney, where she served as women’s officer in her honours year, she became involved in feminist networks that helped frame her enduring priorities. Meredith Burgmann, Wendy Bacon and Ann Symonds were important influences.

Her first big break came early, when it was suggested she run for preselection for the seat of Sydney after sitting member Peter Baldwin’s resignation. In her own words, it was “an audacious move,” and one that introduced her to the nasty business of factional politics. Simons emphasises this aspect of Plibersek’s story as background to the damaging Labor leadership battles that began when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard replaced Kim Beazley in 2006, and continued through the chaotic alternations of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments.

How do you maintain an ethic of loyalty in an environment riddled with treachery? On a personal level, Plibersek steered a discreet course, never wavering from her loyalty to Beazley but serving the regimes that followed him with consistency and good grace.

Sometimes, though, loyalty to principles conflicts with personal loyalties, and the Tampa crisis of August 2001 was a crucial test in this regard. Beazley’s capitulation to the Howard government’s decision to refuse landing to the Norwegian freighter after it rescued 433 shipwrecked asylum seekers went against everything Plibersek believed in, yet after speaking out in fraught party meetings she, too, capitulated.

“I don’t think I’ve ever found it so hard to walk into the chamber and vote for something in my life,” she told Simons. She was only a backbencher, but perhaps this was, to use one of the metaphors employed in the book, a “sliding doors” moment in her career, as it was in Australian politics.

She had been speaking out on asylum seekers in alliance with Western Australian MP Carmen Lawrence. Suppose she had held the line, displayed some of the oratorical fire Simons finds lacking in her rhetoric, and taken a lead on “the vision thing”? It might have marked her out as a future prime minister. Surely that is what Jacinda Ardern would have done.

Opting instead for good parliamentary behaviour, she identified herself in the party room as someone to be thoroughly trusted with whatever brief she was given. Her ministerial portfolios in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments were in line with her established priorities: housing and the status of women, human services, social inclusion and health.

It was not until 2013, when she became shadow foreign affairs and international development minister, that she stepped outside what some might have termed her comfort zone, though “comfort” would be an ironic word to describe areas of responsibility in which so much human suffering is at issue, and where she has so often taken courageous personal action.

Simons astutely does the work of a Jane Austen, insisting on the centrality of what others might consider incidental matters. There is the account of how she noticed a man in a boarding house whose fingers were gangrenous, and drove him to hospital in time to get life-saving surgery. It’s one of countless incidents in which she intervened immediately to assist someone in a critical situation.

Preparation for a white paper on homelessness involved meetings around the nation in remote communities, homelessness centres and refuges. Plibersek was present whenever she could be. She would read correspondence from constituents, checking official replies to ensure that someone in urgent need was not left without a line of help.

According to staffers, she is not just “as good” as her reputation, but exceeds it. She takes home-cooked food to elderly neighbours and serves cake in the office for those working long hours. If someone brings an infant to work (as she did herself with two of her children), she adapts the office environment to suit their needs.

“She lives with great complexity, and handles it well,” as one colleague puts it. It’s the complexity that’s easy to miss, and that Simons is determined to capture. Demarcation lines between domestic and professional life, personal commitment and political statement, urgent situations and long-term objectives, are constantly being erased. This is unusual in a senior minister, even among women at that level.

There’s much in this book about Plibersek’s family: the challenges faced by her migrant parents, the murder of her dynamic brother Philip in Papua New Guinea, the well-known troubled past of her husband Michael Coutts-Trotter, now a distinguished senior public servant. And towards the end of the book, an exclusive interview reveals how her daughter Anna’s personal crisis led to Plibersek’s decision not to oppose Albanese for the leadership.

The question of whether she will at some stage become prime minister, and if so whether she would be a good one, hovers over the book, and draws with it another, larger question: what do we most need in a national leader?

As geopolitical tensions intensify, economic challenges deepen and ecological catastrophe looms, the main concern is how a prime minister can perform on the world stage, something Plibersek has never had a chance to demonstrate. But revelations from the robodebt inquiry draw the attention back to home ground, and the rot beneath our feet when human principles are discarded. Is Jane Austen’s prime minister the answer? •

Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms
By Margaret Simons | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 320 pages

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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. •

The post The beat of a different drum appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post Behaving badly appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

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.” •

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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.

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. •

The post The outsider appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

Surely satire had done its worst? That benchmark seemed to have been acknowledged by the Museum of London when it acquired the balloon as a permanent exhibit in early 2021. And yet, as Flinders University’s Robert Phiddian observes in his new book, Satire and the Public Emotions, Trump came out of it relatively unscathed.

Since the American president had at that point displayed a capacity to come out of just about anything unscathed, this may not in itself be especially remarkable. But, as Phiddian shows, satire has long been regarded as the most lethal weapon in the armoury of writers, artists and performers. If it proved ineffective at that critical juncture, is the pen no longer mightier than the sword?

The value of the Trump blimp, in Phiddian’s view, was no more than palliative: it was a cathartic release for the pent-up contempt, anger and disgust of protesters. Contempt, anger and disgust — the “CAD triad” — are the emotions associated with satire since classical antiquity, when it was epitomised in the works of fourth-century BCE dramatist Aristophanes.

To try to work out what satire actually does, as distinct from what satirists think it does, Phiddian focuses on the balance between cathartic gratification and strategic impact on the battlefield of politics. Satire, which purports to weaponise the CAD triad against a hated public figure to deliver a lethal (if virtual) assault, more often seems only to offer a placebo effect. It is thus “not exactly the opposable thumb of public discourse,” says Phiddian, though its appeal may depend on convincing an audience that it is.

If Trump’s term as president was the acid test of satire’s impact — a test it seemed to fail — then we have to ask why audiences returned night after night to Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Seth Meyers for the latest excoriating tirade against him. Surely not just because it made them feel better. They must have been expecting some decisive moment to be reached, a turning point in public outrage.

But such a shift can occur only if the satirists win the contest of public opinion, and win it so decisively that the outrage translates into votes, or triggers a sweeping change in the zeitgeist. In the current environment, the only person who could really claim to have done that is Greta Thunberg. Thunberg cut through by speaking with the candour of a child, in stark contrast to the sophistries of a satirical tradition that harks back to the eighteenth century.

Robert Phiddian devotes much of his book to an account of key players in that tradition, the eighteenth-century satirists Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and John Gay, who left us with some ringing phrases and indelible images. In his Satires (1738) Pope celebrated anger as a “sacred weapon” and gave vent to a moral wrath he claimed was driven only by “the strong antipathy of good to bad.” In The Beggar’s Opera (1728) Gay reversed the social world on stage to make heroes of “thieves and whores.” Defoe foreshadowed Orwell in The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), a pamphlet that disguised bitter mockery with animal parables.

Swift, going a step further than Pope, added the corrosive elements of anger and disgust to moral wrath and had the words saeva indignatio (savage indignation) engraved on his tomb. It is perhaps these emotions, more than anything expressed by his contemporaries, that are central to current political satire.

Contempt, anger and disgust converge in the savage indignation fuelling portrayals of Trump as a howling baby or Boris Johnson as a straw-haired buffoon mouthing gibberish from the stores of knowledge he acquired during his much-vaunted classical education. Scott Morrison joined the cartoonists’ company in Hawaiian shirt and flower crown, smiling like a loon as Australia burned in the black summer of 2019–20.

Financial Review cartoonist David Rowe pushes the boundaries of contempt and disgust, depicting Trump as a monstrous heap of pink blubber, a fusion of Jabba the Hutt and the emperor with no clothes. Other potentates drawn into Trump’s orbit take on the same guise of naked obesity, becoming figures of visceral hate.

With his focus primarily on the literary heritage of satire, Phiddian doesn’t comment at any length on visual manifestations. But it is here that some of his key questions are most graphically at issue. Rowe, in company with English cartoonists Gerald Scarfe and Martin Rowson, unleashes the savagery of indignation to a point where the boundary between satire and vilification dissolves.

There is always morality in their wrath. The repugnant personae they conjure on the page are a means of giving form to the offences against human value and dignity committed by the worst political leaders. But anger so highly charged with contempt and disgust becomes hatred, bearing its own moral hazards.

As Phiddian points out, “satirical disgust has no reliable moral compass.” He sees contempt as belonging to a “cooler” register, but rightly warns against its dangers. When expressed in caricatures foregrounding racial or gender characteristics, it is toxic. He discusses at some length philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s condemnation of the CAD triad as an emotional phenomenon vested in “a fruitless focus on magical ideas of payback.”

Such a view would ultimately put satire out of business as a moral enterprise, and Phiddian argues that greater licence is called for in the passion-infused politics of the twenty-first century. But hasn’t satire always claimed a greater licence? Isn’t that exactly what Swift did with his coinage of “savage indignation”?

Nussbaum’s views are an important check on the licence of satire, but as a moral philosopher she misses the entertainment factor. From Aristophanes onwards, satirists have been sought-after dramatists, poets, comedians, cartoonists, singers and impersonators.

Important as it is to deal with the theoretical aspects of satire as a tradition in entertainment, its effectiveness in moral crusades can’t be judged in the abstract. It’s all about the examples, and the media environment in which they are generated.

Take the case of Tina Fey’s impersonations of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential election campaign, which Phiddian cites as one of the few instances in which satire can be said to have brought about a political downfall. Here, though, the idea of payback proved not merely magical. In his documentary The Undefeated (2011), Steve Bannon celebrated Palin as the harbinger of a new and revolutionary influence in American politics. The payback for her defeat was the rise of Donald Trump.

As for Trump’s own defeat in 2020, it remains to be seen whether the payback campaign over the “stolen election” will come to anything. But Trump is working on it, with a groundswell of supporters capable of returning any moral outrage directed at him with a vengeance of their own.

As the satirists’ treatment of Trump shows, the triad’s three components don’t appear in an equal mix: changing political climates bring one or another element to the fore. Contempt is riding high at the moment. Tinged with arrogance and associated with moral grandstanding, it is surely the most likely of the three to generate a backlash.

It also has the best entertainment value. With season three of Succession just commencing, we can expect a continuation of the carnival of interpersonal contempt that has made this one of the most popular and highly regarded series of recent years. Each member of tycoon Logan Roy’s gladiatorial family operates under an apparent conviction that contempt is the ultimate weapon of both attack and defence.

As they roll from one bruising debacle to another, though, lethal consequences elude them. It seems like an endorsement of Phiddian’s thesis: satire can’t deliver consequences. What’s funny is that we keep upping the ante, under the delusion that it will. •

Satire and the Public Emotions
By Robert Phiddian | Cambridge University Press | $31.95 | 84 pages

The post Is satire dead? 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. •

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Ricciardi’s study is a curious act of faith, for it assumes we know who Ferrante really is. The Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti notoriously identified her as literary translator Anita Raja, and Ricciardi seeks to confirm that view by describing how the Neapolitan saga is an encounter between German and Italian traditions, and reflects Raja’s work as a translator of German literature into Italian.

But whether Ferrante has actually been “found” remains a matter of keen and sometimes bitter controversy. In email interviews, the person who writes under that name has insisted that the novels stand by themselves — that the absence of the author from the public sphere “makes the writing absolutely central.”

Ferrante’s statements about her identity are fraught with anomalies and paradoxes. This very refusal to be identified has become absolutely central to public interest in the novels, and has generated one of the most compelling literary detective stories of our times.

The obsession with finding Ferrante intensified with the publication of the quartet known as the Neapolitan novels (2012–15), the first two of which have been adapted for television as My Brilliant Friend. There is a provocative irony in Ferrante’s creation of a fictional alter ego who is both the narrator and central figure in the chronicle: Elena Greco tells us everything about every aspect of her own life.

In a narrative driven by what she has called a “mania for reality,” Ferrante evokes the fraught social world of the arid outer suburb of Naples in which Elena and her friend Lila spend their childhood, then moves through locations around the city, where a burgeoning intellectual culture provides wider opportunities. The reality-effect of these literary evocations is so powerful it has generated a tourist trade catering to those who want to see and experience the places for themselves.

In a sense, Elena Ferrante is Elena Greco, or vice versa. Lofty authorial statements about trusting the writing are all very well, but the crucial question is one of trust in the story. Does the author belong to these places in the way that Greco does? Has she experienced for herself the murky social and familial tensions that explode with such inevitability? Does the mania for reality hold true if she has not, and if she does not know the constraints of a life lived on the edge of poverty in an environment from which education is a sole and desperate escape route.

These questions burned along the trails of detection as they converged on a well-established Italian literary couple, novelist Domenico Starnone and his wife Anita Raja as likely suspects in the case. Starnone came into focus first, when a team of specialists in “stylometrics,” a form of linguistic fingerprinting, began to observe a strong correlation between his works and those published under the name of Ferrante.

Then, in October 2016, Claudio Gatti claimed his scoop. It was a case of “follow the money,” he said: sudden and otherwise unaccountable increases in Raja’s wealth, including real estate acquisitions, corresponded with the commissioning and release times of the Ferrante novels. Raja works as a translator for Ferrante’s publisher, so the transfer of income streams could be easily managed.

Gatti’s approach was aggressive and prosecutory. He claimed that Raja should be exposed precisely because her own biographical profile, as the daughter of middle-class parents and brought up in Rome, was so different from that of Greco. If there was a “real” story in Raja’s life, he asserted, it was that of her mother, a Polish Jew whose family fled to Italy during the Holocaust.

The exposé, published for anglophone readers in the New York Review, generated outrage among Ferrante devotees who saw it as not only an invasion of Raja’s privacy, but also a gross intrusion into their own intimate relationship with the works.

Raja’s role has been neither acknowledged nor effectively contested. But Ricciardi’s book is an attempt to resolve the question in a different way, bypassing the technicalities of linguistic fingerprinting to delve into the common thematic and literary preoccupations of Ferrante and Raja.

For Ricciardi, the choice of a quotation from Goethe’s Faust as an epigraph for the first novel in the quartet is of the essence, not least because Ferrante makes her own translation of the lines, in which the Lord pronounces on the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. Faust is one of those “bold, denying Spirits” whose rebellious energies soon burn themselves out; his counterpart Mephistopheles, who “works, excites, and must create, as Devil,” is the real adversary of divine order.

Taking these two figures to correspond with those of Elena and her “brilliant friend,” the endlessly disruptive Lila, Ferrante’s novels can be seen as a portrayal of feminist rebellion with mythic dimensions. Since Goethe is an important presence in the novels of Christa Wolf, all of which Raja has translated, Ricciardi suggests that this can be taken as a vital indicator.

“Like a cat burglar who cannot refrain from leaving clues at the crime scene,” she writes, Ferrante leaves “a signature that artfully encodes her likely identity as Anita Raja.” To the general reader, that’s a bit of a stretch. Academic enquiry has its own seductions, and it’s easy to overvalue evidence that is gleaned from extended trawls through dense material.

Nevertheless, this bold punt on the authorship question does create the pretext for an account of the Ferrante novels as literary fiction with themes that have been missed because of their addictive qualities as mass-market fiction.

Ricciardi finds complex and unorthodox aspects to the relationship between Elena and Lila. Though both of them experience violence and abuse, Ferrante doesn’t use the vocabulary of trauma or assault. Rather, she seems to take a psychoanalytic perspective by portraying Lila’s episode of breakdown as smarginatura, or “dissolving boundaries.”

Without the boundaries of a self there can be no identity, which is the fundamental challenge of the feminist politics to which Elena becomes committed. Her path as an academic and author enables her to form an identity from elements of masculine heritage, but it leaves her feeling she has been “invented by men” and is still imprisoned by traditions of female subordination.

An anarchic counterpoint to Elena, Lila steers her own working life through rollercoaster transitions. Never afraid to invoke the worst consequences, she nevertheless has a way of changing her own fate, often through the most ruthless of stratagems. In a phase of what seems like wilful self-destruction, she takes employment at the local salami factory, where the work involves standing for hours waist-deep in the mortadella brine. Bearing witness to these conditions in an impromptu address to a gathering of communist protesters, she demonstrates a capacity to transform into a political firebrand but then sidesteps the opportunity.

Ricciardi tracks the storylines against their historical background as both women get caught up in the shifting tides of postwar Italian politics. Here too she finds a strong trail of association with Raja and Christa Wolf, who hold a “similar pessimism” about the fate of Eastern and Western European nations. Raja supplies the critical link between two bodies of fiction in which the struggle of an emergent feminism may inevitably be crushed by ancient forms of patriarchy.

In her determination to see these works as “fiercely intellectual,” Ricciardi sidelines the very qualities that make them compelling for a vast readership. The warmth of the writing, the headlong rush of the prose, the intensely personal tone — none of these seems to belong to a vision that is consciously literary. These are not historical novels, but fictions born of lived history, with all its randomness and confusion.

Here, though, is the paradox at the heart of the novels. Elena Greco lives the life of an intellectual. For all the brutality of the social milieu in which she grew up, she creates an identity for herself through her work as a scholar and writer. Yet her outpourings as a narrator resemble the unmediated confessional of a diary.

There is a duality about Ferrante, whoever she is. Is the writer who responds to interview questions with scattergun references across the canon of literature, from Dante to Proust, Jane Austen to Walter Benjamin, who admits to a deep interest in Freud and a love of innovative cinema, really the same person as the author of the sprawling chronicles of Neapolitan life?

One school of thought is that “she” is indeed two people, and that the novels are a collaboration between Raja and Starnone. Starnone barely rates a mention from Ricciardi, but he is the one with claims to first-hand knowledge of the social turmoil of postwar Naples, and who has form as a virtuoso of the narrative voice. My money is on the two of them. •

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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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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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After more than a year of disruption and uncertainty — a time when coping with anxiety was a major challenge — this might seem like the last perspective we need. In spite of its portentous title, though, this is no empty indulgence in doomsaying. Grant wants to make an urgent case for a fundamental political reorientation.

With the Falling of the Dusk is mainly a book about China, and about Grant’s experience as correspondent for CNN in Hong Kong — during 1997, the year the territory began its long reckoning for a century and a half of British control — and Beijing. Recent events in Hong Kong have served to confirm a grim challenge: how many times does the Communist Party leadership need to tell the West that they reject liberal democracy before we accept the reality?

Grant has chosen the politically potent metaphor of the virus deliberately. Under Stalin and Hitler, targeted populations were characterised as infections to be eradicated. The totalitarian state itself, as Francis Fukuyama warned in his 1989 book, The End of History and the Last Man, “could replicate itself throughout the world like a virus.”

Fukuyama’s big-picture view of history is in tune with Grant’s way of thinking. Both acknowledge the influence of the early nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who drew an arc from imperial China through the foundations of democracy in the classical world to the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath.

Mention Hegel, and you have to explain him, or at least explain enough to justify the allusion. That’s no easy task in a book designed for readers unlikely to be interested in the metaphysical wranglings of the Enlightenment. Grant devotes only a few pages to the task, though he insists that “Hegel looms over us” and we cannot understand our own political environment without some grasp of his ideas.

Hegel may also throw light on Grant’s enterprise in a way that he doesn’t mention. According to the great German theorist, history can be done in three ways: through first-hand witness and documentation; by situating events in the longer sweep of time; and as a form of philosophy, identifying overarching patterns in the march of civilisation. By braiding all three strands, Grant builds a sense of urgency.

The reporter who has been sent to Papua New Guinea, North Korea, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq to witness some of the darkest scenes in recent history is backed up by the historian who places them in the larger scheme of things. The philosopher is compelled to ask where all this is heading, and whether we still have the time or the awareness to stave off the worst of what the future may hold.

Many foreign correspondents write books, but few do so with such intellectual ambition and historical sweep. And I doubt many of them read Hegel, who may seem a remote and abstruse figure to most of those who front world crises. Yet the work of bearing witness to human cruelty and derangement also prompts a need for larger structures of understanding in which reason holds its place as an article of faith.

Rationality and optimism, though, don’t necessarily go together. When Fukuyama, in a mood of Hegelian buoyancy, rashly proclaimed the end of history, he believed that the grand narrative of humanity’s march towards freedom was at last being brought to its conclusion: capitalism had triumphed; the totalitarian regimes of communism were a spent force.

Fukuyama himself has clarified and largely retracted those predictions; and Grant’s ongoing determination to wrestle with them, which he has done numerous times in reports for the ABC, seems driven by a conviction that Fukuyama was not just wrong, but wrong in a critical way. History has returned with a vengeance, with China as the model towards which the major political traditions are converging. And now the virus may prove to be the instrument through which freedom itself is terminally weakened.

Grant’s brief as Beijing correspondent involved covering major political moments, such as the accession speech of Xi Jinping, but also gave him licence to hunt the length and breadth of the country for stories illustrating all aspects of contemporary life. He provides a distressing account of the wet markets in Guangdong at the time of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Poverty shapes destinies in many ways. Near Lanzhou in the northwest, where the suicide rate is high, a fisherman adapts his inherited trade to make an income hauling in the corpses of those who have jumped from the bridge. He posts the photographs online, and relatives can then pay to view the corpse for identification.

Ever-present official minders and trackers must be evaded on an expedition to Chengdu on the Tibetan border to speak to Buddhist monks protesting about the crackdown in their homeland. Reporting in this country is a cat-and-mouse game that is by turns dangerous and absurd: new tactics are constantly needed to hide footage and outwit the surveillance.

The assiduous journalist alternates between chasing emerging stories in the provinces and delving into the background of the people who steer events, but the weave of destiny is always his underlying story. The roles of reporter, historian and philosopher merge seamlessly in Grant’s narrative.

In search of insights into how a new form of leadership has emerged in China, he visits Mao’s living quarters in Yan’an, where the Long March ended. A photo hanging outside shows the young Mao still in political exile, weakened by hunger and depression, who was spending days and nights alone in the mountains planning the guerilla campaign that would change the course of the revolution.

Mao and Xi carried bitter experience of privation and exclusion into positions of supreme power, and the consequences are still playing out in the reign of Xi, who calls himself “son of the Yellow Earth.” Like Mao, Xi has ridden the wheel of political fortune. Tainted by the reputation of a father who was purged from the party, Xi spent his childhood in a re-education program, so ragged and underweight he lacked the strength for the farm labour to which he was assigned.

Such reversals of fortune are emblematic of revolution itself, expressing the capacity of the people as a whole to rise from the worst of human conditions to become a force of destiny. This is Hegel with a twist. How is it that the rise of the people as an expression of the world spirit has led only to a worse form of despotism?

And there is no cause for complacency in the West, where a very different narrative of freedom has led us to a state of delusion. “History hisses at us like the devil,” Grant warns, yet we fail to hear it. There are parallels with 1914, when the worst-case scenario played out because so many believed it could not. Even since the publication of this book, talk of potential conflict with China is recklessly leaking onto the front pages in Australia.

But might such pessimism itself be a dangerous indulgence? If we are at a crucial hinge point, perhaps a journalist who has supped full of horrors from the worst places of human suffering and cruelty is not the best guide to the way forward. “The things I have seen weigh heavy on my soul,” Grant acknowledges. But these things do exist out there in the world.

Just over halfway through the book the focus shifts to Pakistan, where Grant made several visits in the mid 2000s, and found another order of horror unfolding, one without even the pretence of reason and justice that inspired the revolutionary leaders of China. It is there that he finds his way to “a place beyond grace,” in a town square in the Swat Valley where headless bodies are dumped and the heads impaled on posts or left on doorsteps.

Zibahkhana Chowk, or “Slaughter Square” as it is now called, is an exhibition of extreme human pathology. There may be versions of it in any war zone. It is the heart of darkness that Conrad found in the Congo and Coppola recreated for Apocalypse Now in an abandoned Angkor Temple near the mouth of Cambodia’s Nùng River. In Coppola’s version the presiding spirit is Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a colonel in the US army who has gone into full-blown psychosis and used his military authority to create hell on earth.

Grant finds “the devil incarnate” in the very different guise of Imran, a tall, red-haired Pashtun man taken captive by Pakistani troops. Imran has a voice like honey — smooth, quiet and alluring — and the demeanour of a holy man. It has been his job to mentor the boys who will become suicide bombers, poisoning their minds with visions of a higher destiny. Reason, the core business of Hegelian history, has no place here.

The world is what it is, and journalists must report it as they find it. If Grant’s primary aim were to provide an overview of his experiences as a foreign correspondent, the accounts of what he witnessed in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan would clearly belong here. But he is attempting something much more. He wants to do the historian’s work of analysis and correlation, and the philosopher’s work of interpretation.

His Hegelian paradigm is convincing when it’s applied to China, where the long march of history is a drama by turns heroic, tragic, harrowing, euphoric and ominous. As he was told repeatedly during his ten years in the country, there’s no China without Mao, no Mao without Marx. And no Marx without Hegel. In a revolutionary scenario, big ideas lead to big events, not vice versa.

The chapters on China have a cohesiveness and depth that is missing from the rest of the book. There’s an atmosphere, too, created from the opening paragraphs, where Grant recalls the train journey into China with his family on Christmas Day in 2004, feeling “the pull of the earth” in a land that seems to pulse with memory.

As the landscape unfolds in the morning light, his attention is caught by a solitary figure working in the field. The man looks old, and must have lived through tumultuous changes: the birth of the People’s Republic, the reign of Mao and the Great Leap Forward. Grant, as a Wiradjuri man bearing a heritage of dispossession, senses a fellow time traveller. “We were twinned with fate,” he writes. “We belonged to old cultures whose worlds had been upended by the march of modernity.” This upending brings with it a legacy of anger towards the modernising nations, with their presumptions of moral authority and powers to enforce it.

Grant’s style may be cool and measured, but at its heart this is an angry book. Civilisations have long memories, he warns, while nations think only of tomorrow. As China and Australia face off in an absurdly mismatched game of sanctions, and our great ally America is trying to work its way out of a political quagmire, a reckoning looms.

So what are we to do? No world-historical individuals are in sight, at least from our side of the picture, which could be a blessing. One of the bitterest lessons of a failed democracy is that the people have only themselves to blame. Perhaps they are also to blame for states of post-revolutionary dictatorship. At the end of his documentary novel Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman launches into a tirade against the people, seeing the underlying cause of Stalin’s regime in a resurgence of “the soul of the serf” among the Soviet citizenry.

When things get fraught, it feels good to lay some blame, even if it means blaming oneself. It may feel good, but whether it does any good is another matter, and that depends on whether the hinge point is a point of no return. This would not be the first time the spectre of 1914 has reared its head and faded again. If we are not there yet — and as Grant claims, “destination is a Western idea” — a moment of reckoning may be to some purpose.

Grant contrasts his vision of the Chinese peasant working in the fields at daybreak, heralding a world of possibility and a new story to tell, with the image of his title, taken from Hegel. “Wisdom is not gained in the dawn; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk.”

Hegel wrestled with the question of whether the long march of history was on some predetermined course. He rejected such a view, believing it left no real place for human freedom and agency. There are times when events seem to converge in inevitable ways, and it is perhaps this, above all, that is the most dangerous assumption.

For all his apparent pessimism, Grant raises the alarm with the conviction that a change of course is possible. The reckoning he calls for involves recognition of political responsibility at all levels: not just by governments, elected or otherwise, but by all of us who in our diverse ways may have some influence on the course of events. This is in many respects a compelling and convincing book, though not one that will help you sleep easily. •

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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. •

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By the time McManus took the podium, the crowd on the lawn before Parliament House was well primed. If it was anger that brought them together, a sense of common purpose was to the fore. Host Julia Zemiro kept the mood buoyant, emphasising the diversity of the assembly and the fact that this was in every sense a “safe” gathering, albeit one too risky for the prime minister to front up to.

After a gracious welcome to country from Aunty Violet Sheridan, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, a Traditional Owner from Central Queensland, spoke further about the importance of Capital Hill as ancient ceremonial ground and called for attention to “the quiet stillness of our country.” She evoked the principle of deep listening, and as they listened to her, those who had come for a protest march more closely resembled a mob in the Aboriginal sense of the term, a collective bonded by fundamental commonalities.

Not that anger was left out of the equation. According to march organiser Janine Hendry, the rollout of protests across forty cities was “an outpouring of rage about gendered violence.” Saxon Mullins, who heads a sexual assault and advocacy centre, spoke of lives stolen by years of trauma. Ballarat lawyer Ingrid Irwin appeared in a gown and wig to denounce a criminal justice system that fails to give sexual assault victims the right to a lawyer. Madhumitha Janagaraja, president of the ANU Students’ Association, introduced herself as an abuse survivor and emphasised the increased risk for those with disabilities in a system that is “not on our side.”

Canberra journalist Virginia Haussegger appeared with Biff Ward, founding member of the Canberra women’s liberation movement, whose proclamation, “It feels like a tidal wave of rage out there,” appeared in headlines a few hours later. Katharine Murphy, writing in the Guardian, declared that “voices raised in anger are echoing through the land.” The rage factor commands attention, and has certainly captured the imagination of journalists.

Soon after Ward finished speaking, Nine correspondent Chris Uhlmann took up a position at the upper end of the lawn, overlooking the march, and commenced a report to camera with the words, “Rage outside parliament is washing over politics.” The camera operator stopped him. “There’s no rage,” he said, gesturing towards the crowd which, shortly before, was illustrating Ward’s pronouncement very effectively. “Got to wait for the rage,” he added. And so they waited. The crowd, however, didn’t oblige. Those gathered were listening in deep silence to Brittany Higgins, who, battling to maintain her composure, had made an unscheduled appearance “out of necessity.”

Brief bursts of clapping and other sounds of encouragement punctuated her speech, but these were quiet moments, and the quietness itself was perhaps the most important message of the day. Sometimes you have to just listen. The three generations brought together in this crowd harboured reserves not just of rage, but also of generosity, social maturity and moral intelligence.

Little of that was on display inside Parliament House when, as the marchers dispersed, the government assembled for question time. Forced to acknowledge what was happening outside, prime minister Scott Morrison embarked on a waffling address full of double negatives (“this is not to suggest that good faith and genuine efforts are not being made”) and vacuous parentheses (“I would hope”; “… as it has, until now, and I hope into the future”). This was ready ammunition for opposition leader Anthony Albanese, who remarked that Morrison was displaying “not so much a tin ear as a wall of concrete.” There followed a succession of opposition questions drawn from statements made by Brittany Higgins.

Those on the government frontbench may have looked somewhat uncomfortable, but not acutely so. Here they were, in their place of greater safety, and for every challenge from across the floor there came a question from its own ranks about the marvels of the current economic recovery, to which Morrison and Josh Frydenberg responded with all the impassioned conviction that was entirely missing from the government’s responses to the urgent and fundamental demands for social justice delivered on its doorstep.

So what are we left with, after this extraordinary day of reckoning? Not much, if those at the rallies walk away carrying the burden of what is now a tired old adage about maintaining the rage. In an insightful article about rage and the rise of the women’s movement, Haussegger quotes American writer Soraya Chemaly confronting the question of “what to do with all this rage?” When properly understood, she says, it is “an outstandingly clarifying emotion.”

Some of the turning points of political history are marked by the surging of rage as a clarifying moral force, others by the blind rage of mob violence, as evoked in A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s chronicle of the French Revolution. It’s doubtful whether fear of the latter really lurks in the hearts of our leading federal politicians. They know they are safe at work, and they know the women gathered outside Parliament House acted in a spirit at the opposite end of the spectrum from the sentiments that prompted Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January.

The image of Uhlmann standing on a wall outside Parliament House waiting for the rage is strangely appropriate. Rage is not the heart of the story here. The new generation of protesters is asking, first and foremost, for safety. But their sense of being under threat is caused, as Grace Tame so cogently insists, by a chronic imbalance of power. Rather than maintain the rage, perhaps we should adopt another old adage: “Don’t get mad, get even.” That might be done effectively if half a dozen of the impressive speakers who fronted the marches around the country ran for federal seats, swelling the ranks of brilliantly effective female independents in parliament so as to hold the balance of power. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post A place of greater safety 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. •

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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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Berejiklian’s association with Daryl Maguire has been a ticking time bomb for the Independent Commission Against Corruption over the past three years. As the Financial Review’s Neil Chenoweth reports, investigators have known of the taped conversations between the pair since 2017, but the thought of destabilising yet another serving premier, having cost former premiers Nick Greiner and Barry O’Farrell their jobs, was enough to “bring them out in a cold sweat.”

Berejiklian’s obvious distress at the revelations drew some sympathetic first responders, who pointed to her strong record in steering through the bushfire crisis and then the pandemic. Transport minister Andrew Constance, interviewed on Seven’s Sunrise on Tuesday morning, reported a flood of messages from the community “saying she is too good to lose.” By Wednesday afternoon, the chorus on social media was swinging the other way.

It’s one of those situations in which guilt and innocence — and public opinion — become polarised and political alignments kick in to intensify the situation. And it’s supercharged by the NSW context: there’s no getting away from the fact that corruption has infected both sides of politics in that state. Anyone taking on the premiership, given how things played out in the era of Eddie Obeid, should surely be aware of how easily corruption can spread. Obeid may have been a superspreader, but the virus became cultural and systemic.

Because it carries the assumption of immunity, Berejiklian’s moral hubris puts her in a high-risk category. Even while she was in the throes of dealing with the Covid-19 lockdown, she seems to have been unaware of the need for distancing in other ways.

Her appearance before ICAC on 12 October began with a set of questions about conflict of interest posed by counsel assisting, Scott Robertson. The line of inquisition bore on Maguire’s position as parliamentary secretary — a tenure Berejiklian renewed when she became premier in January 2017 — in which his fundamental obligations included “not being in a position of conflict of interest.” It’s possible to have a conflict of interest without being corrupt, of course, but conflicts of this kind, kept secret, are what allow corruption to take hold and be transmitted. People who believe they hold to strong ethical standards may find they are not, after all, immune.

If the principle is poorly understood in the Australian political context, this is because it isn’t in the interests of parliamentarians to understand it. Some conflicts of interest may be purely technical, after all, which could make the rules of disclosure seem unreasonably constraining. Why pull out of a legitimate business activity, refuse a financial opportunity or break off a relationship when you are convinced you are doing nothing wrong — and the law itself would find it hard to prove any impropriety?

Since it is hard to hold anyone to account for conflict of interest alone, the embargo is almost impossible to enforce. It is only when the exploitation is flagrant that consequences are likely, and even then, they will be slow in coming, with ample opportunity to contest the case.

This is not to argue that Berejiklian gained any advantage from her relationship with Maguire. On the contrary. But although they may not cost her the premiership, the revelations have done permanent damage to her reputation.

Of equal or perhaps greater importance than the premier’s destiny is the future of ICAC itself. Sky News host Alan Jones has already been on the airwaves calling for the commission to be “on the rack” instead of the premier. The backlash will certainly intensify if Berejiklian is brought down, though the conduct of the inquiry displays no signs of “the cold sweat” Chenoweth alludes to. Robertson has been a model of calm and courtesy, patiently teasing out details and pressing on key points of admission with an insistence that is never aggressive or obviously adversarial.

Behind the skilfully structured lines of questioning lies a wealth of forensic evidence, gathered over months and years, and sorted and double-checked in preparation for a public hearing. Such work costs money, and requires legislative authorisation for effective forms of investigation to be pursued.

And that, ironically, requires the support of the governments who may be the target. As David Hardaker pointed out in Crikey on Wednesday, Berejiklian had a conflict of interest as the head of a government being urged to increase funding for ICAC even as it was investigating someone with whom she had an undisclosed relationship. Victorian Liberal MP Michael O’Brien has raised similar concerns about delays in the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s inquiry into the Victorian government’s handling of the pandemic. “It’s no surprise Daniel Andrews doesn’t want to fund this important integrity agency,” he says.

The American miniseries The Comey Rule offers important insights into the fraught relationship between governments and the institutions charged with responsibility for holding them to account. What has happened in the United States under Trump should be an urgent warning to other nations: democracies are less robust than we have come to assume. While Berejiklian is proclaiming her own uncompromising dedication to “the people of New South Wales,” the staff of ICAC, working invisibly in the background, may be the truer servants of the public good. •

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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.

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? •

The post Chaos is come again appeared first on Inside Story.

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…

The post Other worlds appeared first on Inside Story.

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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On a special edition of Radio National Breakfast from Bateman’s Bay on 30 January, Bega MP Andrew Constance gave an emotional account of the plight of those around him. The inadequacy of responses tied to bureaucratic procedures, he said, reflected an underlying failure to grasp the urgency and scale of human need. “Middle-tier bureaucracy doesn’t get it. The charities don’t get it. This is not business as usual. We’ve got to think differently and outside the square.”

Just how differently? The loss of so many homes and livelihoods this summer confronts us with the urgent challenge of reasserting the fundamental economic rights of citizens.

For three decades we have inhabited an economy that invests in the corporate sector, allowing the major players to recycle profits into greater profits while drawing on our natural resources and taking advantage of our infrastructure at knockdown tax rates. Now the consequences are confronting us. It’s no longer a matter of “which side of politics” we support; it’s a stark question of whether we can survive without a fundamental transformation in our political economy.

If we are indeed in the business of thinking differently, consider how a basic income scheme could transform the situation of people and businesses in bushfire-ravaged communities. Basic income is an idea that has yet to gain traction in Australia: the Pressenza press agency’s major documentary on the topic, released in September, featured exponents from a dozen countries around the globe, none of whom were Australians. Have we become so embroiled in political wrangles about minor changes to our tax system that we are incapable of entertaining any genuinely transformative economic idea?

The unfolding events of recent months should force us to break the deadlock. We need to find a real alternative to the absurdity — and cruelty — of expecting people who have lost their houses to fill in application forms for very modest one-off grants, or offering them loans that will only add to the financial anxieties they face in the longer term.

Think how different the situation would be if a basic income scheme provided every adult citizen with $1000 a month. No loans or repayments involved, no application process, no fraught determinations of eligibility, no delays — a guaranteed, ongoing payment, regardless of circumstance.

The sum might seem inadequate — at $1000 a month it would be less than Newstart — but its aggregate effect would be significant. Individual recipients would gain immeasurable psychological and social benefit from the knowledge that it was also there for family members, neighbours, and those trying to keep essential businesses and services going in their area. In small towns such as Rappville, Mogo or Mallacoota, the entire local economy would be underpinned.

Of course, basic income is not a replacement for the major infrastructure costs of rebuilding civic amenities, nor is it meaningful compensation for those who have lost homes, or for capital losses suffered by farmers and other businesses. Such needs should be addressed separately. But where commercial and civic premises need to be rebuilt, it is vital to have some confidence that they will be able to thrive again. A guaranteed income across the local population would enhance the value of major reinvestments by fuelling an increase in commercial activity.

In this way, basic income could enhance community bonds and regional cultures. The most hopeful aspect of the crisis response so far has been how people have come together to help each other. Frustration at the failure of governments and charities to respond to the needs of those in bushfire areas is countered by stories of mutual generosity and collaborative survival strategies. As Constance testified, “I’ve seen the most beautiful outcomes in terms of people working together, regardless of backgrounds… Unity in survival, unity in recovery.”

This should be the optimal social environment for basic income, which is associated with the ancient principle of the commons as a “first estate,” a form of land rights as birthright. Through the idea of the “common wealth” of shared natural resources, the commons principle asserted an entitlement to subsistence. Providing a monetary allocation is a reinterpretation for a post-industrial society. A basic income would serve as a substitute for the entitlement to land use, keeping the principle of sharing work and responsibility to make the communal economy function.

A basic income is not a “handout” that would discourage people from working, as some critics claim. An aversion to receiving handouts runs deep in Australian culture, especially in the bush, and even those most drastically affected by the fires may feel conflicted about receiving government assistance. A payment of $1000 a month is about half what most adults need to afford food, rent and other essentials. It should be seen not as a substitute for paid work but rather as a subsidy for work that does not pay for itself through the generation of commercial profit.

Building on the socioeconomic infrastructure created by a basic income scheme would enable human work to move away from the profit-driven corporate sector towards community and environmental forms of service. In the aftermath of this summer of disaster, those forms of service are of the utmost importance and urgency.

Nor, in comparison with other recovery schemes, would it be a costly exercise. With funds pouring in from the Firefight Australia concert and other major donation schemes, surely this is one of the fairest and most effective ways to invest in social and economic restoration? It would save expenditure on clumsy administrative schemes for compensation on a case-by-case basis. To the plus side of the equation we should add increased economic activity and employment. In human terms, the reduction in stress and consequent improvement in mental health would have immeasurable benefit.

Introducing a basic income across the whole Australian population would be a complex matter involving comprehensive changes to the national economy. A restricted approach, concentrated in areas worst affected by the fires, would test how well such a plan might work more broadly. Comparative studies in several such locations would provide valuable insights into where and how basic income provides benefits, and what kinds of problems arise. If it proves more successful in some communities than in others, there is an opportunity for focused identification of the factors involved.

Basic income is a big idea, calling for an enlargement of public imagination. While it is embedded in principles with a deep cultural history, it is a fundamentally transformative economic proposition whose time may have come as we enter the crisis-ridden third decade of the twenty-first century.

Australia has not so far played a major role in international debate on its implementation, but that is set to change. The 20th Basic Income Earth Network Congress is to be held in Brisbane on 28–30 September, jointly hosted by Basic Income Guarantee Australia, the School of Social Science and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, and the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology. •

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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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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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“There is a cult of Penny Wong,” Margaret Simons writes in Penny Wong: Passion and Principle, and in media appearances following the AIIA address Wong displayed with renewed vigour the qualities that have earned her such an ardent following. She combines natural authority with acerbic wit and moments of winning charm. As shadow foreign minister, she displays a level of knowledge and sophistication that puts Scott Morrison to shame. Her rhetorical impact is second to none in the current parliament.

Someone of Wong’s political stature will inevitably attract biographers, and the most likely readership is among those already won over by the brio of her public performances. When the writer stepping up for the task is one of the most discerning, trustworthy and knowledgeable journalists in Australia, it looks like a winning ticket. The risk, if any, might be that the book would turn into an exercise in homage, but Wong herself made sure that didn’t happen.

As Simons’s bald opening statement puts it, “Penny Wong did not want this book to be written.” The writer was faced with something more than non-cooperation: she was stonewalled and subjected to chilling censoriousness. Although she shows no sign of having taken personal offence at this — treating it as a professional challenge, in fact — I imagine readers will be offended on her behalf. Surely a political figure of Wong’s importance must expect a biography as an inevitable part of his or her public exposure? Surely she must have been aware that, if it was inevitable, she was lucky it was to be written by a journalist with a first-rate track record, who would be scrupulous in observing the embargoes on speaking to family or digging too far into sensitive personal matters?

Wong did eventually agree to some interviews — six, in all — which took place in sterile meeting rooms. She was far too astute to afford her renegade biographer “the gift” of access to any space that might reflect her personality, as Simons comments, and unwelcome questions were greeted with “the Wong stare and what felt like a drop in the temperature of the room.”

Simons skilfully compensates for the lack of access to those in Wong’s inner circle. She has extensively researched Wong’s family history and, drawing on her own experience of growing up in Adelaide, provides a vivid sense of that social and political milieu. She is also well informed about all the political contexts relevant to Wong’s career, and knows how to do the investigative work to get the necessary background.

There’s certainly a story to tell. Wong spent her early childhood years in the Malaysian state of Sabah, on the island of Borneo, moving to Adelaide at the age of eight when her parents’ marriage broke up. Her father’s Chinese ancestry meant that she was all-too-easily identified as a foreigner in her new primary school, and bullied accordingly, yet her mother’s family, the Chapmans, were “old Adelaide,” with a history going back to the founding years of the city in the 1830s.

It’s prime material for Who Do You Think You Are? and, woven together with the story of the Malaysian side of the family, makes for a complex portrait of Wong’s cultural heritage. For all Simons’s meticulous research, though, the account lacks vibrancy, because the personality at the centre of it is missing. There are few engaging anecdotes or tales of childhood adventures, no confessions of teenage angst.

The book provides an authoritative account of the South Australian context in which Wong started on her future path, first through student politics, where she began to develop her “ferocious” capacity for attack and counterattack, then through the factional system of state politics. Her implacable opposition to the Hawke–Keating graduate tax (later to be introduced as HECS) marked her out as a new talent on the left of the party. She became a protégé of Labor senator Nick Bolkus and an ally of a young Labor activist, Jay Weatherill, fighting on behalf of unions and gaining some notoriety for her involvement in CFMEU demonstrations against anti-logging legislation.

Campaigning on fraught issues that she would later see differently contributed to her enduring dislike of “binary thinking.” One of her key attributes as a mature politician is her resistance to the trap of adopting for-it-or-against-it positions on complex and evolving issues. She also refuses to be retrospectively one-sided about the devastating internecine wars of the Rudd–Gillard years.

Those wars took their toll on her, limiting her opportunities to make real headway in a massive portfolio as minister for climate change and water. The central chapters of the book are titled “Penny Wong Fails to Save the World” parts one and two. Still in her forties, she brought exceptional levels of mental preparation and ethical maturity to the impasses she faced. Her attempts to negotiate parliamentary support for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme were confounded by tribal conflicts and vested interests, leading to defeat in the Senate in 2009. Then came the rollercoaster experience of the Copenhagen Summit, where she and Kevin Rudd collaborated on a marathon effort to broker agreement on a new international accord.

The pair worked through the night, and the next night, snatching brief interludes of sleep on the surrounding furniture. Barack Obama joined them, literally rolling his sleeves up. This was forensic legislative work, all about steering through make-or-break factors with deftly formulated clauses. Rudd was “wonderful… extraordinary, outstanding,” Wong attests. (At this point, her conversations with Simons were evidently running more smoothly.) Amid the Rudd-bashing trend that has taken hold since then, it’s an important reminder of how cultures of political judgement can steer wide of the mark.

However often she fails to save the world, Wong responds well to reality-testing, and there was no more stringent test than her party’s 2019 election defeat. Simons used steely persistence to secure a final interview with her subject in July 2019 in the belief that it was vital to get some insights into how she was reorienting herself after the debacle.

The determination paid off. The concluding chapters in the book are the strongest, as Simons focuses on the qualities of an outstanding political intelligence at a time when such qualities seem to be perversely excluded from the opportunities of government. Perhaps mellowed by what she has been through, Wong lets her guard down to describe how sweetly her children responded to the loss, making her a coffee and giving her their last gingerbread man.

Just the day before this final meeting, Wong had been interviewed by Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast. Speaking as shadow foreign affairs minister, she talked through a range of critical international situations — the significance of Trump’s stepping over the North Korean border, the US–China trade war, escalating tensions between the United States and Iran — navigating around gotcha questions with authority and finesse. “Here were hints of the kind of foreign minister she would have been,” Simons comments. More than a hint of this was also evident in her recent address to the AIIA; if fate has thwarted her, all of us are the losers.

The contemporary political biography is very different from the traditional biography, which is a form of history told posthumously through a major public figure. Publishers are now looking for something more like an extended profile — a blend of gossip, personal story and parliamentary intrigue. But if there is any serious value in a biography such as this, it is surely in the insights it gives into those who hold political power, or aspire to. What kind of people are they? What really matters to them? What (if any) are their principles? Are they mere opportunists, or do they have a genuine vision for the national future and the public good? No politician should shy away from a writer, like Simons, who focuses on such questions. •

A new, expanded edition of Penny Wong: Passion and Principle was published by Black Inc. in July 2023

Penny Wong: Passion and Principle
By Margaret Simons | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 368 pages

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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. •

The post What makes the rich different appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

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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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The real challenge was to bring the realities of “thorough, dogged, unexciting police work” to the screen in a way that would keep audiences engaged. Producer Philippa Braithwaite, determined to step outside the clichés of conventional TV detective series and show “how a real crime was really solved,” engaged Sutton as an adviser at the scriptwriting stage. Her resolve paid off. When the six-part series went to air in Britain earlier this year, it broke ratings records with an audience of 9.5 million over the three consecutive nights on which it was shown. (The series is streaming in Australia on Seven.)

This partly reflects the notoriety of the case itself, of course, for Sutton was senior investigating officer on the hunt for serial killer Levi Bellfield, who was eventually convicted in 2008 for the murders of Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, and in 2011 for the murder of Milly Dowler. Bellfield, in Sutton’s assessment, was a rare beast in the annals of violent crime, on a par with “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe. The Yorkshire case has another kind of notoriety, too: in the annals of policing, it stands as a textbook example of an investigation gone wrong, and Manhunt highlights how Sutton was set upon learning from it.

In the dramatisation, Sutton carries around Michael Bilton’s weighty book about the Yorkshire case, and quotes from it in briefings. When his team baulks at checking 25,000 vehicles, he reminds them that the Ripper investigators were faced with tracking more than 50,000 vehicles. After they’d gone through 30,000 without producing a strong lead, a decision was made to stop and dedicate resources to other lines of enquiry. Sutcliffe’s vehicle was among the other 22,000. Had they pressed on, they’d have saved the lives of three further victims.

But when every line of enquiry spins out into scores, then hundreds, then thousands of individual checks, how can you tell which to pursue? For the Yorkshire detectives, working before the introduction of computers, it truly was a case of a needle in a haystack. By November 1980, with the death count rising and still no prime suspects, they had returned to the grinding slog of vehicle checking. Some 157,000 cars had been logged. They had taken 28,000 statements and conducted 27,000 house-to-house enquiries. The floor was groaning under the weight of filing cabinets. Sutcliffe had been brought in for questioning eight times and passed through the net without attracting any special notice.

This is not the stuff of which crime dramas are made. The fictional genre of the police procedural may take us into some of the operational routines of an inquiry, but the convention is that the individual intelligence of the central detective dominates the storyline. Interviewed about the series, Sutton is quick-witted, knowledgeable, sensitive and engaging, but his successes as an investigating officer — he has brought in convictions in some thirty murder cases — have to do with his faith in procedure itself, and the collective responsibility for adhering to it.

Clunes puts his own natural charm on hold and plays Sutton as a plain man who talks straight and works by the book. He is not in the business of outwitting people. He’s happy for a colleague to take the credit for a breakthrough and sees the rat cunning of the perpetrator as a fact of life rather than an incitement to competition. “I know my vehicles,” he says to an assistant detective who queries some technicality over a wheelbase, and you have a sense that in any other walk of life it’s the kind of knowledge that would turn someone into the pub bore. Here it’s literally a matter of life and death.

One of the unusual features of Levi Bellfield’s crimes is that he managed to avoid leaving DNA evidence. Police were left toiling through fingertip searches for cigarette butts in the grass, studying almost endless CCTV footage and spending cold hours on the motorway overpass watching for a particular white van. All this is portrayed with meticulous accuracy in the series, which is filmed in the original locations and seems barely a step away from a documentary reconstruction.

And that, surely, is the secret of its hold on viewers. It’s a matter of establishing a pace and a level of concentration that make minor interactions fascinating. Bellfield is identified and tracked at an early stage, so there’s no arc of suspense, though there are some moments of sustained tension — as when Sutton and DS Jo Brunt witness the suspect trying to lure schoolgirls into his car.

What Clunes captures especially well is Sutton’s warmth, which comes through most significantly in his concern for the parents of Amélie Delagrange. The impact on families of victims is a dimension that crime drama series rarely attend to. Nothing much is happening while you are sitting in a room with shocked and grieving people, but there’s a quietness about the approach in this series that enables the human reality to come through.

Australian audiences may have a less immediate emotional connection to these events than British viewers, but the focus on police procedure still hits home in relation to the Azaria Chamberlain case. As a recent guest on the ABC’s Brush with Fame, Lindy Chamberlain brought host Anh Do to tears with recollections of the darkest days following her wrongful conviction for Azaria’s murder. These are the costs of police work done badly.

Disturbing resonances of the Chamberlains’ ordeal came in March with the release of an eight-part Netflix documentary, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The McCanns, too, went through the purgatorial experience of being the prime suspects following their daughter’s disappearance in Portugal. Again, it was a consequence of police overvaluing DNA evidence.

In the Chamberlain case, a forensic report claimed to have found traces of fetal haemoglobin in the Chamberlains’ car; in the McCann case, highly trained sniffer dogs detected traces of blood under the window in the room in the holiday resort of Praia da Luz from which Madeleine was abducted in May 2007. One of the problems with forensic evidence is the assumption that it is in itself definitive. In both these cases the forensics fed into ready-made frameworks of interpretation that had less to do with the facts than with the lures of crime fiction. The most intriguing culprit will always be someone within the circle of the existing dramatis personae; a wild animal or a random stranger will never capture the imagination with the same force.

Colin Sutton’s adherence to the disciplines of procedure has much to recommend it, and almost certainly saved lives. “Don’t get tunnel vision,” he advises his team, again citing the Ripper case, where a fixation on one line of evidence — audiotapes sent in to the police purporting to be from the killer — led to a massive waste of resources. Like the supposed traces of fetal blood in the Chamberlains’ car, they turned out to be a red herring. The wheels of conventional police procedure grind slowly, but, as Sutton proved, they can eventually find their way through the foggiest terrain.

The McCann documentary has been fiercely criticised for trawling through already widely known aspects of the story and offering nothing new. The McCanns themselves declined to cooperate. But much can be learned from its systematic retracing of the phases of the police investigation and the efforts of a skilled private detective to open the framework of enquiry in other directions. Like Manhunt, it underlines the value of showing what is actually involved in contemporary police work. •

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“It’s the economy, stupid,” as Bill Clinton proclaimed at the dawn of an era of election campaigning in which “the economy” was placed front and centre. The slogan caught on not just because it portrayed the national economy as a concern of the many, not the few, but also because it implied that there were people around who kept failing to see what was staring them in the face. And now, as all the old slogans are hauled out for another jousting match, it may be time to ask who is being stupid, and about what.

When the panel on The Drum last Thursday were asked to respond to the inaugural campaign statements from the two major parties, Stan Grant made a striking intervention. “I think there is a common thread with all of this,” he said. “We talk about inequality and fairness and getting a go… the zeitgeist… and I think this idea that people don’t matter feeds into this blowback against neoliberalism.” In the Thatcherite version of neoliberalism, he continued, there is no community or society, just the individual. The economy is the measure of all things “and through the economy you change our souls.” Grant was taking a punt that a widespread sense of having “exhausted the model” may be what’s going to drive the election.

Bill Shorten is campaigning on “freshness” and so far has not responded strongly to the Coalition’s familiar scare campaign about Labor’s handling of the economy, but he would be foolish to depend on the prevalence of the sense Grant is talking about. Since John Howard climbed into the cabin of Labor’s debt truck on the forecourt of Parliament House in September 1995, fear and loathing about national debt has been hitting home with voters who haven’t trawled through the plethora of articles from journalists and economists providing evidence that it is all a lot of hooey.

Scare campaigns depend on ignorance, and Morrison’s renewed investment in this one suggests he and his advisers are confident that the level of ignorance about the economy remains as high as it has always been. As Ha-Joon Chang, author of the bestselling Economics: The User’s Guide, writes: “If you want to have a meaningful democracy, expertise should be harnessed by the general will… Members of the general public have a duty to educate themselves in economics.” But Stan Grant’s association of the public mood with a “blowback against neoliberalism” captures something crucial: this is not just about economics, it is about ideology, and the ways in which economic policy is ideologically determined.

Richard Aedy’s excellent series The Money on Radio National has demonstrated how the discussion of financial matters can be opened out onto diverse areas of human life. Recent episodes have included items on the financial dimensions of high-speed rail, mental health, bushfires and bees. This means he is not just talking to specialists in economics, he is also talking to regional planners, mental health professionals, rangers and firefighters, and beekeepers. It is the connection of money matters with so many aspects of contemporary life that gives the program its dynamism and allows us to see how the economy must serve the people, not just the other way about.

We need a forum like this, devoted to exploration of the ideas and principles that determine economic policy, on television. It’s time to get past the glib view that “a strong economy delivers everything,” as Niki Savva pronounced on last weekend’s Insiders. If only “the people” can be made to believe in the trickle-down principle, they will continue to vote for tax cuts to the corporations and wealthy individuals who are presumed to be the makers of this “strong economy.”

It was Emma Alberici’s challenge to the validity of trickle-down logic in a February 2018 article on the ABC website that led to the debacle that damaged first her own career, then that of ABC chair Justin Milne. She had touched on something that threatened the credibility of an economic orthodoxy to which the Turnbull government was adamantly committed. Turnbull was prepared to lean on the ABC to get a retraction, and this led to the now notorious email from Milne to managing director Michelle Guthrie with the instruction, “Get rid of her. We need to save the ABC — not Emma.”

The whole affair was a revelation not just about political intervention at the national broadcaster, but also about the ideological centrality of the trickle-down doctrine and its crucial importance in maintaining public support for an economy based on transferring wealth to big investors and big corporations at the expense of the majority of citizens. That is where the n-word comes in. Neoliberalism. We need to talk about it.

What if, at that particular moment of crisis in 2018, a managing director in a very different frame of mind had responded to the Turnbull phone call by proposing an expanded coverage of economic affairs, with a brief to explore the ideological principles underlying policy? What if Alberici had been appointed to present such a program? What if ABC business reporter Elysse Morgan had been invited to contribute, not just as an expert in markets but on the basis of her experience in regional broadcasting, to facilitate coverage of regional economic affairs? Stan Grant might be another regular correspondent, offering global and transnational perspectives, and focusing on priorities for Indigenous Australians.

If Grant is right, the national broadcaster should be sensing a change in the zeitgeist and responding. The Drum is showing signs of doing just that, by encouraging more wideranging insights from its guests. It is also experimenting with themed interludes featuring a brief monologue accompanied by graphics and other forms of visual demonstration. There have been recent contributions from conjurer Vyom Sharma illustrating techniques of deception, and Drew MacRae from the Financial Rights Legal Centre reimagining the corporation as a body operating in the public interest. These are good beginnings, if they are indeed the start of bigger thinking on the small screen. •

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Although he was clearly upset, Aly remained pitch-perfect throughout the four-minute statement. As media “moments” go, this was right up there, and it almost immediately went viral. The clip attracted more than twelve million viewers worldwide and drew responses from two prime ministers. Jacinda Ardern contacted Aly to thank him and invite him to New Zealand. Scott Morrison’s office rang the program’s producers, cancelled a scheduled appearance, and threatened to sue.

Disasters do show what political leaders are made of. Living in Toowoomba at the time of the Queensland floods, I was deeply impressed by the role Anna Bligh played. There’s no faking a capacity to connect with the realities of a traumatic event.

Over the following days, Morrison and Ardern underwent trials by media in which The Project seized the opportunity to serve as an arbiter. Morrison was concerned to be seen doing the right things. He contacted Ardern to offer support, made appropriate statements, visited mosques and spoke of the need to “come together.” But he was also rankled by the damage to his reputation from Aly’s reference to a 2010 meeting of the shadow cabinet in which, as originally reported by Lenore Taylor in the Sydney Morning Herald, he had urged his colleagues to capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment.

Last Wednesday, as Aly flew off to New Zealand for his meeting with Ardern, Morrison gave an interview with ABC News Breakfast in which he called the allegation “a disgraceful smear and an appalling lie.” That night on The Project, Aly’s co-presenter Hamish Macdonald responded with a terse address to camera in which he asserted that Taylor stood by her original report, and so did her sources.

With the manner and tone of an attorney summing up the case for the prosecution, Macdonald reissued the invitation to Morrison to come in and “have that conversation that is so desperately needed.” “If anything paints a clearer picture of the state of Australian politics today, it is this,” he concluded. “After Waleed made that genuine, thoughtful and reasoned contribution on Friday night, a plea for our community to come together, the prime minister of our country threatened to sue. In contrast, New Zealand’s prime minister invited Waleed to her country to sit down for an interview.”

Clearly, the program was seeking to make the most of its canter on the moral high ground. Up in the prime minister’s office, the penny seems to have dropped: The Project had made an offer he couldn’t refuse.

On the night, Morrison was in a sense set up. The studio was arranged for conversational ambience, with two easy chairs and a coffee table. Wearing a light jacket and no tie, he sat back with his legs crossed, prepared for a frank personal dialogue. He might have taken it as an early warning sign that Aly appeared in a dark suit and tie and sat sternly upright.

Morrison had come prepared for a conversation in a spirit of building bridges. Aly had an entirely different agenda: he was set on conducting an interview, and in an adversarial mood. If The Project were being disingenuous in apparently offering the prime minister an occasion to present himself as an honest-to-goodness guy with a big heart, it’s also true that Morrison was naive, and self-indulgently so, to think it was going to go like that.

Aly deliberately put Morrison off-guard with an opening invitation to “set the agenda.” “What do you want to say?” he asked. Morrison attempted to strike a personal note. “You’ve just got back from New Zealand,” he said, “and have a sense of what it’s like on the ground there… These events are tectonic.” He seemed sincere and serious as he talked about the need for communities to get together, “to keep hugging each other.”

But there was to be no empathy in the studio. Aly shifted to another register. “The community that has been framed for eighteen years in the public imagination as a perpetrator suddenly became the victim… Does Australia have an Islamophobia problem?” Morrison seemed to be doing his best to maintain the sincerity and the straight-talking as he acknowledged that all communities could be susceptible to forms of extremism. But Aly was making the case for the prosecution: “Does the Coalition have a problem with Islamophobia?”

From there he proceeded to an inquisition about the 2010 meeting and an interrogation of the Coalition’s intentions about preferencing One Nation. In the face of this, Morrison’s feel-good statements about “learning to disagree better” cut no ice.

Already, the twittersphere was lighting up and — from Morrison’s point of view — not in a good way. A poll conducted by Peter FitzSimons on which of the two emerged with most credibility clocked up some 15,000 votes, with 86 per cent in Aly’s favour. Images of train wrecks came through by the dozen. People made quips along the lines of “Oh look, a man with dignity, intelligence and gravitas… and the prime minister of Australia.”

Responses from the professional commentators were also predominantly negative. In the Guardian, Katharine Murphy pointed to how Morrison’s anxiety about being prejudged led him deeper into the quagmire. Fairfax’s Jack Waterford, observing the prime minister’s “ever-diminishing credibility,” referred to the cynical commentary on his body language on Twitter. Stills from the video began to circulate, showing a succession of awkward postures and expressions.

Aly’s conversation with Jacinda Ardern, which concluded Monday night’s episode of The Project, could not have been more different. Ardern didn’t talk about hugs; she asked for one, as soon as she entered the room. She thanked Aly for his statement. His burning question was “How are you?” She was nodding as he came out with it. It was what everyone asked.

Here, and in all her responses, Ardern had a way of talking about her own reactions and challenges as part of a larger situation, as if she herself were just one of the channels through which the trauma must flow. Where Morrison’s smiles came across as unconvincing attempts to show warmth, Ardern’s communicated stoic determination to be reassuring in the face of crippling human grief. The interview lasted only a few minutes, but it was enough to convey that Ardern is a leader of stature and substance, one who needs no PR machine and seems to have barely given a thought to the matter of her own public image.

The Murdoch era has taught us that it is not a good thing for powerful media figures to have the upper hand over our elected parliamentary representatives. Here Aly was in a very powerful position. He had recorded his conversation with Ardern the day before his interview with Morrison, and could manage the dialogue so that the display of her strengths would accentuate Morrison’s shortcomings. For the meeting with Ardern he was dressed informally, and his behaviour was spontaneous and warm. His expressions of personal concern, his obvious liking for her, encouraged a trusting candour on her part. Morrison may have arrived in the studio expecting at least an element of that trustful spontaneity, but the mode of questioning placed him constantly on the defensive.

That’s not to say Aly was doing anything unethical in playing up the antithesis, but we should be aware of these things before chalking up the public scorecard. The contrast between Morrison and Ardern that emerged from the two encounters is real and very revealing, not just about them as individuals but also about the political cultures of the two nations they represent. But this is also politics as television theatre — staged and stage-managed to achieve a determined effect. •

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With the burgeoning of crime drama on television, more cities have found their place in the great dictionary of atmospheres, but Canberra still seems like an unlikely candidate. For all the visionary ambition of its founders, the city’s picture-postcard layout, 1950s suburban heritage and public service economy are hardly the stuff of intrigue. And as for the aura of government, it is surely more absurd than sinister.

Yet the Canberra bubble dissolves into a larger mythos in Secret City, whose first season, aired in 2016, was arguably the best Australian television crime series we’ve seen. Produced and distributed as a Netflix/Foxtel collaboration, it benefited from the production opportunities afforded by its cashed-up American backers. Its cast was headed by Anna Torv, Jacki Weaver and Damon Herriman, all of whom must have been wrested from demanding international schedules.

Extensive filming in Parliament House and at the Australian Signals Directorate lent an authenticity and gravitas denied to producers on tight budgets. Cinematographers Mark Wareham and Garry Phillips revealed a city of strange and uncanny dimensions, its sweeping vistas enhanced by bridges spanning the lake and the massive steel tower of Parliament House, at odds with the petty day-to-day activities of the city.

Somehow, the place seemed uninhabited. A youth running across Commonwealth Bridge in the dark, a journalist rowing on the lake at dawn, two conspirators huddled against the wind on the summit of Mount Ainslie, someone working through the small hours in the deserted offices of the Signals Directorate: these isolated figures are dwarfed by an environment with a personality of its own. Yet plans are afoot that threaten to breach the containment lines of a dysfunctional government.

Season one opens with a chance encounter that sets Harriet Dunkley, a journalist with a major national newspaper, on the trail of a story that just keeps getting bigger. She consults her ex-husband, Kim Gordon, a crack intelligence officer who has undergone a sex change and now clips around the office in high heels and a silk blouse, all six foot two of her. While Harriet pitches the story to her editor in the press gallery at Parliament House, Gordon starts her own investigation of activities at the Chinese embassy.

And so a suite of major public institutions are drawn into the story. At this point those in the script department might have been wary of biting off more than they could chew, but Canberra insiders Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis, who wrote the two novels on which the series is based, know the terrain. They know the kind of conversation that goes on behind closed doors in the ministerial wing; they know how a national newspaper runs its political agenda; they understand the coded jostling in which ambassadors engage.

The first of their novels, The Marmalade Files (2012), was conceived as a telemovie focusing on the triangular diplomatic tensions between Australia, China and the United States. It was launched with a promotional effort beyond the dreams of most authors, featuring mock interviews in which Joe Hockey, Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop and Anthony Albanese obligingly dodge questions. The second, The Mandarin Code (2014), was written during Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, when the game of challenge and counter-challenge was tipping the political atmosphere into harder levels of cynicism.

As insiders, Uhlmann and Lewis had access to all the key players in parliament, and understood the wary mutual respect that builds up between long-term adversaries who can anticipate each other’s moves in advance. “We wanted to write as close to the bone as we possibly could,” Uhlmann has said, with an understanding of the dilemmas from which spin and compromise are born.

But he and Lewis also exploit the freedom fiction gives them to vent some deep-seated contempt for particular personalities, thinly disguised through changes of gender. The novels are a generic fusion of satire and thriller, though the determination to tell the inside story of appalling forms of political behaviour tends to get the upper hand over the commitment to a plot that wears a bit thin as the pages turn.

Some clever work of adaptation redresses the balance in the screen version, keeping the sequence of events surrounding the central conspiracy to the fore and adding some complexity to the plotlines.

Central to the novels is a character called Catriona Bailey, now serving as foreign minister after being ousted from the role of prime minister and bearing an undying grudge against her vanquisher (no prizes for guessing the real-life equivalent here). Bailey’s cunning is put to the ultimate test when she suffers a stroke, following which she is diagnosed with locked-in syndrome. While others are racing round trying to investigate conspiracy and control political fallout, she continues to act as foreign minister from her hospital bed, sending out communiques through eye movements electronically linked to a keyboard.

It’s a nice satirical idea, but not one that would work on television. Instead, the character is left fully functional and Jacki Weaver turns her into a smooth-tongued Machiavel whose consummate political skills keep her in control of everything that passes through the PM’s office. Weaver has a way of lighting up every scene she’s in. This is a witty, clever performance.

The other standout cast member is Damon Herriman as the transgender signals analyst. Betraying not a flicker of camp, Herriman portrays someone whose defining quality is skill. Well-judged dress and make-up are secondary manifestations; it’s when we see her close-up to the computer screen, concentrating with every fibre of her being, that she is most captivating. Herriman is one of those actors who should never be cast in a role that is written out before the end of the series. Here, we lose him less than half way through season one, and with him a level of imaginative engagement for which nothing else compensates.

Only half a dozen cast members reappear in season two. The fused storylines of the two novels are left behind. We have a change of prime minister (of course), but also a new ASIO director-general and a new US ambassador, with different government personnel. Jacki Weaver lingers for only one episode.

Justin Smith continues as a very convincing head of the Signals Directorate and Danielle Cormack introduces some new dynamism as an intrepid independent MP who employs Dunkley as her media adviser. But we are no longer in the Canberra press gallery, which was such an authentic foundation for the original series. It is Torv who has to carry this second season, and while her poise and restraint help to maintain the more sophisticated dramatic tensions, the persona itself is too bland to make an effective central focus. Uhlmann and Lewis conceived of Harry Dunkley as a middle-aged, hard-drinking male workaholic in the best tradition of sleuths and Canberra journalists, so the idea of transforming the character into a fit young woman is the problem. Decisions made in the interests of audience appeal too often have the opposite effect.

Disappointing as it is in many ways, the change of focus and register in season two is also a reflection on changing political atmospheres. The Uhlmann–Lewis novels captured a certain zeitgeist, at the height of leadership jostling when the Canberra press were intensely involved in the play for public opinion. These tensions have dissipated in the new season, and we are left with a lacklustre parliament where the also-rans are in charge. •

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The whole scenario is about decorum, and the lack of it. The bystanders — mostly male, in darks suits complete with waistcoats, polished shoes and boaters — demonstrate that this was a culture in which it was important to cut a dignified figure, even in the park. Only the busker, in his ill-proportioned brown suit and battered felt hat, gets to breach protocol. He has an outsize cigar stuck in his mouth, and as he turns, he lifts the back of his jacket to show a white hand emblazoned across the seat of the pants.

This footage, captured in 1896, is the earliest surviving film of life in Australia. It makes an appropriate starting point for the four-part SBS series Australia in Colour, not least because of the white hand, which acquires troubling connotations for a twenty-first-century audience. Inevitably, the simple photographic terms “colour” and “black and white” are now overlaid with other meanings.

In the introductory montage for the first episode, we see images of the first Melbourne tram, Douglas Mawson’s 1911 Antarctic expedition, children on a massive swing at an early fun park, Anzac troops returning, Vietnam troops cutting through jungle, girls dancing in a suburban backyard, boys riding goats down a country road. The voice of narrator Hugo Weaving is somewhat reminiscent of the patriarchal narrators of old newsreels: “This is the story of Australia transformed into colour for the first time… As the moving image is born, Australia unifies as a nation.”

Although, actually, it doesn’t. We also see images of Aboriginal children on a reserve, and of men in a desert community making fire. Then comes the stout matron of the mid-century middle class, “well dressed,” in the parlance of the times. “I don’t think at all that they should allow coloured races into Australia,” she says, with the righteousness of an entitlement that has never been challenged. We cut to film of a younger woman, carrying an infant, disembarking from a ship in a line of newly arrived immigrants from Europe. As the camera closes in on her face, it discovers no flicker of excitement or anticipation, only a look of apprehension.

It’s a striking juxtaposition indeed, a mere moment of screen time in the final program, but such moments are born of many dozens of hours of work in the archives and the editing studio. A series like this is a work of composition in which sound, image and narrative are woven together to create a whole that must amount to much more than the sum of its parts.

America in Color, the series on which it is based, was made for the Smithsonian network in 2017 and drew a generally favourable response. “You might not learn anything new about American history,” wrote the New York Times critic, “but the program might make you feel differently about that history.” It is the colour, essentially, that makes the difference. The work of colouring was done by Paris-based company Composite (also responsible for the colouring of the Australian series), which has devised a computer program for analysing greyscale tones and matching them with minutely subtle colour equivalences.

Clips of archival film that we may have seen before in black-and-white — scenes from the gold rush, suffragettes demonstrating, the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, Don Bradman scoring in a cricket match — take on a new immediacy in colour. Those slightly hazy, two-dimensional figures become people like ourselves, with movements and expressions that draw us in to their world. The technique of leaking colour gradually across the picture is used to especially striking effect in crowd scenes.

Like the American series, the Australian version is a history of the moving image, merged with a chronological review of life and events in the twentieth century. Alec Morgan, who co-wrote and co-directed the Australian series in collaboration with Lisa Matthews, tells me that they intended to depart from the American model in some respects. Most significantly, they wanted to capture the dual meaning of “in colour” by countering the white Australian narrative with a parallel history of Aboriginal culture and politics, and by tracking the growth of multicultural Australia.

The risk here is that the series at times replicates the magazine style of early newsreels, where abrupt transitions from war zones to cricket matches to fashion parades are managed with a continuous stream of upbeat narrative that is essentially tone-deaf. Perhaps in order to avoid this tendency, a second series made by the Smithsonian is organised around themes (Wild West, Rise of the Mafia, Hollywood, America at Play, Titans of Industry).

Morgan recalls some discussion of this option in the early planning phases for the Australian series, but says it was never seriously considered as an alternative to the chronological structure. He and Matthews have done some fine work with the editing and composition of the episodes to counter the magazine effect, especially in the management of the Aboriginal history, which is stranded through each episode.

In the second episode (perhaps the strongest of the series) the Aboriginal side of the story is followed continuously rather than intermittently through the depression years. Footage taken in a remote mission shows the dormitories, with the children in a circle being trained in domestic tasks for their role as servants. But there are also escape routes from the misery in the burgeoning world of popular and travelling entertainments. Young Indigenous men got work in tent-boxing shows, or in the circus, where Con Colleano, his Aboriginal heritage masked with the persona of a Spanish toreador, became one of the leading highwire performers in the world.

Key phases of the movement for Indigenous citizenship rights and land rights are intercut with the colonial story of nation-building, but in such a way as to create a genuine weave of narratives, highlighting clashes and ironies.

Images of glitzy floats in city parades celebrating the 150th anniversary of the First Fleet as “white Australians unite in a wave of nationalism” are followed by a sustained account of the controversies over the re-enactment of the landing at Port Jackson. The script called for a staging of “the Eora retreat” and Aboriginal organisations around the Sydney area were asked to provide participants. When they all refused, twenty-six men were brought in from a reserve in western New South Wales and required to play the roles, under threat of having their rations cut.

Impressively, this series has been created with a fraction of the resources available to the producers at the Smithsonian, whose team included nine people in editing and post-production, seven editorial assistants, six people on sound, four on music and seven historians. To compensate for their much smaller team, the Australian program was created through institutional collaborations: Screen Australia, SBS and Stranger Than Fiction Films liaised with Arrow Media International and drew on expertise from the National Film and Sound Archive.

This is not gripping television. It is pedagogical in tone, and doesn’t have the edge of an investigative documentary or the zing of a satirical review. But it is certainly engaging. The subtlety of the process involved in releasing colour into the images is met by an equivalent level of finesse in narrative composition. •

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Barrie Cassidy and Bill Shorten, who was being interviewed at the time, went off-script to express their concern, but somehow the incident served as a curious reprimand: a reminder that this whole exercise of political dialogue sits outside a world in which real things happen to real people.

In a brilliant video montage earlier in the program, clips of Scott Morrison pitching his message for the coming election were intercut with Labor MP Brendan O’Connor commenting, “It’s an absolute fairytale” and Jim Chalmers saying, “He’s from another planet.” Reality of another kind, though, was about to hit.

Cassidy’s first questions to Shorten concerned the imminent release of the report from the banking royal commission. Wasn’t there some justification for the government’s concern that punishing the banks too severely might cause credit to dry up? “There they go again, the government,” said Shorten. “They already sound like they’re back-pedalling on making the banks accountable.” It was intended as a laid-back, cynical response, but he got the tone wrong. It looked as if he’d rehearsed it in front of a mirror.

Shorten’s strength in interviews is that he’s always well prepared; he gives substantive, coherent responses to even the most adversarial questions. Here he was in the easy seat, with an opportunity to score some real hits against a government that had wedged itself between a rock and a hard place. But where Keating would have been spinning the butterfly knife, Shorten seemed to have trouble getting a grip on the cudgel.

The panel for this episode — Katharine Murphy, Peter van Onselen and Laura Tingle — had a scattergun’s range of issues to discuss. Aside from the crisis of confidence triggered by the banking royal commission, there was the surge of independent candidates for the coming federal election and vexed questions about offshore detention, tax and whistleblowers.

These are three of the sharpest insiders in the business and they are never less than intelligent, but they suffer from a syndrome that dogs the program as a whole: they are caught up in the limited circuits of the inner political arena. There are times when one longs for a commentariat capable of panning back, taking a greater critical distance and offering some perspectives on the principles driving the political agenda, rather than wrangling about how it will play out in the electorate.

Why are political commentators so obsessed with trying to predict things, when they are uniquely bad at it? I went back through some past episodes of Insiders to see how some of the judgement calls have stood the test of time.

The 9 October 2016 program, for instance, featuring Murphy, Chris Uhlmann and Phillip Coorey, began with a discussion of the Trump presidential campaign following the release of the tape in which he boasts about groping women. The consensus was that this was the end for him, and a Clinton presidency was more or less assured — a consensus that helped shape wider expectations about the election.

In the same program’s discussion of recent parliamentary committee testimony by the major banks’ chief executives, all the panellists were cynical about protestations of contrition and all were firm in the view that there were more serious matters to deal with. (Cassidy quoted John Cleese’s quip that 99 per cent of bankers give the 1 per cent a bad name.) But none of them picked this for what it was — the first phase of a major debacle, and a scenario from the endgame of neoliberalism. None was prepared to comment on the ideological underpinnings of an economic culture gone toxic, or to recognise that this is what we were really witnessing. They still saw it primarily as a party-political stoush. As for the outcome of the hearings, both parties would take from them what they wanted, said Coorey. Murphy agreed: in terms of politics, it didn’t disturb the equilibrium.

Maintaining the equilibrium after a bad wobble was essentially the approach taken by The Drum following the release of the Hayne report on Monday. Ellen Fanning, in the chair, set the tone: “What was it that frittered away our trust?” Frittered away? Following the revelations elicited by the commission, trust is as dead as the fish in the Murray-Darling.

In its new hour-long format, The Drum had an opportunity to deal with this as a major turning point in our economic culture. Four Corners/Fairfax journalist Adele Ferguson, who won the Gold Walkley for her story on corruption in the Commonwealth Bank in 2014, appeared in edited footage at the start of the program. Why was she not on the panel? Given that the producers had advance notice of when the report was to be released, why did they not move heaven and earth to get her?

Instead, we had ABC business editor Ian Verrender assuring us that society relies on greed, and we all benefit from the way greed drives competition, but that something needs to be done when it reaches extreme levels. Investigative reporter Caroline Overington, who won a Walkley for breaking the story of the Australian Wheat Board kickbacks to the Iraqi government, here seemed to be fighting shy of the larger implications. “If you let this idea catch on, that the banks are not to be trusted,” she said, “we are in for a world of pain.” That’s a statement about five years out of date.

Reality still hadn’t fully caught up on 7.30, where Leigh Sales appeared standing in front of a screen headlined “Trust Deficit.” Laura Tingle, who had the job of summarising the royal commission’s findings, opened strongly: “The unconscionable, corrupt and sometimes unlawful behaviour of our financial sector has not just destroyed the lives of thousands of customers, but dragged down the reputations of some of our most senior business figures and sucked our political leaders into the vortex too.”

Well, that does indeed just about sum it up, but what about the causes? The failure of the regulators is a major part of the picture, as it was in the global financial crisis of 2008. Commissioner Hayne has not done anything that would radically reshape the financial system, as Tingle observes, or change the structure of regulators. No cases have been referred directly to the DPP.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, interviewed from Parliament House, again faced the question of why he and his Coalition colleagues had opposed the commission. “We can debate for hours, Leigh,” he began, “but what Labor have…” Sales cut him off, and went to the issue of trust. Determined to get on the front foot, Frydenberg stressed that action would be taken on all seventy-six recommendations. What would he do about ASIC? There has been a change in approach and leadership, he said. “We’ll keep a watching brief.” And he proceeded to expand on how vital the banking system is to our economy and our way of life.

All this sounds too much like a replay of how the global financial crisis was allowed to roll through without any drastic consequences to those who caused it. “Too big to fail.” “Too important to lose.” The public are again portrayed as helpless dependants who must wind back the frustration, cop the losses and hope that business as usual is resumed as soon as possible. And the government’s reaction is to ignore the crash and the hole above their heads, and offer assurances that the plaster will be swept up — or at least some of it.

What is the role of political discussion programs on the national broadcaster? The Drum and 7.30, with ABC news between them, now occupy a continuous two hours of evening television. There’s a risk of repetitive treatment of major news items, and unless one or other of these programs can break the mould and offer a more challenging approach to analysis and discussion, I don’t see how the arrangement can be sustainable. •

The post Reality bites appeared first on Inside Story.

“One may smile and smile and be a villain,” as Hamlet says of his smooth-talking uncle, Claudius, who has engineered a successful power grab in the kingdom of Denmark. The secret of political villainy, as distinct from the kind of villainy that fuels crime dramas, is the capacity to maintain a certain kind of ease. One of Cheney’s key attributes, according to Vice, was his ability to make an outrageous suggestion in a totally relaxed way.

The central character in Press is Duncan Allen, editor of a leading tabloid. Played by Ben Chaplin, he is in many ways Cheney’s antithesis: lean, agile, flamboyant, seductive and flippant. His behaviour as he flounces around in the designer-themed offices of the Post is one step away from stand-up comedy. If David Brent of The Office were reborn in his dream identity, he’d be Duncan Allen.

Allen thinks at lightning speed and never misses a trick. In the opening episode, we see him just back from New York, ascending a glass elevator in the Post building. As he walks through the open-plan office, he’s approached by a succession of people with urgent matters to impart. One hands him a phone on which a government minister is waiting. Allen is about to ruin her career, a matter that takes up most of the episode and establishes him as a thoroughly ruthless and devious operator. Later we see him in a meeting room at 10 Downing Street, vying with the prime minister over who really calls the shots.

Since the Leveson inquiry of 2011–12, we’ve all known that editors of the Murdoch tabloids had their own backdoor to Downing Street and did indeed expect to call the shots, not just on how the government’s public image was to be managed but also on matters of policy.

The policy aspect doesn’t get much attention in this series, which explores the dynamics of the rivalry between the Post and the Herald, modelled respectively on the Sun and the Guardian. The two papers are essentially chasing the same stories: the suicide of a young footballer, a hit-and-run incident involving a police car, sexual harassment allegations against a high-profile celebrity, and a scandal surrounding Carla Mason, secretary for work and pensions and government spokesperson on women’s affairs.

It’s all spin, scandal and social issues. Later, the stakes are raised with a story from an MI5 whistleblower (with obvious echoes of the Snowden affair), but the series curiously avoids portraying regular political reportage. While it shows real nerve in taking on some of the most vindictive and destructive operators in British politics, what goes on in government is not part of the story.

Press aims to dramatise journalism in the contemporary world, but this is a world that moves fast, and the attempt to portray it gets tangled in anachronism. The Leveson inquiry, evoked in a very effective scene early on, took place seven years ago. Carla Mason might be a minister in a late-term Blair–Brown government or the early years of David Cameron, but since Jeremy Corbyn took over as Labour leader in 2015 the political dynamic in Britain has changed beyond all recognition. Against the fallout from Brexit, most of the stories so earnestly chased by the rival newspapers in Press are of minor concern in the larger scheme of things. The political climate is now very much more fraught than it was five years ago, and the media are if anything more intensively involved than ever before.

Perhaps this is why the BBC has (apparently) stalled on plans for a second season. That’s a shame. Press has strong appeal as television drama. Mike Bartlett’s script is crisp and stylish, alternating passages of fast-paced, edgy dialogue with exchanges in which the key players size each other up, holding their fire as they figure out a new angle of attack.

Bartlett establishes a strong dramatic structure, playing with the assumed bipolarity of tabloid and “quality” journalism in ways that blur their boundaries. The Post, with its vibrant red logo, and the Herald, badged in faded blue, occupy buildings diagonally opposite each other. Both are losing money, but the Post, bankrolled by media mogul George Emmerson (David Suchet), has a spanking new office fit-out, while staff at the Herald have to fuss with broken water coolers and mouse traps.

In compensation for its position as the underdog in the commercial hierarchy, the Herald occupies the ethical high ground. That, at least, is the equation assumed by its editor Amina Chaudury (Priyanga Burford) and her team of serious-minded and dedicated journalists, headed by Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley) and James Edwards (Al Weaver).

While Chaudury, seeing the imminent demise of her newspaper, sets out to transform the business model, Allen, under instructions from Emmerson to engage in some “real journalism,” sets out to poach Evans. The battle between the two camps is deepened by cleverly woven tension lines. At times it is like a peak chess game, with Evans and Allen making ingenious moves in a sophisticated play for the upper hand.

The critical dialogues take place in St Bride’s Church, a fine Christopher Wren building in Fleet Street known as “the journalists’ church.” Heritage and the professional traditions of journalism are at the thematic heart of the series. The buildings occupied by the two newspapers are on the edge of the Clerkenwell precinct, with its paved alleyways and sixteenth-century arches, and the characters weave between the older and newer worlds of London as they go about their assignments.

Allen emerges as by far the most fascinating character in the drama, a moral shape-shifter whose motivations are much less easily defined than they seem. He even strategically outclasses Emmerson, the Murdoch figure. Is he a villain? He’s a master of betrayal, deception and manipulation. He’s also shrewdly cynical, taking the scalpel to other people’s self-delusions and indulging in none of his own.

In the first episode, after a teenage football star commits suicide, he sends a young reporter to get the family’s reaction to evidence that the boy was gay and afraid to come out. That might be news to them, objects the reporter, and I don’t want to be the one to break it. “If it’s news,” Allen quips with toneless sarcasm, “that’s our remit.”

Forms of villainy that involve ruining lives rather than killing people have a special kind of fascination. Those who are especially skilled in this way are often adept at staying on the right side of the law. Dick Cheney is a real-life version of the type. It includes many of the great characters in literature and drama: Shakespeare’s Iago, Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Dickens’s Uriah Heep. What they all have in common is that they are creatures of their times, exploiting and so exposing the pathologies of the social and political worlds they inhabit. •

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