What Australian television has coming in 2020 and why you should care

Look. I am going to level with you. Australian television in 2019 was fine. It was respectable. It was the television equivalent of a well-maintained Subaru Outback: reliable, occasionally surprising, and mostly ignored by people who had other options. The ABC did good work. SBS did good work that fewer people saw. Foxtel made prestige drama for an audience that could not quite justify the subscription. Stan existed.

But 2020 looks different. The slate is deeper, the ambitions are bigger, and there are at least three shows coming that could change the way people outside Australia think about Australian television. Or, at minimum, they could give us something to talk about that is not Neighbours or Home and Away, which I am told still exist and which I have not watched since I was thirteen and will not apologise for.

Here is what is coming.

Stateless

Stateless is the one everyone will be talking about, so let us start there. Cate Blanchett co-created it with Tony Ayres and Elise McCredie. It is a six-part limited series for the ABC (with Netflix picking up international rights, which tells you something about the scale). The premise: four strangers whose lives converge at an immigration detention centre in the South Australian desert. One is an airline hostess escaping a cult. One is an Afghan refugee. One is a father from the suburbs chasing a pay cheque. One is a bureaucrat trying to hold the system together while the system is designed to not hold together.

The cast includes Yvonne Strahovski, Fayssal Bazzi, Jai Courtney, and Dominic West. Blanchett herself plays a supporting role as the cult leader. (Of course she does. Of course Cate Blanchett looked at a six-part immigration drama and said, “I’ll play the cult leader, thanks.”)

The subject matter is not subtle. Australia’s immigration detention policy is one of those topics that Australians have strong opinions about and very little interest in examining in detail, which is precisely the space where good drama operates. The early word is that the show does not take sides so much as it puts you inside the system and lets the system speak for itself. Whether that is possible or whether it is itself a political position is a question the reviews will argue about for weeks. I am looking forward to the argument.

Total Control

Total Control already aired its first season in late 2019, but I am including it here because most people missed it and because the show deserves a second mention and because Deborah Mailman’s performance is the best thing that happened on Australian television last year and I will die on that hill comfortably.

The premise: an Indigenous woman from a remote community (Mailman) is recruited into federal politics by a calculating prime minister (Rachel Griffiths). It is a political thriller with teeth. Mailman plays Alex Irving as someone who is simultaneously learning the rules and deciding which ones to break, and Griffiths plays her PM with the kind of smiling ruthlessness that makes you check whether she is based on a real person. (She is based on several, which is worse.)

Season two has not been confirmed yet, but the first season ended with enough loose threads and enough critical praise that it would be extraordinary if the ABC did not commission more. Watch the first season now. When the second arrives, you will be ahead of the conversation.

Upright

Tim Minchin made a road trip show. I know. I had the same reaction. Tim Minchin, the pianist-comedian with the eyeliner and the barefoot stage presence, co-created and stars in Upright, a Foxtel original about a man driving a piano across Australia from Sydney to Perth. He is joined by a teenage runaway (Milly Alcock, who is very good and whom you will see in larger things soon). The piano belonged to his mother. The road trip is a funeral procession disguised as a buddy comedy.

It is funnier than it has any right to be, and sadder than the premise suggests, and the Australian landscape has rarely looked this deliberately empty on screen. The Nullarbor gets a starring role. Foxtel, as usual, has made something genuinely excellent and then placed it behind a paywall that ensures the audience will be small and devoted and slightly annoyed about the monthly fee.

Mystery Road

Mystery Road returns for a second season on the ABC. The feature films (directed by Ivan Sen) established the template: Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) investigates crimes in remote Australia while navigating the politics of being an Indigenous officer in a predominantly white institution. The first television season extended that template into six episodes and proved it could sustain the slower pace.

Season two moves to a new location in Western Australia and introduces a new partner for Swan, played by Jada Alberts. The early indications are that the show continues to do what it does best, which is use the procedural format as a frame for stories about land, race, and the particular kind of silence that settles over communities that have learned not to talk to outsiders.

Mr Inbetween

Mr Inbetween is back for a second season on Foxtel, and honestly, if you have not watched this show yet, I do not know what to tell you. Scott Ryan created it, writes it, and stars in it as Ray Shoesmith, a hitman in suburban Sydney who also has a daughter, an ex-wife, a best mate, and a calendar that requires him to balance parent-teacher conferences with contract killings. It is blackly funny and structurally tight and each episode is about twenty-two minutes, which is the correct length for a show about a man whose job involves occasional murder.

The first season found a small but intensely loyal audience in Australia and a larger one in the United States, where FX picked it up and Americans discovered that Australian crime drama does not always involve the outback. Sometimes it involves a bloke in a Holden Commodore driving through Bankstown with a body in the boot. The second season promises more of the same, which in this case is a compliment.

Why any of this matters

This is the first issue of this magazine, so let me say something about intent. Australian television has been good for years, often quietly, often without the marketing budgets or the international attention that would let it compete with the American and British shows that dominate the conversation. The gap between the quality of the work and the size of the audience has always been the central tension of this industry.

What 2020 offers is a slate that might close that gap, or at least make it visible. Stateless has the cast and the subject matter to travel internationally. Total Control has the performances. Upright has the specificity. Mystery Road has the landscape. Mr Inbetween has the twenty-two-minute runtime and the body in the boot.

These are not niche shows for a niche audience. They are shows that are good enough to compete, made by an industry that is tired of being politely overlooked. That, honestly, is what this magazine is about. Paying attention.