Bay of Fires and the town full of people you should not trust

Bay of Fires is a show about a woman who gets relocated to a town where every single resident is hiding something, and the joke the series is too polite to say out loud is that this describes most of regional Australia. Marta Dusseldorp plays Stella Heikkinen, a financial-company chief executive who finds out, in the worst way, that her late husband left her holding something dangerous, and the state’s answer is to drop her and her two kids into the fictional Tasmanian town of Mystery Bay under witness protection. The catch, revealed gradually and then constantly, is that Mystery Bay is itself a witness-protection dumping ground. Everyone there is somebody who needed to disappear. Stella has been hidden among the hidden.

It premiered on the ABC in July 2023, co-created by Andrew Knight, Dusseldorp herself and Max Dann, and a second season turned up in the middle of 2025. I want to be fair to it, because it is doing something a lot of Australian drama will not, which is committing to a tone that is genuinely two things at once and not apologising for either.

The tone is the whole trick

Here it is, the thing the show lives or dies on: it is a thriller and a comedy in the same breath, and it refuses to let you settle into one. A scene will start as a fish-out-of-water bit, Stella in a borrowed flannelette shirt failing to operate a wood heater, and end with the genuine possibility that the bloke teaching her how to do it has killed people. The register keeps sliding, and to its credit the show knows that is the point. Mystery Bay is funny because it is frightening and frightening because it is funny. Nobody’s cover story holds up, including the audience’s assumption about what kind of program they are watching.

Dusseldorp is the reason it works. She has spent a career (Janet King, A Place to Call Home) playing competent women under pressure, and Stella is competence stripped of its setting, a CEO with no company, a problem-solver whose problems now involve livestock and feuds and a chest freezer she would rather not open. Dusseldorp plays the disorientation without ever tipping into helplessness; Stella is always about four seconds behind the town and aware of it, and that gap is where a lot of the comedy and most of the dread live.

Tasmania is the co-star and it earns the credit

The series shot across the west coast, Queenstown, Strahan, Zeehan standing in for the main street, Sandy Bay, and the place is photographed with an honesty that most Australian productions reserve for the outback and rarely extend to Tasmania. This is not the tourism-board island of glossy waterfalls. It is the other one: the mining towns, the scoured hills, the light that goes flat and cold and makes you believe a body could stay missing for a long while. The landscape does real narrative work. A town that looks like the edge of the world is a plausible place to send people who need to stop existing.

There is a long Australian tradition of the city person dumped into the bush and slowly broken or remade by it, and Bay of Fires is smart enough to know it is working that seam. What it adds is the criminal substrate. The usual version of this story has the local eccentrics turn out to be warm-hearted once the outsider learns to listen. Here the local eccentrics turn out to be armed robbers, fraudsters and worse, warm-hearted or not, and the show does not pretend the warmth cancels the rest.

Where the second season strains

Honestly, the second season has the problem every Australian drama’s second season has, which is that the premise was a closed box and opening it twice is harder than opening it once. Season one had the engine of discovery: we learned the rules of Mystery Bay alongside Stella, and the pleasure was watching a confident woman work out that nothing was what it claimed. By season two she knows the town and so do we, and the show has to manufacture new pressure from outside rather than mine the original situation. It mostly manages, but you can feel the machinery now in a way you could not the first time, the writers reaching for a fresh threat because the old one has been solved.

The other strain is tonal greed. When the balance is right, the comedy and the menace amplify each other. When it slips, a genuinely tense plot turn gets undercut by a gag that arrives too soon, or a comic set piece curdles because the body count has gotten too real to laugh at. The first season held the wire more steadily. The second wobbles, and a couple of episodes (the less said about the smuggling subplot the better) lose their footing entirely.

Why it is still worth your time

None of that sinks it, because the central idea is strong enough to absorb a few bad episodes. A town that is secretly a holding pen for the relocated and the reinvented is a great engine for a country built, in no small part, on people who came here to become someone else. Bay of Fires never makes that argument out loud, which is the most Australian thing about it; it just lets the premise sit there, funny and sinister, and trusts you to notice.

Dusseldorp is doing some of the best television work of her career, the production looks like nothing else on the ABC, and the show has the nerve to be two genres at once and let you sort out how you feel. That is more ambition than most of the local slate manages, and ambition that occasionally overreaches is a much better problem to have than the tidy competence that passes for quality everywhere else. Mystery Bay is a strange, cold, funny place. I would not move there. I keep going back.