The best Australian TV of 2020 was made for people who could not leave the house

The year’s best Australian television was, almost without exception, about people who could not leave. This was not planned. These shows were written and largely produced before anyone had heard of COVID-19, before the word “lockdown” entered daily vocabulary, before Melbourne spent 112 days inside. But when they aired, to audiences confined to their lounges, the resonance was immediate and slightly eerie. Art does this sometimes. It arrives sideways into the moment it was made for.

Here are five shows from 2020 that were worth the time, presented in the order I watched them, which is as valid an organising principle as any.

Stateless (ABC/Netflix)

Stateless was the big one. Co-created by Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayres, and Elise McCredie, it arrived on ABC in March and Netflix shortly after, and it did something that Australian television rarely attempts: it told a story about immigration detention that was angry without being polemical and specific without being narrow.

The show follows four characters whose lives intersect at a fictional detention centre in the South Australian desert. Yvonne Strahovski plays a flight attendant whose breakdown leads her into a cult and then, through a series of bureaucratic accidents, into detention. Fayssal Bazzi plays an Afghan refugee trying to hold his family together inside the system. Jai Courtney plays a centre guard whose decency is steadily eroded by the work. Marta Dusseldorp plays the facility manager attempting to maintain order while the system she administers is designed to produce disorder.

The performances are uniformly strong. Bazzi is extraordinary in a role that could have been reduced to victimhood and instead becomes the show’s moral centre. Strahovski does career-best work with material that requires her to be sympathetic and infuriating in alternating scenes. The show is not perfect. The cult storyline (based loosely on the real case involving Kenja Communication) sometimes feels like it belongs in a different series. But the detention centre sequences have a weight and specificity that Australian drama has been circling for years without quite landing, and Stateless lands it.

Six episodes. Watch all of them.

Total Control (ABC)

Total Control (formerly titled Black Btch*, changed after the first season) is about an Aboriginal woman from Alice Springs who is recruited into federal politics by a pragmatic prime minister who needs a win. Deborah Mailman plays Alex Irving, and the performance is, look, it is Deborah Mailman, so you already know it is going to be good, but this is something else. Mailman plays Alex as a woman who is smart enough to see every trap in the system and idealistic enough to walk into them anyway, and the tension between those two qualities drives the entire show.

Rachel Griffiths plays the prime minister with a chilly efficiency that makes every scene between the two leads feel like a negotiation where the stakes keep shifting. The political machinery is convincing. The show understands that Australian politics operates on deals made in hallways and phone calls placed at midnight, and it dramatises that machinery without romanticising it.

The first season aired in late 2019, technically, but it was still on iview in 2020 and the second season was commissioned, so it counts. If you watched it this year, as many people did, it was a show about institutional power and the cost of participation, which felt relevant to absolutely everything.

Upright (Foxtel)

Tim Minchin wrote and stars in Upright, and it is the show on this list most likely to make you cry in a way that feels earned rather than manipulative. Minchin plays Lucky Flynn, a man driving across the Nullarbor with an upright piano strapped to the roof of his car, trying to reach his dying mother in Perth. Along the way he collects Meg (Milly Alcock, before House of the Dragon made her famous), a teenager running away from her own family situation, and the two of them form a reluctant partnership that the show builds with patience and restraint.

The Nullarbor sequences are gorgeous. The show understands that the Australian landscape is not just backdrop but participant, that the emptiness of the drive is the point, that two people in a car with nothing to do but talk will eventually say the things they have been avoiding. Minchin is a better actor than his reputation as a comedian might suggest, and Alcock is a genuine discovery, playing a character who could have been written as precocious but instead comes across as guarded and specific.

Eight episodes. The pacing is gentle, which is either a strength or a weakness depending on your tolerance for shows that take their time. I think it is a strength.

Mr Inbetween, season three (FX/Foxtel)

Scott Ryan’s Mr Inbetween returned for its third and final season in 2020, and it remained the best show most people outside Australia have never heard of. Ryan plays Ray Shoesmith, a hitman in suburban Sydney who is also a single father, a loyal friend, and a man with a moral code that makes sense to him and nobody else. The show is a half-hour drama (not a comedy, despite the format) and each episode runs between 22 and 28 minutes, which gives it a compression that most Australian drama lacks.

Season three brings Ray’s story to a conclusion that feels inevitable without feeling predetermined. Ryan, who writes and produces the show in addition to starring in it, understands that the appeal of Ray is not the violence but the domesticity: the school pick-ups, the awkward dinners, the quiet moments where a man whose job is killing people tries to be a decent father and a present partner and mostly, against the odds, succeeds.

The show ended in 2021, technically, but the 2020 episodes are the ones that mattered. If you missed it, start from season one. It is short. It is precise. It does not waste your time.

Mystery Road, season two (ABC)

Mystery Road returned for a second season set in Western Australia rather than the first season’s Queensland, and the change of landscape reinvigorated the series. Aaron Pedersen returns as Detective Jay Swan, this time investigating a disappearance connected to a cattle station, a water dispute, and the layers of history and ownership that sit beneath every square metre of rural Australia.

The show is slower than most crime dramas, and that is deliberate. It watches landscapes the way other shows watch faces. The country is not incidental. The framing gives the land equal weight with the people on it, and the result is a crime show that doubles as a meditation on place and belonging without ever announcing itself as such. Pedersen remains one of the most watchable actors in the country, playing Swan with a stillness that conveys more than most actors manage with entire monologues.

What 2020 proved

The accidental theme of the year was confinement. Stateless put people behind fences. Total Control put a woman inside a political machine designed to contain her. Upright put two people in a car they could not leave. Mr Inbetween put a man inside a life he could not exit. Mystery Road put a detective inside a community that did not want him there.

None of these shows were about COVID. All of them were about the experience of being stuck, of navigating systems and spaces that constrain movement and limit options, of finding ways to be human within structures that discourage it. They arrived in a year when the entire country understood that feeling in a way it had not before, and the timing gave them a weight they might not have carried in an ordinary year.

Australian television in 2020 was better than it had any right to be. The productions were disrupted. The budgets were uncertain. The audiences were captive, literally, and the shows that reached them were, by coincidence or design, exactly the stories the moment required.