Harrow keeps solving murders in Brisbane and Brisbane keeps looking good doing it

There is a particular kind of television show that does not get enough credit, and Harrow is one of them. It is a procedural. It knows it is a procedural. It is not embarrassed about being a procedural. It does not try to transcend the form or smuggle in a meditation on the human condition underneath the autopsy scenes. It just does what procedurals do, and it does it well, and every episode it does it in Brisbane, which turns out to be a significant part of the appeal.

Harrow returned for its third season on the ABC in February 2021, with Ioan Gruffudd once again playing Dr Daniel Harrow, a forensic pathologist with a talent for reading the dead and a complicated relationship with the living. Gruffudd has been doing this for three seasons now, and the performance has settled into something comfortable and precise. Harrow is charming, morally flexible, professionally brilliant, and personally chaotic. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of protagonist that procedurals have been running on since the format was invented. The difference is that Gruffudd plays him with a specific warmth that stops the character from tipping into the tortured-genius cliche. Harrow likes people. He is not brooding in a dark office. He is riding his motorbike across the Story Bridge with visible enthusiasm.

Brisbane is doing a lot of the work

The show films on location in Brisbane, and it uses the city properly. Not as a backdrop, not as a generic stand-in for somewhere else, but as Brisbane. The river is in half the shots. The bridges keep appearing. The light is that particular subtropical brightness that flattens everything in the middle of the day and then turns golden in the last hour before sunset. The houses have tin roofs and wide verandas and the kind of casual structural decay that tells you it rains hard and often. The morgue scenes are clinical and cool and grey, and then the show cuts to an exterior and the heat is immediately visible.

This matters more than it might seem. Australian television has a long history of being set in Sydney or Melbourne, and when shows venture outside those two cities they tend to treat the location as exotic or remote. Brisbane in Harrow is neither. It is just a city where people live and work and occasionally die in ways that require a forensic pathologist. The normalcy is the point. Crime happens in Brisbane the same way it happens everywhere, and the show does not pretend otherwise.

The production is handled by Hoodlum Entertainment, a Brisbane-based company, which partly explains why the city feels so authentically rendered. They are not visiting. They are working from home.

The procedural question

There is a conversation that comes up every time a new Australian crime show launches, about whether it is “just” a procedural or whether it is doing something more. The question contains an assumption that I have never found convincing: that procedurals are inherently lesser, that a crime show needs to be about something bigger to be worth watching. Harrow ignores this conversation entirely, and it is better for it.

The show’s structure is straightforward. Each episode centres on a case. Harrow investigates. There is a season-long arc involving Harrow’s own secrets and the people who might expose them. The cases are well-constructed, the performances are strong, the writing is efficient. Nobody is trying to reinvent the form. Nobody needs to.

Compare this to Mystery Road, the ABC’s other major crime series, which takes a very different approach to the same genre. Mystery Road is slow, deliberate, landscape-driven. It uses the outback as a character. Its silences are as important as its dialogue. It is brilliant television, and it is also working in a completely different register to Harrow. The two shows share a network and a genre and almost nothing else, and the fact that the ABC can support both of them says something good about the broadcaster’s range.

Gruffudd holds the centre

The ensemble around Gruffudd is solid. Mirrah Foulkes, Remy Hii, and Darren Gilshenan have all been part of the show from the beginning, and by season three the relationships between these characters have the easy rhythm of a workplace you have visited many times. But the show depends on Gruffudd, and he carries it without apparent effort. There is a specific scene in the third season where Harrow is examining a body and simultaneously having a personal crisis, and Gruffudd plays both registers at once without either undermining the other. It is the kind of acting that looks simple and is not.

Gruffudd is Welsh, not Australian, and Harrow does not pretend otherwise. The show leans into his outsider status, making Harrow someone who has chosen Brisbane rather than someone who belongs there by default. This gives the character an observational quality that works well for a detective: he notices things that locals might overlook, because he is still, in some ways, seeing the city for the first time.

Genre television deserves respect

The ABC’s strength has always been its willingness to programme across registers. The same network that gives you Four Corners and Q+A also gives you Harrow and Mystery Road and Rake. There is no contradiction in this. A public broadcaster that only made prestige content would be a public broadcaster that had lost contact with its audience. Harrow is not prestige. It is well-made genre television, programmed for an audience that wants to watch a clever man solve murders in a city that looks good on camera.

Three seasons in, the show has not run out of either murders or Brisbane locations, and Gruffudd has not run out of charm. That is enough. Sometimes that is more than enough. The best procedurals are the ones that know exactly what they are, deliver it consistently, and trust the audience to show up. Harrow has been doing that since 2018, and the third season suggests it has no plans to stop.