Irreverent puts a Chicago criminal in a Queensland church and lets the accent do the rest

The pitch for Irreverent contains a structural problem that the show spends ten episodes almost solving. A criminal from Chicago is forced to hide in a tiny Queensland town, posing as a reverend. The comedy is supposed to come from the collision: American gangster meets Australian outback, fast-talking city operator meets slow-moving coastal community, a man who knows nothing about God is put in charge of talking about God every Sunday. On paper, this is a machine that should generate jokes automatically. In practice, the machine works best when it stops trying to be clever and lets the town be the show.

Irreverent premiered on Netflix in late 2022, ten episodes created by Paddy Macrae. P.J. Byrne plays Paulo Keegan, the Chicago criminal who winds up in the fictional town of Clump (filmed in and around Cairns and the Daintree, with Port Douglas standing in for the town itself). Kylie Bracknell plays Piper, a local cop who is smarter than anyone gives her credit for. Colin Friels shows up as a crocodile hunter with secrets. The ensemble is strong and the location work is genuinely beautiful, two things that carry the show through stretches where the plot forgets what it is doing.

The town is funnier than the premise

Here is the thing about fish-out-of-water comedies: the fish is usually the least interesting part. The audience already knows the fish is out of water. The fish knows the fish is out of water. The comedy comes from the water, from the specific details of the place the outsider has landed in and the specific people who live there. Irreverent figures this out intermittently. When it is focused on Clump and its residents, their rhythms and grudges and the particular way small-town Queensland operates, the show is genuinely funny. When it cuts back to the crime plot, to the Chicago mob searching for their missing man, the energy drops.

Byrne is a good comedic actor, and he does what he can with Paulo, but the character is caught between two demands that do not quite fit together. The mob-comedy version of Paulo needs to be dangerous and quick. The small-town-comedy version needs to be bumbling and slowly endearing. The show asks Byrne to do both, often in the same scene, and the result is a character who feels like two different people depending on which storyline the episode is prioritising.

Bracknell, by contrast, has one character and plays her with precision. Piper is watchful, underestimated, and competent in ways the show reveals gradually rather than announcing. She is the audience’s way into the town, and she is also the character who most clearly belongs to the landscape. When Bracknell is on screen, the show feels grounded in a specific place. When she is off screen, it drifts toward generic.

Queensland looks extraordinary

The location work deserves its own paragraph because it is doing things that the script cannot. The Daintree rainforest is dense and wet and ancient. The coast is impossibly blue. Port Douglas has the quality of a place that knows it is beautiful and does not care whether you agree. The production team, led by director Jonathan Teplitzky (who directed several episodes), uses these locations with a confidence that suggests genuine familiarity rather than tourism. There is a recurring shot of the church at sunset that functions as a visual thesis statement: the light is golden, the building is small, the landscape around it is vast and indifferent. Paulo is a small man in a big place. The camera knows it even when the script forgets.

The Tourist comparison

Irreverent arrived in the same year as The Tourist, another show about a stranger dropped into remote Australia with a criminal past and a confused identity. The comparison is instructive. The Tourist, starring Jamie Dornan, leaned hard into genre and sustained it: the outback was hostile, the tone was tense, the comedy was dark rather than broad. Irreverent tries for something lighter and warmer, and mostly achieves it, but the lightness comes at a cost. The stakes never quite land. When the mob plotline intrudes, it feels like a different show has walked into the room and interrupted the one you were enjoying.

The Tourist also had the advantage of a single, propulsive mystery: who is this man? Irreverent has several mysteries running simultaneously and none of them generate the same pull. The strongest episodes are the ones that set the crime plot aside entirely and focus on Paulo trying to deliver a sermon, or navigating a local dispute, or slowly realising that the people of Clump are not the rubes he assumed they were. These moments have a gentleness that the show earns through its casting and its setting, and they are the reason to watch.

The small-town formula

Australian television has a long relationship with the small-town comedy, from SeaChange through Doctor Doctor through Rosehaven. Irreverent fits into this tradition more comfortably than it fits into the crime-comedy genre it is technically occupying. The best scenes are not about the mob or the money or the danger. They are about a man who is pretending to be someone he is not, in a place that does not care who he is, surrounded by people who are exactly who they appear to be. The simplicity of the town is the comedy. The complexity of the plot is the obstacle.

Netflix did not renew Irreverent for a second season, which is unsurprising given the platform’s track record with Australian originals, but it is also a slight shame. The show was finding its voice in its later episodes, settling into the small-town register that suited it best, letting Bracknell and Friels and the ensemble do the work that the premise promised but could not deliver alone. Another season in Clump, with less Chicago and more Queensland, might have been the better version of itself. As it stands, Irreverent is a ten-episode argument that the town is always more interesting than the stranger, and the show is most convincing when it agrees with its own argument.