Six Australian shows worth finding while the cinemas are closed

Look, the cinemas are closed. They might be closed for a while. You have already watched Tiger King because everyone has watched Tiger King, and you have probably started something on Netflix that you will abandon by episode three because it requires more emotional investment than you currently have available. This is fine. This is where we all are.

But here is the thing: the streaming back catalogues in this country are better than most people realise. ABC iview in particular has been quietly sitting there with a library of Australian drama that nobody talks about because nobody talks about iview unless Bluey is involved. Stan has its own collection. And some of the best Australian shows of the last decade are just sitting there, waiting for a pandemic to give people the time to find them.

So here are six. Not ranked, because ranking things is exhausting and the criteria would be arbitrary. Just six shows that are good, that are available, and that will get you through a week of lockdown without making you feel worse about the state of the world.

Rake (ABC iview)

Rake ran for five seasons between 2010 and 2018, and if you have not seen it, you have approximately 40 episodes of Richard Roxburgh being magnificent ahead of you. Roxburgh plays Cleaver Greene, a Sydney barrister who is brilliant in court and catastrophic everywhere else. He gambles. He drinks. He sleeps with people he should not sleep with. He owes money to people who break kneecaps for a living. He is, honestly, one of the best characters Australian television has produced.

The first two seasons are the strongest. The writing is sharp and the legal cases are absurd in a way that feels specifically Australian, not imported absurdity but the kind of lunacy that feels like it could have come from a Herald Sun court report. Seasons three through five are uneven but still worth your time, partly because Roxburgh never drops below excellent and partly because the supporting cast (Adrienne Pickering, Matt Day, Danielle Cormack) keeps the whole thing grounded when the plotting goes sideways.

Secret City (Foxtel/Netflix)

Secret City is the Canberra political thriller that nobody watched when it aired and that everyone who eventually finds it cannot stop recommending. Anna Torv plays Harriet Dunkley, a senior press gallery journalist who uncovers a conspiracy linking Australian intelligence services to Chinese state operations. The show is based on the novels by Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis, both of whom actually worked in the press gallery, and the Canberra of the show feels like Canberra: cold, procedural, and full of people who speak in careful half-sentences designed to say nothing while implying everything.

Two seasons. The first is tighter. The second goes bigger and loses some specificity in the process, but Torv is consistently good and the show treats its audience like adults, which is rarer than it should be.

The Code (ABC iview)

If you liked Secret City, The Code covers adjacent territory with a different texture. Two brothers, one a journalist (Dan Spielman) and one a coder with autism (Ashley Zukerman), stumble into a cover-up involving a car accident in outback New South Wales and a government data facility that should not exist. The show moves between Canberra and remote Australia in a way that makes the geography feel like a character, and the central relationship between the brothers is strong enough to carry the conspiracy plotting when it stretches thin.

Two seasons again. The first is the better one (this is becoming a pattern, and honestly it is a pattern across most Australian drama: the first season is the pitch, the second is the obligation).

Glitch (ABC/Netflix)

Glitch has a premise that sounds like it should not work: six people rise from the dead in a small Victorian country town, and neither they nor anyone else knows why. It is not a zombie show. It is closer to a mystery with supernatural elements, and the show is less interested in the how of the resurrection than in the what-now. What do you do when your dead wife comes back? What does she do when she discovers you have remarried? What does the town do when people it buried start walking the streets?

Three seasons. The first is excellent. The second is good. The third is divisive, and I will not tell you which side I am on because that would constitute a spoiler of sorts. Patrick Brammall and Emma Booth anchor the thing with the kind of quiet, lived-in performances that Australian actors do better than almost anyone.

Please Like Me (ABC iview)

Josh Thomas created Please Like Me in 2013 and it ran for four seasons. It is a comedy about a young man in Melbourne navigating his sexuality, his mother’s mental illness, his father’s new relationship, and his own tendency to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. It is also, intermittently, a cooking show. Thomas cooks in almost every episode. The food is not always good. The show is.

The tone is tricky to describe. It is funny, but it is not a sitcom. It deals with depression and hospitalisation, but it is not a drama. It is specific to Melbourne in a way that feels genuine rather than performative, and Thomas’s writing has a rhythm that takes about three episodes to lock into. Once you are in, you are in.

Wentworth (Foxtel)

Wentworth is the one on this list that people have probably heard of, because it ran for nine seasons and developed an international following that was, at various points, more passionate than the domestic one. It is a reimagining of Prisoner (or Prisoner: Cell Block H, depending on your age and your relationship with daytime television in the 1980s), set in a contemporary women’s prison and played straight rather than camp.

The first four seasons are genuinely strong television. Danielle Cormack, Nicole da Silva, Kate Atkinson, and Pamela Rabe do career-best work, and the show balances procedural drama with character development in a way that keeps you watching past the point where the plotting starts to strain credibility (which it does, around season six, though the performances remain committed throughout).

The back catalogue is the point

The common thread through all six of these is that none of them had the cultural moment they deserved when they first aired. Rake was a hit by ABC standards, and Wentworth found its audience eventually, but the others were made, broadcast, reviewed politely, and then largely forgotten by anyone who was not already paying attention.

That is the state of Australian television in a normal year: good shows, modest audiences, short memories. A lockdown is not a normal year. The time is there. The shows are there. The remote is already in your hand.

Go find something.