Plum and the game that breaks the men who love it

Plum is a show about a man who spent twenty years getting hit in the head for a living and is now, gently and then not so gently, falling apart, and the trick it pulls is making you understand why he would do all of it again. Brendan Cowell created the six-part series for the ABC, adapted it from his own 2021 novel, and plays the lead himself, which is either an act of total commitment or a man refusing to let anyone else have the part he wrote for his own midlife. Peter “The Plum” Lum is a retired rugby league great in the Cronulla mould, a local legend in a suburb that has nothing bigger to be proud of, and the diagnosis lands in the first episode like a tackle he did not see coming. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The thing the codes have spent a decade not saying out loud.

All six dropped on ABC iview on 20 October 2024, directed by Wayne Blair and Margie Beattie, and the structure is the smartest decision in it. This is not a disease-of-the-week build toward a teary reveal. Plum knows early. He just decides not to tell anyone, which is the most rugby league response available, and the season is the slow cost of that silence.

The poems in the hard man’s head

Here is the part that should not work, and here it is, wait for it: Plum writes poetry. Secretly. Has for years. And as his brain frays, the poets start turning up in his kitchen, Charles Bukowski (Matthew Sunderland) propped against the bench like a man who has read the room and disapproves, Sylvia Plath (Charlotte Friels) materialising to needle him about whether he means any of it.

On paper that is a lot. A footy hard-man haunted by literary ghosts is the kind of swing that curdles into student theatre in about ninety seconds. To its credit the show mostly holds it, partly because Cowell plays Plum as genuinely embarrassed by the poetry, the way blokes of that vintage are embarrassed by any interior life at all, and partly because the apparitions are not there to be profound. They are symptoms. The same damaged head that is taking his memory is the one that wrote the poems, and the show refuses to call that a gift.

The son is the real knife

Asher Keddie plays Renee, the ex-wife, doing the thing Keddie does better than almost anyone on Australian television, which is hold a decade of grievance and a decade of love in the same tired look. (She was on a run, this and Fake in the same stretch.) But the character who actually wrecks you is the son.

Gavin (Vincent Miller) is sixteen and good. Properly good. The clubs are circling, the same machine that built his father and is now dismantling him from the inside, and Plum has to decide whether to warn the boy off the only thing that has ever made the family money or stay quiet and let him chase it. That is the show’s best engine, and it does not flinch from it. The thing that is killing the father is the thing the son is being recruited into, and everyone in the suburb treats the recruitment as a blessing. Watching Plum try to find words for a danger he can barely admit to himself is where Cowell the actor earns the part Cowell the writer handed him.

Cronulla as a character, league as a religion

The series is soaked in the Shire, the leagues club carpet, the servo, the particular flat light of a Sydney beach suburb in the off-season, and it gets the texture of league culture from the inside in a way most Australian drama fumbles. The cameos help: Andrew Johns, Paul Gallen, Mark Carroll and James Graham turn up as themselves, and Matt Nable, who actually played first grade before he started acting, is in the cast, so the footy scenes carry a weight that stunt-doubled drama never quite finds. Nobody is sneering at the game here. That is important. Plum loves rugby league, which is the only honest position from which to indict it.

Because it is an indictment, in the end, just a patient one. The show never delivers the speech. It does not need to. It just lets you watch a man who gave the game everything, who is loved for what the game made him, work out in real time that the gift and the damage were never separable, that the thing the suburb celebrates and the thing eating his brain are one transaction with a very long invoice.

Where it wobbles

It is not flawless. Six episodes is a tight container for this much, and a couple of the supporting threads (Jemaine Clement turns up as a figure from Plum’s writing life and feels imported from a gentler show) do not get the room to land. The poetry device, even held as well as it is, occasionally tips a scene a beat too far into the literal, where you can see the metaphor being lifted into place. And the ending reaches for grace a touch faster than the hour before it has quite earned.

None of that sinks it, because the central performance is too honest to let it. Cowell has written himself a man who is, by every external measure, a hero, and then spent six hours showing you the bill. Plum is about masculinity and football and the lies a country tells itself about both, and it makes those arguments without once stepping out of the kitchen to make them. It just sits there with a brain-damaged former legend and his ghosts and his frightened, gifted son, and trusts you to do the maths. The maths is brutal. The show is very good.