The Newsreader keeps getting the small things wrong on purpose

The wigs in The Newsreader are not quite right. The haircuts are a little off. The shoulder pads are maybe half a size too big. If you were alive in 1987 (I was, barely, and I remember none of it) you might look at the newsroom set and think: close, but not exact. This is, I am fairly certain, the entire point.

Most Australian period dramas want you to sink into the era. They want the wallpaper right, the cars right, the cigarette brands right, so you can relax into a warm bath of “things used to look like that” and enjoy the story without ever feeling the friction of the present tense. The Newsreader does not want you to relax. It wants you slightly off balance, aware at all times that you are watching a construction, and it uses those small, deliberate imperfections to keep the gap visible. You are not in 1987. You are watching 1987 through 2023 eyes, and the show never lets you forget the difference.

Anna Torv and the discipline of not being likeable

Season two picks up with Helen Norville (Anna Torv) at the anchor desk, theoretically in the position she spent all of season one clawing toward, and immediately makes clear that getting what you want is not the same as being happy about it. Torv’s performance this season is something genuinely special. She plays Helen as a person who has learned to perform confidence so thoroughly that the performance has eaten the person underneath. There are scenes where Helen is charming and authoritative and completely hollow, and Torv lets you see all three layers at once without signalling any of them.

The show’s willingness to let its lead be genuinely difficult is braver than it looks. Australian drama has a long habit of softening its female protagonists, giving them a scene with a friend or a moment of vulnerability that functions as permission for the audience to keep liking them. The Newsreader does not do that. Helen is ambitious, calculating, intermittently cruel, and the show asks you to watch her without offering the safety net of a redemption arc. To its credit, this also extends to Dale Jennings (Sam Reid), whose closeted struggle in season one deepens into something more complicated and less sympathetic here. Neither character is positioned as the moral centre. The show does not have a moral centre. It has a newsroom.

Hoddle Street, Fitzgerald, and the weight of real events

The 1987 setting gives the writers access to two of the most significant events in Australian public life that year: the Hoddle Street massacre and the Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland. Both are handled with a seriousness that the rest of the show’s tone (workplace comedy, romantic tension, wardrobe drama) has to earn. The Hoddle Street episode in particular does something very difficult: it shows a newsroom processing a mass shooting in real time, fumbling the coverage, making editorial decisions they will regret, and doing it all while their personal lives continue to intrude. Nobody pauses to be noble. Nobody delivers a speech about the responsibility of journalism. They just try to get through the bulletin, and some of them manage it better than others.

The Fitzgerald material works differently, as a slow background pressure that reveals how comfortable Australian media was with institutional corruption, not because journalists were corrupt themselves (though some were) but because the system of access and relationships made it easier to look away. The show does not bang this drum. It lets it hum underneath scenes about desk assignments and on-air rivalries, which is more effective and more honest than a big confrontation scene would have been.

The problem with comfortable period drama

This is where The Newsreader separates itself from the pack. Think about Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, which was a perfectly fine miniseries about Ita Buttrose and the launch of Cleo magazine. It got the period details right. It had good performances (Asher Keddie was excellent, as she tends to be). But it sat inside its era like a cat on a warm ledge, completely at ease, never asking the audience to do anything other than enjoy the furniture. By the end you felt like you had visited a museum exhibit: interesting, well-curated, inert.

The Newsreader is allergic to that comfort. The slightly wrong hair, the slightly exaggerated shoulder pads, the occasional line of dialogue that feels half a beat too modern: these are all strategies for keeping the audience in a state of productive discomfort. You cannot settle into nostalgia because the show keeps nudging you out of it. The past is not a nice place to visit. It is a place where people were casually homophobic, where women in positions of authority were treated as anomalies, where a newsroom could decide what the public needed to know and the public had no way to check. The show wants you to feel that, not to admire the set dressing.

Characters who are allowed to be terrible

The writing room (created by Michael Lucas, who also wrote the bulk of both seasons) has a policy that I would describe as radical honesty about human behaviour in professional settings. People in this show are terrible to each other. Not in the big dramatic way, not throwing things or screaming, but in the small, precise way that people who work together and need things from each other are terrible. A compliment that is actually a positioning move. An offer of support that comes with conditions. A moment of genuine kindness immediately followed by a calculated betrayal. This is what workplaces are actually like, and most television is too polite to show it.

The supporting cast (Stephen Peacocke, Michelle Lim Davidson, William McInnes doing that William McInnes thing where he is genial and slightly menacing at the same time) all operate at this level. Nobody is comic relief. Nobody exists solely to support a lead character’s arc. They all want things, and those wants collide, and the collisions are where the show lives.

The Newsreader is the best Australian drama currently on television, and it earns that position not by being prestige-polished or important-feeling but by being smarter, funnier, and more uncomfortable than anything else in its time slot. The wigs are wrong. The show is right. Watch it on iview before someone spoils the finale for you.