Total Control gives Deborah Mailman the prime ministership and then makes her fight for every room

The best Australian political drama ever made is on the ABC, it stars Deborah Mailman, and the fact that I have to tell you this rather than you already knowing it is part of the problem the show itself is about. Total Control premiered in 2019, ran for two seasons, and received the kind of reviews that should have made it a national conversation piece. Instead it got respectful notices and modest ratings and the quiet admiration of people who already watch everything Mailman does, which is not enough people and never has been.

The premise is deceptively simple. Alex Irving (Mailman) is an Indigenous woman from a remote community in central Australia who becomes a viral sensation after confronting a politician on camera. The sitting Prime Minister, Rachel Anderson (Rachel Griffiths), sees an opportunity: appoint Alex to the Senate as an Indigenous voice, use her authenticity to shore up the government’s credibility, and manage her from above. The show’s engine is the gap between what Rachel thinks she is getting and what Alex actually is.

Canberra as a contact sport

Look, I have watched a lot of political dramas. I have sat through all of Borgen, I have rewatched The Thick of It more times than is healthy, and I maintain that Yes Minister is the most accurate depiction of government ever committed to screen. Total Control belongs in that company. It does something none of those shows attempt, which is to put someone who has never been in the building at the centre of the building and then watch the building try to digest her.

The Canberra of Total Control is not the Canberra of press gallery gossip or The Hollowmen’s gentle satire. It is a machine. People enter rooms with objectives. They leave rooms having been rearranged. The corridors are wide and clean and every conversation in them is a negotiation that one party has not realised is happening yet. Rachel Griffiths plays the Prime Minister as a woman who has been inside the machine so long that she has forgotten it is a machine. She thinks it is just how things work. When she recruits Alex, she genuinely believes she is doing a good thing. The show is smart enough to let that belief be sincere and still show it as a form of control.

Mailman does the impossible

Deborah Mailman has been the best actor in Australian screen for twenty years and the industry has consistently given her roles that are too small for what she can do. Total Control is the correction. Alex Irving requires her to be naive and strategic in the same scene. To be overwhelmed by Parliament House while also reading the room better than anyone in it. To make you believe that a woman from a remote community with no political experience could walk into federal parliament and, within weeks, become the most dangerous person in the building. Mailman makes all of this credible. She does it without shortcuts, without the kind of inspirational-speech moments that American political dramas use to signal that their protagonist is exceptional. Alex is exceptional because she is paying attention, and Mailman shows you the attention in real time.

There is a scene in the first season where Alex sits in a committee hearing and watches two senators perform a disagreement that has been choreographed in advance. Her face registers understanding, then disgust, then something colder: calculation. She has learned something about how this place works, and she is filing it away. Mailman does all of this in silence, across about eight seconds, and it is the best acting on Australian television that year.

Race as infrastructure, not episode

The thing Total Control gets right that almost no other Australian show has managed is the treatment of race. Alex is Indigenous. Her appointment is explicitly racial. The politics around her are racial. But the show does not make race its weekly topic. It makes race the infrastructure of every topic. When Alex pushes for policy on remote housing, the resistance she encounters is not a single racist villain delivering a monologue. It is a system of budget priorities, media cycles, and intra-party negotiations that produce racist outcomes without any individual needing to be the designated racist. This is harder to dramatise than a villain, and it is more honest.

The show also refuses to make Alex a symbol. She is not there to represent all Indigenous Australians or to teach the white characters (and by extension the white audience) lessons about reconciliation. She is a specific woman with specific politics who happens to be Indigenous, and her Indigeneity shapes her perspective without defining her entire character. This sounds like a low bar but watch how many Australian dramas fail to clear it.

Griffiths as the polite antagonist

Rachel Griffiths has not been this good since Six Feet Under, and I say that as someone who thinks she was very good in Six Feet Under. Rachel Anderson is the most interesting villain on Australian television because she does not think she is a villain. She is a moderate, pragmatic, centre-right Prime Minister who believes in incremental progress and managing expectations. She is also someone who will destroy a person’s career over a dinner she is smiling through, and Griffiths plays the transition between these two modes as if there is no transition at all. Honestly, if you have ever worked in politics or large organisations, you have met this person. You probably liked them. That is the point.

Why nobody watched it

Total Control rated adequately for the ABC, which means it was seen by fewer people than a mid-rating reality show on a commercial network. The reviews were strong. It won the AACTA for Best Drama Series in 2020. It has a dedicated audience that watches it closely and talks about it in the specific tones people use when they are trying to convince their friends to watch something they know their friends will not watch.

The reasons are the usual ones. The ABC’s audience skews older. The show’s subject matter sounds like homework to people who do not already care about political drama. And Australian audiences have a deep, seemingly immovable resistance to watching Australian political content, which is strange given that we live in one of the most politically entertaining countries on earth. We will watch fourteen seasons of a Danish parliament drama with subtitles but we will not watch two seasons of Deborah Mailman dismantling federal politics in our own accent. This is a cultural problem I do not have a solution for, but I can identify it, and Total Control is the evidence.

The best we have made

I do not say this lightly: Total Control is the best political drama Australia has produced. It is better than The Hollowmen, which was funnier but thinner. It is better than Party Tricks, which had Asher Keddie and not much else. It is in the conversation with Redfern Now for the best drama about Indigenous Australia on screen, though they are doing different things. What Total Control does is take the mechanisms of power and show them to you from the perspective of someone who is seeing them for the first time, and because that person is Deborah Mailman, you see them clearly. You see how the rooms work. You see who controls access. You see who gets to speak and who gets spoken for. And you see what happens when someone who was supposed to be managed decides to stop being managed.

Go watch it. Both seasons are on iview. It will take you about seven hours. You will be angry that there are only two seasons, and you will be right to be angry.