Total Control season two raises the stakes and Deborah Mailman raises them higher

I reviewed the first season of Total Control in October 2020. I called it the best Australian political drama ever made. I stand by that, and season two makes the argument easier because it does the one thing returning seasons of good shows almost never manage: it changes the power dynamics completely without changing what the show is about.

When we left Alex Irving at the end of season one, she had survived. She had navigated the corridors, learned the game, and emerged from Rachel Anderson’s orbit with her career intact and her principles battered but not broken. Season two does not pick up where that story ended. It leaps forward. Alex is no longer the outsider being managed. She is a player. She has factional support. She has enemies who take her seriously, which in Canberra is a more reliable indicator of power than allies. And the show, to its enormous credit, does not treat this as a victory lap. It treats it as a new set of problems.

The machinery gets louder

The Canberra of season two is the same machine it was in season one, but Alex can hear the gears now. She understands how the building works. She knows which conversations are real and which are performances. She knows who controls the numbers and what they want in exchange. This knowledge, which the show spent six episodes earning in the first season, is now the baseline. Alex is not learning any more. She is operating. And the operating is where the show gets genuinely uncomfortable.

There is a sequence in the second episode where Alex negotiates a policy concession in exchange for her vote on a separate bill she does not care about. The scene plays out in three locations across maybe four minutes of screen time, and the writing is so precise about what each exchange costs that you can feel the moral arithmetic happening in real time. Alex gets what she wants. She gives up something she did not think she was giving up. The audience registers both sides before Alex does, and that gap between what we know and what she knows is the engine of the entire season.

Griffiths returns with sharper teeth

Rachel Griffiths is doing something different in season two, and it took me a couple of episodes to pin down what it was. In season one, Rachel Anderson was the polite antagonist, the moderate PM who believed her own good intentions. In season two, the good intentions have thinned. Griffiths plays Rachel as someone who has started to see Alex not as a useful appointment but as a genuine threat, and the shift in her performance is almost entirely in the eyes. The smiles are the same. The language is the same. The warmth has left the building.

The dynamic between Mailman and Griffiths is the best two-hander on Australian television. They orbit each other with a precision that feels choreographed in the way real political relationships feel choreographed: every gesture means something, every courtesy is a measurement, and the moments of genuine connection between them are more unsettling than the conflicts because you cannot tell if they are real.

Race as structure, still

I wrote in my season one review that Total Control treats race as infrastructure rather than episode. Season two deepens this without overplaying it. Alex’s position is explicitly racial. Her appointment was racial. The way the party uses her is racial. But the show continues to refuse to make any single scene “the race episode.” Instead, race is the water table beneath every policy argument, every media cycle, and every factional negotiation. When Alex pushes for funding in remote communities, the resistance is not framed as racism. It is framed as competing priorities, resource allocation, and political calculation. The outcome is racist. The process looks entirely reasonable. This is the most honest depiction of structural racism in Australian politics that I have seen on screen, and the show achieves it by never once using the word.

Why the audience is still too small

Here is the part that frustrates me, and I said the same thing four years ago. Total Control is the best drama on the ABC. It might be the best drama on Australian television full stop. It is brilliantly written, impeccably performed, and it treats its audience like adults. And the ratings are modest. Not bad, but modest. The kind of ratings that justify a third season on the ABC but would not survive a single week on a commercial network.

The problem is not the show. The problem is that Australian audiences have decided, collectively and without discussion, that Australian political drama is not for them. They will watch Borgen. They will watch House of Cards. They will watch a four-part BBC thriller about a fictional home secretary and feel culturally enriched by the experience. But an Australian show about Australian politics, starring one of the best actors this country has produced, performing at the peak of her abilities? That is apparently too close to home, or too close to the news, or too close to something that feels like it might be important, and importance is not what people want from their television on a Sunday night.

The best we have, again

I am going to say this again because it was true in 2020 and it is more true now: Total Control is the best political drama Australia has ever produced. Season two is better than season one. Mailman is better than she was, which should not be possible but is. The writing is tighter. The stakes are higher. The moral compromises are more expensive and more specific. And the show remains, stubbornly and quietly, one of the most important things happening on Australian screens.

Go watch it. Both seasons are on iview. Tell someone else to watch it. Tell them Deborah Mailman is in it, because that should be enough, and if it is not enough, that tells you something about the gap between what we say we want from Australian television and what we actually watch. The gap is wide. Total Control lives in it.