Upright is the best Australian road show nobody outside this country has seen

Look, I understand why the pitch sounds ridiculous. A middle-aged musician straps an upright piano to the roof of a rented car and drives across the Nullarbor Plain to deliver it to his dying mother in Perth. Along the way he picks up a teenage runaway. They bicker. They bond. The piano gets damaged. There is a scene in a roadhouse that involves a meat pie and an emotional breakdown. If someone described this to you at a party you would nod politely and check your phone.

But Upright works. It works so well that by the end of eight episodes (each a tight half-hour, no filler, no wasted subplot) you will be genuinely upset about a piano. Not metaphorically. You will care about the physical instrument, its scratches and its out-of-tune keys, because the show has done the patient work of making you understand what it represents without ever stopping to explain it.

Tim Minchin was always going to be good at this

The temptation with Tim Minchin is to treat his dramatic turn as a surprise. It is not a surprise if you have been paying attention. His stage work, particularly Matilda the Musical, has always been more interested in emotional precision than in comedy for its own sake. The funny parts of Minchin’s writing tend to exist so that the sad parts land harder, which is a structural trick that most comedians never figure out.

In Upright he plays Lucky Flynn, a man whose name is the show’s first and most obvious joke. Lucky is not lucky. He is broke, estranged from his family, nursing what appears to be a significant drinking problem, and driving across the country on a mission that everyone in his life thinks is pointless. Minchin plays him as someone who has run out of ways to be charming and is now just operating on stubbornness and muscle memory. It is a restrained performance from a man who is professionally unrestrained, and the discipline of it is impressive.

The real discovery, though, is Milly Alcock. This was 2019, three years before House of the Dragon made her internationally famous, and she is already doing the thing that would make her famous: playing a young person who is smarter than everyone around her and furious about it. Her Meg is prickly, guarded, occasionally vicious, and the show never softens her into a cute kid sidekick. She and Minchin have the kind of screen chemistry that looks effortless and is almost certainly the result of very careful work by both actors and the writing room.

The Nullarbor as a narrative device

Road shows live or die on their relationship with landscape, and Upright gets this exactly right. The Nullarbor is not photographed as beautiful. It is not golden-hour desert porn. It is flat, dry, monotonous, and the show films it that way on purpose, because the point of the Nullarbor is that there is nothing to do except talk to the person next to you. The landscape functions as a compression chamber. You cannot scroll your phone (no signal). You cannot pull over and do something interesting (there is nothing). You are stuck with your companion and your own thoughts, and the show uses that confinement the way a good play uses a single room.

This is smarter than it looks. Most Australian road narratives treat the landscape as spectacle or as threat (the outback will kill you, the outback is sublime, the outback is ancient and indifferent). Upright treats it as boring, which is both more honest and more useful for character work. When you strip away every possible distraction, what is left is two people and their damage, and that is where the show does its best writing.

The Foxtel problem

Here is the frustrating part. Upright aired on Foxtel, which means approximately 14 per cent of Australian households had access to it, and a fraction of those actually watched. Foxtel has, for reasons that continue to baffle me, become the home of some of the best original Australian drama of the past decade. Wentworth. Mr Inbetween. Upright. The platform keeps commissioning ambitious, distinctive work and then burying it behind a subscription wall that most Australians have decided (not unreasonably) they cannot justify.

The international situation is worse. Upright had limited distribution through Sky in the UK and a brief, quiet appearance on a US streaming platform that I genuinely cannot remember the name of. It did not break through. It was not picked up by the algorithm. It exists in that category of excellent television that requires someone to physically recommend it to you, which in 2020 is a death sentence for audience growth.

Why the odd-couple thing works here and usually does not

The “grumpy adult and precocious child on a journey” format has been done so many times that it should be impossible to do well. Paper Moon. Leon. Every third indie film at Sundance. The structure is a cliche because it is reliable: put an emotionally stunted adult next to a child who sees through their defences, add proximity and a ticking clock, and the character arc writes itself.

Upright is aware of this. There are moments where the show seems to lean toward a sentimental beat (Lucky teaches Meg something about life, Meg teaches Lucky something about openness) and then swerves away from it. The relationship between Lucky and Meg is not redemptive. He does not become a better person because of her. She does not become softer because of him. They just become two people who have shared a very strange week, and that is enough. To its credit, the show trusts that outcome. It does not inflate the connection into something it has not earned.

The piano, the mother, the point

The final episodes shift register in a way I will not spoil except to say that the show earns its ending. The piano, which has been a prop and a metaphor and occasionally a punchline, becomes something else entirely, and the scene where it finally arrives at its destination is one of the most affecting things I have seen on Australian television. Minchin, who has spent seven episodes being dry and deflective, opens up in a way that does not feel like a performance choice. It feels like something breaking.

Honestly, Upright is the show I put on when people ask me what Australian television can do that other countries’ television cannot. It is small, specific, funny, and devastating, and it was made for a platform that most people do not subscribe to, in a country whose television exports rarely travel. That is either a tragedy or just the way things work now. Probably both.