The Newsreader is one of the best dramas of the decade, but have we taken it for granted?
THE NEWSREADER ★★★★
ABC, Sunday, 8.30pm, and iview
Are we taking The Newsreader for granted? Created by Michael Lucas and debuting in 2021, this Australian period drama about the fraught co-dependency between two television journalists – Anna Torv’s Helen Norville and Sam Reid’s Dale Jennings – who meet in a Melbourne newsroom in 1986, hasn’t just been one of the best Australian dramas of the decade to date. It’s been one of the best dramas of the decade. With its third and final season now airing, the series has proven to be consistently compelling.
Dan Spielman, Maria Theodorakis, Daniel Henshall, and Anna Torv in The Newsreader.
I’ll put it another way: if The Newsreader was a British production, set in 1980s London, it would be acclaimed in more prominent and completely different ways. Another comparison: Give me The Newsreader over The Newsroom any day of the week.
Anyone who watched the ABC’s airing of the new season’s debut episode would have instantly felt the emotional unease that is the show’s unerring grammar. It’s in the way Torv holds Helen’s smiling facade until it seems like her body will snap. It’s in the cold, coiled framing director Emma Freeman applies to Reid’s portrayal of Dale. It’s in the mausoleum tones of composer Cornel Wilczek’s score, which haunts both the characters and the era they live in.
As Dale Jennings, Sam Reid is tightly coiled in The Newsreader.
The great shows know just what they are, no matter how they communicate it to the viewing audience, and that’s what The Newsreader does. One of the needle-drops in the first season was the Motels’ unerring 1979 hit Total Control, and the song’s lyric has haunted the show ever since: “I can’t do it not with you, not even with you, maybe never with you …”
What Helen and Dale want and what they need are cruel companions. In a blokey newsroom culture, both at News at Six and the wider Australian television industry, they are outsiders. Helen is the woman who fought her way to co-anchor status, her personal life suffering along the way, while Dale is a closeted bisexual man initially scared of his sexual attraction. The two have been friends, allies and soulmates in private. A public relationship consummated and consumed by the studio camera did not fare so well.
After the final season opened on the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie terrorist attack, with Helen at her professional best as a foreign correspondent, the new episodes unfold in 1989. Once again, there are historic headlines breaking in the background. Once again, Helen and Dale are trying not to break in the foreground. Helen’s return to Melbourne, for a new show at a rival network that will compete with Dale’s, puts them back in close proximity.
Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson) and Rob (Stephen Peacocke) welcome a new addition in The Newsreader.
There is insight and moments of relief in surrounding storylines, such as the romance turned marriage between footballer turned sports anchor Rob Rickards (Stephen Peacocke) and assistant turned producer Noelene Kim (Michelle Lim Davidson), but it’s hard to be away from Helen and Dale. You can see them trying to make sense of themselves, even if it’s not for the best. Reid has given Dale an august professional tone to mark his professional ascent. It makes his private contemplation all the more fascinating.
Given what The Newsreader has already achieved, you have to have faith in Lucas and his collaborators sticking the landing. A show that initially sounded like a time capsule feels utterly contemporary whenever you look at its protagonists and their melancholic duality. They’re made to compete with each other; they need to complete each other.
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