The death and rebirth of the Aussie cop show
THE death of the great Australian cop show was almost as mysterious as some of the plots played out on the small screen. But the good old crime drama has been resurrected, it’s just in a shiny new body.
TV
Don't miss out on the headlines from TV. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The demise of the great Australian cop show was almost as mysterious as some of the plots played out on the small screen.
Once a genre as ubiquitous as reality TV is today, the cop show quietly faded off our screens a couple of decades ago.
Gone were long-running favourites such as Blue Heelers, Water Rats and Police Resuce, shows that came after their equally popular forebearers such as Homicide, Cop Shop and Matlock Police.
But this great Australian tradition didn’t stay buried for long — resurrected in a new form, a shift brought on by changing viewer demands.
Audiences no longer wanted crime dramas that were essentially soap operas set in a cop shop, they demanded more nuanced stories and deeper characters.
Sue Masters, head of scripted drama at SBS and one of Australia’s most experienced television producers, tells Insider the shift has been a global one.
“Around the world it’s very sophisticated and that’s what you have to do now — complex plots, complex characters are what we need to deliver,” she says.
“That’s what audiences seem to be wanting — rattling good yarns, highly stylised visuals and they want to binge, but the commitment isn’t there anymore.”
The change in Australian crime drama can be traced back about 10 years when the first of the Underbelly franchise delivered on those changing demands.
Just as The Sopranos dramatically shifted the way television was created in the US when it debuted in 1999, Chanel 9 co-head of drama Andy Ryan points to Underbelly as the crime series that heralded this new era of local content.
“I think Underbelly was a major turning point. It opened the door to different ways of telling stories in commercial drama,” Ryan says. “Underbelly proved that the audience was really hungry for a style of storytelling that they hadn’t been receiving from local drama and that has emboldened everybody.”
Masters agrees.
“Underbelly was actually the vanguard of the change I suspect,” she says.
Cop shows of the past were essentially “soaps, not really cop shows at all”, says social analyst and principal of The Strategy Planning Group David Chalke. The popularity of Underbelly was a sign things had changed with the audience.
“With Underbelly, that showed we are genuinely more interested in true crime rather than yet another soap,” he says.
Sally Riley, ABC’s head of scripted drama, uses the comparison between Blue Heelers and the public broadcaster’s new critically acclaimed eight-part drama Mystery Road to highlight the differences between then and now.
Mystery Road sees city Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) and outback cop Emma James (Judy Davis) investigate the disappearance of two farm hands from an outback cattle station. With a stunning backdrop of the Kimberley, complicated relationships and a compelling story arc, it is a far cry from the happenings of Mount Thomas.
“Blue Heelers was kind of lighter, fluffier, happier, nothing too much happened in Mount Thomas. Mystery Road give you other layers to the story, it’s not just about the cop shop,” Riley says.
The introduction of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video over the past few years has given consumers more choice than they’ve ever had before. Australian networks are not just competing with each other anymore, they also have to contend with these behemoths and their exponential growth of new and back catalogue content, which contains a plethora of global crime shows.
While admitting they were now up against some of the best television ever made, Ryan says local producers can specialise in what they know better than anyone — Australia.
“Audiences are demanding very contemporary productions, fuelled by the quality programming being produced,” he says. “We have to find and tell stories which are fresh and have a really strong point of view and which speak to our local Australian audience in ways they can’t get from shows that Netflix are making.”
He points to Nine’s upcoming eight-part thriller Bite Club, starring Dominic Monaghan, Todd Lasance and Deborah Mailman, as an example.
“Bite Club is a crime series but it is very much rooted in Australian landscape, the Australian experience and rich characters,” he says.
The effect of these changes to the wider investigative genre is perfectly illustrated by the change in fortunes of an ABC drama that underwent a radical facelift.
While not a cop show, Crownies was a court drama that revolved around a group of young crown prosecutors in Sydney. The national broadcaster commissioned a 22-episode series in 2011, but despite positive reviews, ratings were low and a second season wasn’t made.
Determined there was something in the premise, the ABC created a spin-off several years later and Janet King was born. The series was reduced to eight episode seasons and the ratings took off. The reimagined drama maintained a healthy audience throughout its three seasons.
“I think Janet King was a much more focused series,” Riley says. “It’s a singular point of view of how she runs a case whereas Crownies had a bigger cast and multiple storylines. In crime shows people want that singular, really strong point of view because they’re on that journey with that character to solve the case.
“I feel like that was when the shift happened with police shows too,” she adds.
THE COP SHOWS OF THE PAST