Netflix’s first Australian original series, Tidelands, is lightweight and underwhelming

We’ve waited a long time for this, the first original series Netflix has made in Australia. We should’ve kept waiting.

Woo! Netflix is finally spending real money in Australia, with its first original Aussie series dropping on Friday.

Boo! It’s not great. It’s actually kind of bad.

What could be generously described as a cross between a later, off-the-rails season of True Blood and Home And Away, Tidelands is not the show Australia deserves to represent us on the US streaming service.

It’s a shame, because the fact that Netflix is finally fully funding an Australian series should be a time for cheer — after all, we’re a small English-speaking market happy to voraciously gobble up US content, so there’s no real business case for it.

So it’s awesome they did it at all. But did it have to be this series?

Shot in southeast Queensland, and made by Australian production company Hoodlum (Secrets & Lies), the underwhelming Tidelands is a supernatural crime thriller. Two of those words are true — there are supernatural elements and there is crime, but there’s nothing thrilling about it.

The opening sequence features a topless woman aboard a fishing boat squeezing someone’s eyes out, blood running down her arms. That’s the kind of subtlety that sums up Tidelands — unnecessarily violent while trying to titillate or shock you with bizarrely placed moments of nudity.

The premise of the show is sirens exist — mythical creatures that lured fishermen to their watery deaths with song.

And a group of them, led by authoritarian Adrielle Cuthbert (Elsa Pataky), have been living on the outskirts of a small coastal town named Orphelin Bay for centuries.

Elsa Pataky (left) and Madeleine Madden in Tidelands.

The town’s prodigal daughter, Calliope McTeer (Charlotte Best), returns after a 10-year stint in juvie/prison. Her arrival stirs up tensions as she tries to integrate back into her family, which includes her drug-running brother Augie (Aaron Jakubenko) and angry, inheritance-thieving mother.

Augie’s drug operation is reliant on the sirens, or what the town calls the tidelanders, but Adrielle is distracted by something else, an ancient prophecy and some very old artefacts.

Calliope, unknowingly, is somehow tied into all of it. Maybe. It’s very confusing.

The first episode is weak, especially for a pilot, failing to effectively establish a core story or why anyone should care about these limp, stereotypical characters.

And while the next couple of episodes pick up, at least in trying to eke out a plot, or several plots, it devolves again with a double-nay-triple-cross midway through the season, leaving you to throw your hands up in exasperation. The last thing Tidelands needs is more “twists”.

Charlotte Best is known for her role in Home And Away

With that many strands to follow (corrupt cops, magical prophecies, big city drug cartels fighting for territory, an old seer woman imprisoned in a dungeon who may or may not be the long-lost love of another character!) and no indication that it’s going to resolve satisfactorily, there’s little justification for sticking around to the end of the eight-episode run.

The performances are lightweight — with most of the actors resorting to a furrowed brow or glowering to make sure we know that they have angst.

But damn, they sure are pretty, all sun-kissed glistening bodies and perfect beach hair (except for that one tragic mullet).

Peter O’Brien is the only one here with an ounce of gravitas with even the otherwise talented Madeleine Madden let down by a silly script that takes itself too seriously.

But, ultimately, you can’t blame the actors too much because the writing is the real culprit — they can’t play what’s not on the page. Which, ironically for a show set by and in the water, is depth.

Touch-lands

Which is not to say that Tidelands will be universally derided. It ticks many of the boxes that a certain demographic is looking for in a show — viewers that enjoy CW shows like Siren, The Vampire Diaries and its ilk may find it watchable.

It has hotties with supernatural powers in a small town-contained soap opera story, punctuated by violence and “sexy” nudity. So, yes, it will have an audience.

Though, for all that, Tidelands is strangely boring. It has no verve, not even a crazy, ridiculous one — at least that would have been entertaining.

Tidelands drops on Netflix on Friday, December 14 at 7pm AEDT.

Share your TV and movies obsessions: @wenleima