The Gloaming wants us to confront our past

Moody and unsettling, this ambitious new streaming series imprints on you until you can't shake that uneasiness off.

The Gloaming is ambitious TV on many fronts, and one of them is its title, banking on the fact that viewers will tune in to a show whose name they don’t understand.

Gloaming is a not an often-used word, but its meaning is so evocative and specific that it really couldn’t have been named anything else.

Technically, gloaming refers to twilight, that moment after the sun sets and before the dark veil of night, but it could be applied to any moment and space that is the “in-between”.

“It was a word I was wanting to use,” Vicki Madden, creator of Stan Original Series The Gloaming told news.com.au. “My mum was Welsh and she used to talk about the gloaming a lot. It’s the space in between, and I knew I wanted to do a ghost story, and ghosts sit in a liminal space.”

The Gloaming, which drops on the streaming service today, isn’t some Sixth Sense ghost story. But it does feature people who are haunted, who are stuck.

Madden added: “I wanted to explore grief as a theme because I was losing my mother at the time. You’re stuck, you can’t move forward, you can’t move back.”

A character-driven and moody Tasmanian noir, The Gloaming is an experience that almost parallels what swamps its lead characters, something you can’t shake off.

The eight-episode series is streaming now on Stan.

Set in Tasmania, the plot is ostensibly a detective story, a murder investigation led by two unorthodox cops, Alex (Ewen Leslie) and Molly (Emma Booth). But the engine of the show isn’t a mystery box, rather it’s Alex and Molly’s past traumas.

The detective show is merely the bones of a house, but what’s inside the house are these two characters in an emotional arrested development. Alex’s past is revealed to us immediately – as a teen, he’s witness to a violent death – but Molly’s is hidden until the later episodes.

Booth said playing Molly was the toughest thing she’s had to do. “And I’ve played some pretty tough characters,” she said. “It challenged me, and I’ve played a serial killer before. I thought I could do anything after Hounds of Love.

“But, on this, I questioned myself a lot. But I trusted these guys so much, and Ewen, who’s amazing. So it felt right. I kept at it, showed up every day and just sat in Molly and remembered everything that we’d gone over about her.”

Booth said playing Molly was one of the toughest things she's had to do. Picture: Stan

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Confronting those pasts, working through them, is far from easy.

The same is true for Tasmania’s past and its dark, gritty and uncomfortable history, a history of violent colonialism, which The Gloaming also sets out to explore.

“I often say it’s haunted characters in a haunted landscape, and Tasmania is stuck in that status as well,” Madden said. “We’ve never quite reconciled that past. There’s a lot of people who deny that past.

“You can’t just change a name from Van Dieman’s Land to Tasmania. I’m quite fascinated by how the island survives with such a dark past.”

Madden, who is cementing this subgenre of Tasmanian noir with The Gloaming and her previous series The Kettering Incident, was inspired by the work coming out of Scandinavia and how those countries used a sense of place to elevate their stories.

“I thought, well, I come from an interesting island, I should tell some stories and find out a bit more about Tasmania. It’s been eye opening because I know it’s got a dark and bloody history, but the more you read, the more you think, ‘Wow, we are really stuck here, we need to start talking, we all need to start having a conversation’.”

Greg McLean, Ewen Leslie and Vicki Madden on set during The Gloaming's production Picture: Bradley Patrick/Stan

Greg McLean, who directed many of The Gloaming’s eight-episode season, agreed.

“This show is very specific to Tasmania,” he said. “But actually, when you think about it, it’s actually about Australia. A reckoning of the past really has to come at some point. And so much of that is in the show, but it’s about personalising it, personalising the historical.

“These characters have realisations and they have transformations and they have a kind of emotional reckoning that frees them in some way from the past.

“While it’s very personal and very focused on two characters, it’s actually a metaphor for the bigger culture.”

For McLean, the Tassie setting was a visual smorgasbord.

“As someone who doesn’t come from Tasmania, to go there and see it, the palate of this place is incredible, and then to try and capture the visually unique parts of that world.

“It’s specifically this place, it’s not anywhere else in Australia. We want to see those images and try to find a way to make it feel very unique to Tasmania and to have the atmosphere and personality of that place.”

Ewen Leslie said he’s noticed more risk-taking in Australian drama.

The Gloaming is another example of the kind of gutsy Australian series now popping up on either streaming services, pay TV or on our public broadcasters. Commercial free-to-air networks having largely abandoned ambitious scripted TV for cheap-to-produce and mass appeal reality TV.

Booth (Glitch, Cloudstreet) and Leslie (The Cry, Top of the Lake, Love My Way) have both noticed through the scripts that come their way that Australian TV writers are stepping up their game.

“There’s more risk-taking in terms of the drama we make because it has to compete on a world stage,” Leslie said. “They’re going out against British shows, American shows – people will watch what they want to watch and you have to compete on that level.

“The great thing about these TV shows is that these scripts take a more novelistic approach, you don’t need to wrap it up in 90 minutes.

“You can tell that story over eight hours and it allows you to sort of sit in it and take your time.”

Booth added: “It’s entirely different from even a few years ago. It’s exciting because you’re making shows at an international standard that people worldwide are going to watch that are of the best quality.”

The Gloaming is streaming now on Stan

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