Consistently compelling, this actor continues to fly under the radar

Director Greg McLean has described it as “Dallas with dingoes”. But Territory, the latest Netflix series to excite the world, could also be described as Yellowstone in the Top End or Succession in the Outback. Or maybe The Hatfields & the McCoys Go West.

A canny exercise in box-ticking, the six-part series, set in what is frequently described as “the biggest cattle station in the world”, incorporates many of the elements that have previously fuelled popular stories and shaped successful TV series. However the tale of the Northern Territory’s fictional Marianne station and the Lawson family, its embattled owners, adroitly tweaks its variation on the theme.

Anna Torv as Emily Lawson and Philippa Northeast as her daughter, Susie, in Territory: a fractured family battles for control.Credit: Netflix

Created by Ben Davies and Timothy Lee, it features a fractured family warring over control of an empire. There’s an ageing patriarch (Robert Taylor), a hard man who’s demanding and can be bullying and abusive. There’s an ambitious woman (Anna Torv) who’s his logical successor but one who isn’t regarded by the patriarch as a palatable candidate for the keys to the kingdom. Her alcoholic husband (Michael Dorman) is the family disappointment. Also in the mix are the traditional landowners, an Indigenous community dealing with its own rifts, and a mining billionaire (Sara Wiseman) with her own covert agenda. Then there’s the long-standing animosity between the Lawsons and their grifter neighbours, the Hodges.

These simmering tensions provide the ideal foundation for a series built around robust confrontations. There’s a whole lot of manly chest-thumping in Territory, as well as a bundle of action-movie accoutrements: helicopters, quad bikes, an assortment of weaponry and off-road vehicles that look like they belong in a battle zone.

Beyond the advantage of a budget that can accommodate such snazzy gear, as well as the considerable cost of shooting in remote locations, the production has writers who know how to construct cliffhangers. There are big, juicy hooks at the end of each episode enticing viewers to stay tuned.

Territory’s formula is timeless and familiar: characters, some of them rich and some of them nasty, jockeying for power and battling over control of a coveted kingdom. In this variation on the formula, one of the stars of the show is the wide brown land: the scenery is spectacular, as is the sense of scale. Everything in Territory is big – sometimes over-the-top – and writ large.

When it comes to the people, the standout is the consistently compelling Anna Torv. From her first scenes, confidently striding around Marianne as if she innately knows and capably runs the place, she’s convincing. Emily Lawson (nee Hodge), we soon learn, can fly a chopper, shoot like a cowboy, muster cattle, corral raging bulls and rebrand stolen cattle to conceal where they came from. She can also lie, cheat, fight and scheme with the best – and the worst – of them.

As is often the case when Torv is on screen, she brings strength and gravitas, and here it’s the sense that something significant is at stake beyond the brawling and macho posturing. Playing the most fully fleshed character in the drama, she becomes its wounded and conflicted heart.

That’s not a novel occurrence as Torv reliably brings power to a production. Yet, in some ways, she seems to fly under the radar, quietly building a brilliant career. She isn’t a media darling who’s regularly in the headlines or decorating social pages and posts. She tends to disappear unless there’s a production that she’s contractually obliged to promote. So her impressive CV has steadily grown without attracting a lot of public attention.

Anna Torv and Sam Reid in the ABC’s award-winning The Newsreader.Credit: ABC

Since she moved back to Australia from the US during the pandemic, her credits suggest that she’s been in constant demand. There have been two seasons of The Newsreader (ABC iview, 2021-23), the award-winning period drama in which she plays the outwardly tough but privately vulnerable TV journalist and news anchor Helen Norville. And there have been appearances in the anthology drama series Fires (ABC iview, 2021), The Last of Us (Binge, 2023), the dystopian hit series based on a video game, and the film, Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (Prime, 2024).

Her first lead role locally came before that, with two seasons of the espionage thriller, Secret City (Foxtel Now, 2016-19), in which she plays relentless Canberra journalist Harriet Dunkley. Among the other notable credits in that period are as Dr Wendy Carr in Mindhunter (Netflix, 2017-19), David Fincher’s profoundly unsettling crime series about the establishment of the FBI’s profiling unit, and the US sci-fi drama Fringe (Foxtel Now, 2008-13), in which she played FBI agent Olivia Dunham for five seasons.

Anna Torv as Harriet Dunkley in Secret City, set in Canberra.Credit: Foxtel

In addition to Territory, Torv can be seen in another recent release, So Long, Marianne (SBS on Demand), an eight-part Norwegian, Canadian and Greek co-production. Created, written and directed by Oystein Karlsen, it chronicles the relationship between Canadian singer, songwriter, poet and author Leonard Cohen (Alex Wolff), and his Norwegian muse, Marianne Ihlen (Thea Sofie Loch Naess). They meet in Greece in the early ’60s, at a time when the island of Hydra was home to a bohemian colony of expat artists – writers, painters, musicians – drawn to the enclave’s sunny beauty and inexpensive lifestyle. Torv and Noah Taylor play married Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston.

It’s another series with an eye-catching setting, although here, at least for the time spent on Hydra, it’s not earthy browns but vivid colour: the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean, inviting waterfront cafes, cobblestone streets and the whitewashed walls of village houses. It looks like a sun-drenched, booze-soaked idyll.

Torv’s Clift is all worldly, weary sophistication: an insightful woman, a disenchanted wife in a troubled marriage, and a mother, although the children are barely seen. Drawing deeply on her cigarettes, she frets about ageing and delivers pronouncements designed to suggest a wry understanding of the world. In a series that at times resorts to unfortunate cliches, Torv is given some clunky dialogue to wrestle with. Yet she makes Clift sound wise and wounded rather than annoyingly pretentious.

Like many of Torv’s characters, Clift is clever and conflicted. It’s hard to imagine her playing someone dumb, although she could probably make that work too. As Territory and So Long, Marianne attest, she can be compelling, even when the production she’s in has its flaws.

And it’s a fair bet that, given the series finale and the global success of Territory, we’re likely to see more of Emily Lawson.

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