One to watch

THERE were few highlights in a year marking the end of the greatest decade of TV's history.

Underbelly: The Golden Mile, was a big hit on Australian television screens.

IT was a year that started badly, and it finishes just as lamely, with a summer's viewing that's one of the worst I can remember. At its start the commercial networks chased us away with poor programming choices as new technologies and distribution forms began to profoundly change how we use television.

Commercial TV, while it never wanted anyone else to have digital free-to-air TV capacity, was overwhelmingly uninterested in the innovative capabilities of the digital platform. After all, who wants to walk away from a way of doing business that still draws nightly national audiences of more than one million people to many shows each week, and occasionally more than three million?

Then suddenly, almost alarmingly, they embraced their new digital channels. And through the year free-to-air audiences started to fragment, with millions chasing the new digital channels in the hope of something vaguely entertaining. For dedicated viewers the new channels at least offered the sensation of travelling through time in one's own life and cultural history.

Abruptly -- hundreds of hours of TV had to be rapidly disinterred -- you could see those shows that marked your adolescence, your early married years and even your first forays into adultery. By the end of this year, as the final days of the greatest decade in TV's history came to a close, the whole fast-food smorgasbord of TV culture was laid out for consumption on our new commercial channels. Everything from I Love Lucy and I Dream of Jeannie to George and Mildred and The Rockford Files.

The year started slowly, the first unexpected hit being Seven's My Kitchen Rules, a crude rip-off of the brilliant British show Come Dine with Me. The local version is the kind of series you watch only out of despair at finding any alternative if you haven't got pay TV. The series made temporary celebrities out of unknowns in exchange for making them look ridiculous and pathetic -- and we loved it.

In contrast, reaction to most of the new imported shows, such as Courtney Cox's highly touted comedy Cougar Town on Seven, was lukewarm, with network boss David Leckie publicly expressing his disdain for the overseas product.

"OK, the Cougar Town, it's a shit show but we promote it and we get nearly 1.4 million watching it," he said, with his usual insouciance and mysterious syntax, about Cox's lame comedy series. It was an alarming example of the contempt some TV bosses obviously feel for their audiences.

But then Seven gave us The Pacific, HBO's 10-part military miniseries, executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Largely shot in Australia, it was TV's biggest blockbuster to date, dwarfing even the same producers' Band of Brothers. Brilliantly photographed, it centred on a group of Pacific-bound US marines as they battled the Japanese on a series of remote islands they'd never heard of: Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

Not only was the violence not for the squeamish but the style of storytelling was confronting in its abruptness and challenging in its complications. Then, as Hanks's and Spielberg's heroes emerged from the dark hold of their warships and gradually entered the Technicolor light of the Pacific battlefield, TV returned to normal.

Quickly the landmark shows such as Underbelly, Packed to the Rafters, MasterChef, Better Homes and Gardens, The Gruen Transfer and Q&A returned. They continued to be hits in their various markets but I struggle to recall another year where so many new programs so painfully missed the mark.

Most will only remember with the aid of deep sleep therapy woeful attempts at enlightenment and entertainment such as The Bounce, Beat the Star, The Boss is Coming to Dinner, COPS L.A.C. (what a shambles that was), Australia Versus, The White Room and Russell Crowe's Damage Control.

So much new that was delivered by the networks, especially Seven and Nine, seemed ersatz, a borrowing, adaptation, variation or a straight-out theft of something else. Few new shows possessed a sense of cultural impact commensurate with the ambition displayed and the money expended.

The ABC also disappointed early, making up for it with election shows The Gruen Nation and the Chaser's hysterical Yes We Canberra. Remarkably, Ten had not one new show fail, the American comedy Modern Family arguably the best new show of the year. It was certainly the happiest.

Ten had the strongest new local commercial dramas too, its enthusiastic and creative commitment translating into good ratings figures. Wicked Love, the 90-minute telemovie based on the sensational Maria Korp murder case, was often mesmerising, continuing our fascination with murder stories drawn from real life.

Hawke, Richard Keddie's biographical film about the former prime minister, also based on actual events, was a triumph, full of wonderful melodrama. Ten was the network that produced the Whitlam blockbuster The Dismissal in 1983, the same year Hawke came to the prime ministership. And, of course, Hawke went to air only a month after another prime minister was so unexpectedly toppled from his Canberra throne. Rarely has a TV drama had so much resonance for its audience.

Ten also gave us Offspring, the comedy drama, set in the streets of Melbourne's inner-city Fitzroy, created by writer Debra Oswald and produced by Southern Star's John Edwards and Imogen Banks. The series has been a delight: exuberant, witty, poignant, and stylish (it's a show at which it's hard to stop throwing adjectives).

Like most of Edwards's work (Love My Way, Tangle), the series deals with the way personal relations with loved ones are a parallel career for most of us: disconcerting, demanding and only occasionally satisfying. But Offspring has a touching emotional centre that revels in the sense of joy that sometimes takes any real family by surprise.

The ABC gave us Rake, still screening on the broadcaster's first channel, in which Richard Roxburgh plays emotionally and often physically bruised Sydney barrister Cleaver Greene. Co-creator with the fine writer Andrew Knight, producer Peter Duncan gives us an elegantly paced comedy of rather bad manners, as well as an offbeat character study and a seemingly unfolding relationship drama. He wraps these up in an ironic narrative that echoes the legal thriller and the courtroom drama, gently parodying both. More next year, please.

And there was Underbelly: The Golden Mile on Nine, joyously filled with horny and narcissistic women. Many viewers, but not all, were pleased to discover the display of their mammary attributes was less gratuitous than in last year's second series. It was flat-out terrific, as cinematic as the first series and more assured than the second, which certainly seemed a little obsessed with the libidinousness of the disco era in which it was set.

The makers of Underbelly proved again that the true-crime genre is flexible enough to include hard-boiled reporting, lurid pulp expose and well-acted drama that artfully mix fact and fiction.

Ten's MasterChef Australia also packs a wallop but the storytelling is certainly more linear. This year's second series was produced with tremendous style; the last 45 minutes of the finale was broadcast live in a wonderful coup de theatre. The show works so well because it manages to satisfy the public thirst for narratives of adventure, struggle and aspiration when conventional imported dramas just don't seem to any more.

MasterChef Australia is a brilliantly produced morality play in which we are taught that preparation in life is everything, triumphing over all the culinary evils such as burned sauces, missing ingredients in the final plating and, the largest sin of all, poor seasoning. Junior MasterChef worked a treat, too, though it always bemused me. I didn't want to like it. I don't want to tune in to be amazed by other people's kids who are turning out better than mine, or to be reminded of the long line of smug stage parents just off camera. But every time I watched it, Junior MasterChef dazzled me. I never found it patronising, and it's certainly not some exploitative cooking version of a kid's beauty pageant as some dyspeptic critics have suggested.

There were several major anniversaries through the year. Foxtel celebrated its 15th birthday, having transformed itself with new channels, some brilliant adaptations of successful overseas formats such as Come Dine With Me and Australia's Top Model and edgy, innovative local productions like this year's Claudia Karvan vehicle Spirited.

Many of you still don't have pay TV, for various reasons, but the view there's nothing new on pay TV -- if you don't like sport or news, that is -- is simply no longer true. Fifteen years on it's a vast mix of first-run movies, innovative lifestyle, entertainment, science, true crime, children's, music, documentary and weather channels, all available at a touch of the moulded black remote. (The one with those coloured buttons many of us are still working out how to operate, so quickly does Foxtel confront us with new technology.) SBS also celebrated this year, rather lugubriously turning 30 with few fireworks, red carpet occasions or startling new shows, just an increasing sense of loneliness as viewers continued to slowly desert it. This is a terrible pity. Even as its rationale has been eroded both by the internet and by increasingly aggressive pay TV, it's given us some unforgettable recent shows.

But at 30, SBS just can't take a trick when it comes to presenting itself, or even arguing much of a case for its survival, although by year's end there is a sense of slow renewal.

Its reworking of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? -- which takes prominent Australians on an often complex, and sometimes unsettling, genealogical journey -- has proved addictive TV. It represents a fascinating chronicle of the social and cultural evolution of our national identity and is just what we expect from SBS. (Even if the format, like those of so many local shows, originated elsewhere.)

It was also the year we briefly mourned the demise of the long-running The Bill, though many of us had already stopped watching. The show never seemed comfortable in this last decade of popular culture's more nihilistic battle against TV's crooks, a period in which democracy seemed to be only just holding its own against the gun-happy and deviant. But we already miss the cockney chat and rhyming slang.

Lost finally finished as well, ending a decade's experiment with serial storytelling. But for many viewers, including First Watch, who started the series full of hope and anticipation, Lost had slowly and smugly eaten itself to death. Millions simply became bored at being strung along by writers with no idea when to stop.

It was a show seen by many as the epitome of what TV studies scholars have dubbed TV3, this exhilarating and confusing period of technological convergence, new business models and audience fragmentation.

Unlike most long-running series, Lost demanded more than slighting, if occasionally libidinous pleasures; it wanted commitment, total fidelity.

And if you were unable to offer Lost that assurance, the show never rose above a kind of postmodern Gilligan's Island: "Are they ever going to get rescued?"

With a nice ironic touch, almost mocking its own convoluted debated mythology, the final episode of Lost was called "The End".