Aftertaste is spirited drama to savour

The second series of Aftertaste brings back big-ego chef Easton West, whose patterns of behaviour are a constant challenge for his family in the Adelaide Hills

Natalie Abbott and Erik Thomson in Aftertaste.

It’s a pleasure to welcome the second season of another of the ABC’s smalltown hits, Aftertaste – a kind of highly strung comedic domestic melodrama springing from Adelaide’s vaunted reputation as a food and wine centre. The series is certainly sprightly, nimble and often surprising. Like Rosehaven, set in rural Tasmania, there’s a nice sense of close harmony between its characters and where they live in the Adelaide Hills, a different kind of place.

It’s from the innovative South Australian company Closer Productions, who have picked up a swag of international awards. Closer’s first feature drama 52 Tuesdays won the directing award in the world dramatic competition at Sundance Film Festival in 2014 and the Crystal Bear for best film at the Berlinale International Film Festival. Closer’s move into scripted television began with the six-part short-form series F--king Adelaide, which was the most viewed show made for ABC iView in 2018. The Hunting, starring Asher Keddie and Richard Roxburgh, was released in August 2019 and became SBS’s most successful commissioned drama.

Producer of the series is Closer’s Rebecca Summerton and the show was jointly created by Julie De Fina and Matthew Bate, who wrote the first episode of the new season. The director is Renee Webster, whose film Edgar and Elizabeth was nominated for an AWGIE and along with her first short film, Scoff, played at festivals worldwide. And she was also a series director on the ABC’s innovative serial The Heights, also shot regionally in Perth, about a community trying to protect its way of life while under the constant threat of redevelopment, transformation and the social stratification of its happily knockabout neighbourhood.

Aftertaste’s first season followed the testosterone-driven shenanigans of Erik Thomson’s Easton West, once hailed as a genius chef and international culinary god who, washed up and broke and seemingly just a little repentant, finds himself back in the Adelaide Hills, returning to a family still dealing with a past trauma. They’re not all that happy to see him. And he’s still unable to cope with the way the walls of fame closed in to crush him.

Nor is the fair city of Adelaide pleased to welcome him home, Easton having once outraged the town, calling it “A pitiably parochial cesspit of a syphilitic city of ill-bred boorish oafs who wouldn’t know a cassoulet from a deep-fried donkey’s dick”. Eventually he opens a new restaurant with his niece Diana – played with some abrasive precocity by Natalie Abbott, a would-be pastry chef who has dreams of being the next Nigella – in the ruins of his family home, still occupied by his somewhat derelict father Jim. Disasters pile up, of course, and Easton seeks enlightenment in the form of hallucinogens.

There are countless family dramas and catastrophes but the restaurant is a success until the local council threatens to shut down their barely legal operation. Easton contemplates selling out. Diana thinks about getting off the sinking ship and taking a one-way ticket to London; she is sick of the displays of Easton’s massive ego.

It’s impossible to watch Thomson’s Easton, played with such entertaining abrasiveness, and not think of the late Anthony Bourdain. As he wrote in Kitchen Confidential: “Cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and grim pride.” He could have been talking of Easton, a wonderful example of “those strange beasts that lurk behind the kitchen’s doors”, who during the first season just couldn’t help jeopardising everything that could be good and agreeable in his life. It’s as if he’s watching the lights of an oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over him.

Aftertaste is still largely set in the small town of Uraidla, half an hour east of Adelaide in the magical hills above the city in the Mount Lofty Ranges where, as Hal Porter said, the landscape somehow doesn’t seem attached to the sky, with no sense of a horizon. “Immeasurably ancient, abraded low and smooth, they seem young, boneless pagan, sprawling like adolescent creoles in a languor of passion, but passion undeveloped and never to develop.”

That other great chronicler of Adelaide, Barbara Hanrahan, described the hills as gentle, with their pale trees and drifts of smoke. “And everywhere the wattle: intensely gold, on hair-like twigs, in plumes, among flannel leaves, fuming in a lemon fuzz, fallen to a shrivelled crust.” (Colonel William Light, who founded Adelaide in 1836, described the backdrop to his city as “the enchanted hills”.)

These days it’s a place laying itself out to quietly enjoy a comfortable life. It’s one of the largest wine regions in the state, with a patchwork of orchards, vineyards and pasture, dotted with stone cottages and established gardens.

And for all the family discord dramatised here, there is some lovely texture in this production, a beguilingly established sense of place and a genuine density in the relationships between the characters growing out of it. And, as in Rosehaven, Bate and De Fina obviously have a good idea of what makes country towns tick and why so many cherished traditions remain intact. And why the bush still casts such a potent spell over the national imagination.

There’s been a deep seed of plot from the start and some well-crafted reveals and twists, and the narrative journey continues in this new season.

Against the background of the gorgeous country around Adelaide, not often seen on our screens, the show navigates the confusions and complexities of extended families and the often uncomfortably confronting spaces of contemporary relationships – the way they’re distressing at times, demanding and only occasionally satisfying.

And how dealing with someone like Easton West and his old-fashioned patterns of behaviour would affect anyone’s mood, energy levels, self-esteem and peace of mind. His toxicity is easy to recognise but it’s hard for those in his orbit to fully understand their feelings and empower themselves to deal with the situations he creates. This is where much of the comedy sits.

As the new seasons starts he’s under control and trying to mellow out. He is not cooking for anyone and is happy to concentrate on brewing his own beer in his bedroom. Brett (Wayne Blair) and Easton’s sister Denise (Susan Prior) are tying the knot in an alfresco ceremony at the family house she has now taken over, but Brett is having trouble sorting out what he will say at the service. Words are not his thing. Diana has returned from London with a boyfriend, the rather posh restaurateur Harry (Julian Maroun) and is now working as a chef at his family pile.

She’s still overweight, constantly on the edge of hysteria and, as she says, wearing a dress that makes her look like a peach sorbet. Totally insecure about being back, she keeps warning the urbane Harry about her “insane” family.

Everything seems rather stable as they all gather for the nuptials in the lovely Hills garden – even Easton. Though when Diana spots him she hits the tray of Mimosas a little hard. It’s obvious that old tensions are on the rise and soon the bickering starts, followed by the wrestling and the usual chaos when Easton and Diana are in close proximity.

It’s a simple opening and reintroduction of the family and their friends. The writing is good, simple and direct.

The language is crisp, sometimes thorny and abrupt, like real conversation. There’s the profanity we’ve come to expect and Bate’s script works the emotional material with a kind of devoted tough love that avoids mawkishness with flinty comic touches. And Webster holds it all together simply, letting the jokes play out, but with some telling touches in her camera framing and compositions. And, like the show, she’s not afraid of a little slapstick either.

Like most of these small-budget ABC comedies, the show is built from a casual storytelling finesse with a kind of relaxed dialogue that makes it easy to see yourself in the mostly amiable characters. It all goes down as easily as a glass or two of an Adelaide Hills pinot grigio.

Aftertaste, Wednesday, 9.10pm, ABC TV, streaming on ABC iview.