Dying and living with dignity: The End is must-watch television

New Aussie drama The End follows three generations of a family trying to come to terms with the meaning of death and just what it is that makes life worth living.

Noni Hazlehurst in The End. Picture Mark Taylor

‘It is nothing to die,” wrote Victor Hugo. “It is frightful not to live.” This might just have been an epigraph to the first script from Samantha Strauss for the short film she wrote as a 19-year old still living with her parents. It formed the basis for The End, a compelling drama which also happens to be a deft, acerbic comedy — the new 10-episode series a co-production between Foxtel and Sky UK.

Strauss is the Emmy-nominated writer of the breakout Australian series Dance Academy, about the dreams and melodramas in the lives of young ballet dancers. Its 65 episodes have screened in more than 160 countries. (Strauss trained as a ballet dancer until she broke her back, her dreams unfulfilled. But as she said in promoting the movie based on her series, “Writers will tell you it’s hard work, that we bleed into keyboards, but I’ve bled into pointe shoes and believe me this feels nothing like that.”)

And Strauss, who discovered herself as a writer after never having to wear a leotard again, wrote and is executive producing the much-anticipated TV adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s bestselling novel Nine Perfect Strangers. Created by David E Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy, it is now in post-production.

The End, which screened last year to excited reviews in Britain, is produced by See-Saw Films, the Oscar-winning producers of the movies Lion and The King’s Speech and the TV drama Top of the Lake. Set largely on the Gold Coast, if follows three generations of a family trying to come to terms with both the meaning of death and just what it is that makes life worth living.

Strauss and her creative colleagues accomplish this complex mediation on mortality in the most entertaining of ways. Strauss’s writing is taut and economical, characterised by an obviously passionate concern for phrase, cadence and the sound and value of words

The story originated with Strauss’s grandmother, whose husband died by putting a plastic bag over his head. She moved to the Gold Coast to live in a retirement village aged 80. “When she arrived, she was wearing all brown and was hunched over and depressed,” Strauss says in the production notes. “My Dad, who’s a doctor, gave her six months to live.”

Strauss’s family managed to get her grandmother into an upmarket assisted living village. “Within six months, rather than being dead she’d bought a red dress, a zippy red car and she was dancing on tabletops with her best friend.” It made Strauss realise that no matter what kind of a mess you make of your life, it might be possible “to clean the slate and get it together at the end”.

Dame Harriet Walter, familiar from The Crown and Killing Eve, stars alongside the versatile Frances O’Connor, so good several years ago in the tense thriller The Missing, surrounded by an ensemble cast of local acting stalwarts. They include Noni Hazlehurst (A Place to Call Home), Robyn Nevin (Relic), Andrea Demetriades (Janet King), Alex Dimitriades (The Principal), Brendan Cowell (Game of Thrones) and John Waters (Offspring).

It’s a great cast and they all know exactly how to play this heightened kind of comedy, savouring every slightly absurd moment that comes their way but never acknowledging the humour. There is a lot of discipline here but an obvious enjoyment in being cast in such a production with a script that requires no editing in performance by those on screen. As an old actor, it’s easy to sense their sheer pleasure in being in this high-level production. “All the characters are interestingly defined,” Walter says. “I mean nobody is just background action or less interesting than anybody else. It’s nice to be in a cast that’s top heavy in the over-50s, over-60s actually, that’s quite unusual.”

It begins with a startling sequence. The camera slowly moves around a darkened house as we hear the achingly raw voice of Ane Brun singing the ethereal Koop Island Blues from the Scandi jazz combo Koop. “I’m sad alone,” she croons. “I’m so sad on my own”. A burning log falls on the carpet from a fireplace as we discover a woman lying on a bed, a plastic bag around her head. But being burned alive is not how she wants her life to end. (We later learn her name is the recently widowed Edie, played by Walter.)

She rips the bag off as the camera hovers closer, takes a swallow of the vodka next to her bed, runs to the window, perches on the ledge, looking down at the snow-covered ground below, takes a final swig and throws herself off as the house burns around her. Edie groans after she lands, disappointed she’s not dead. As an ambulance takes her off to hospital, she shouts to the attendant, “It says: ‘Do not resuscitate.’” “Love,” says the kindly paramedic sitting with her, “You’re still conscious.”

This first sequence, with its mordant humour sets the tone for what, more boisterously, follows. The drama establishes the reality of how difficult it is to end a life, a notion that will obviously recur through the series. The simple fact is it is unbearably hard to depart this life alone. To do so requires more resoluteness, taciturnity and iron discipline than even Edie possesses.

Edie is a woman, it turns out, who is coping not only with rage and despair but guilt and shame, and especially deep regret. She is played with brilliant stoicism by Walter, tightly grimacing through her lines of dialogue, she enters and exits each emotion at different times, and not always in a particular order. She’s had enough.

Her  daughter  Kate,  played  with  her  usual efficiency by O’Connor, brings a reluctant Edie over to Australia, hoping to settle her on the Gold  Coast,  so  she  can  supervise  her  and avoid  more  shocking  escapades.  But  Edie  is outraged  when  she  is  moved  into  Emerald Fields  retirement  home  “Lifestyle  Resort  For Active Seniors”, having anticipated living with her daughter. (“You’ve got three-and-a-half bathrooms.”)

Kate is a palliative care specialist who, it seems, managed to sometime earlier escape the tedium of life in the English village where her parents lived. It’s not as if her life isn’t complicated enough, as she deals with questions of euthanasia and assisted suicide every day, one of her patients demanding she help her end her life with smuggled drugs.

Her husband is in jail, something the family seems unperturbed about — this is the Gold Coast after all, with as many frontage floggers, condo developers, pollution violators and all manner of despicable lurk merchants as there are in Miami.

She also has two difficult daughters: Persephone, played by a mischievously delightful Ingrid Torelli, at 10 years old already assertive and determined that life will never get the better of her. And 15-year-old Oberon, a convincing Morgan Davies in a difficult role, who was previously known as Titania and is struggling with their gender identity. “We’re using pronouns now,” Persephone explains to her grandmother. “It just takes practice,” Kate says, without a great deal of expectation.

Kate’s major problem though, of course, is her mother, still determined to end it all, filled with shame that her “happy marriage” to man-of-the-cloth George, who died of cancer of the bladder, turned out to be a farce after discovering the adulterous adventures of her husband, in a diary after his death. All her mother wants to do is unpick the wasted years.

Then she discovers the people of her resort-like new home. There’s Roy Billing’s avuncular Art Weinberg, the retired ethics professor who likes to bury photos of his dead wife and then dig them up again to remember her afresh. And Hazlehurst’s free spirit Pamela, a woman of few regrets; Nevin’s glittery former flight attendant Dawn, the social queen who rules the village and its committees; and Waters’s retired pilot Henry, still looking for love while grieving the many planes he flew. They’re a welcoming bunch of eccentrics but by the end of the first episode they leave poor Edie screaming.

Establishing director Jessica M Thompson (The Light of the Moon), while still a little inexperienced, shows a developed talent for handling actors here, and with the supple assistance of experienced cinematographer Garry Phillips, gets the tone just right. It seems she insisted on rehearsal time with the actors, an approach that sadly has all but disappeared in local TV. They’re assisted by the witty soundtrack from composer Antony Partos who has provided scores for many of our best dramas including Wake in Fright, Rake and The Slap.

The End is a bracing reminder of the importance of living here and now, with full engagement in life and with commitment and devotion to those around us. It also show us how to have a few laughs along the way.

The End, Tuesday, Fox Showcase, 8.30pm.