Killer instinct back on show in Mr Inbetween

An antihero – a hit man with a moral compass – keeps Nash Edgerton’s black comedy-crime drama Mr Inbetween firing.

In Mr Inbetween, Scott Ryan plays Ray Shoesmith. Picture: Supplied

It’s a pleasure to welcome back Nash Edgerton’s black crime caper Mr Inbetween for its third and final season after a highly successful international outing. And once again, it continues the underworld adventures of professional hit man Ray Shoesmith, played by the show’s writer and creator, the lugubriously mugged Scott Ryan.

Ryan is also executive producer, along with Edgerton and Michele Bennett, the series shot around Sydney and is produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Pariah Productions in association with FX Productions. And now it’s a hit all around the world, its daggy, violent world strangely appealing, its antihero leading man an unlikely international star.

The series was a long time in development and when it arrived a couple of years ago it turned out to be a grim but very funny comedy built around the clear boundaries that exist between criminality and respectability, featuring a kind of mythical simplicity akin to folktale.

With each episode running at around 30 minutes, the first two seasons received rave reviews, the New York Times including the first season on its Best of Fall 2018 TV list, applauding the show’s “appealing casual improvisatory vibe”, and Rolling Stone congratulating the second season’s “huge improvement from an already solid first season to this tremendous second one”.

Other critics were taken with Ryan’s “sharp dialogue”, and Edgerton’s “ideally grubby aesthetic” and his direction of the strong supporting characters clustered around the cadaverous Shoesmith.

And as played so convincingly by the self-taught Ryan, Ray Shoesmith, the killer with the shark-like smile, is a hard-boiled character who, while intensely sensitive when it comes to family, carries a shield of cynical apathy as he goes about his deadly business.

He’s a bloke though who has achieved complete self-integration by sacrificing himself to violence for the sake of the peace and prosperity of those he loves and for whom he feels responsible. In his mind brutality seems simply a necessary and indispensable course of action, a quiet delight in the extralegal punishment of evildoers.

The show cleverly manages to allow the violence to amplify character and the conflict in the drama.

Ray’s code was outlined early in the first season. “How many people would you say you’ve assaulted?” an anger-management counsellor asks him in the fourth episode of the first season. “Heaps,” Ray replies, his lips hardly moving. How does he feel about that? “Fine. They had it coming to them.”

The world of the seemingly heartless assassin obviously clashes and collides drastically with the compassionate, deeply emotional world of Ray the carer, father and friend, which in spite of himself binds him to some communal belief in the possibilities of society.

Sardonic, even misanthropic, in Ray’s world, stupidity leads to well-deserved disaster. He affects a wise-guy coolness and wit but behind the veneer of taut self-control he is bitter, exasperated, and lonely. “He’s quite reserved but he has his own clear moral centre — it’s a little left of centre than most people’s but he has a code that he navigates his life by,” Edgerton told Drama Quarterly. “What’s interesting to me about the show and what drove Scott to do it is he’s read all these books and autobiographies on real-life killers and realised that, as much as that’s their job, they’re still regular people. They still have the same things going on in their lives that anyone else has. It just happens to be that their job is killing people for money.”

And in this third season, Ray is still in good form eking out a living making people sorry when they renege on debts, or make trouble for the people he loves. He’s especially tough on anyone in the underworld who double crosses him or acts dishonourably. But following the events of the previous season there’s a sense that he’s having second thoughts about the ruthless life he has built for himself based on the suffering of others.

He comes across as a bloke who truly believes he is fundamentally decent and honourable only dispensing pain to the low lifes who deserve it but is he beginning to think that in the end there’s nothing really honourable in murder? Is he slowly beginning to regret his own eccentric reclusivity?

He’s still mourning the loss of his brother, Bruce, gone in a mercy killing conducted by Ray at the end of the last season, and is trying to work out how to care for his ageing father, Bill (Kenny Graham). His daughter Brittany (Chika Yasumura) is growing into a young woman and must one day learn what he actually does for a living. She’s aware of something about her father that is a little “weird” and now, while their horoscopes are aligned she tells him, she won’t allow him to drop her off at the school gate but at the nearest corner. And no kisses. “I’m 12 now,” she tells him.

And he’s lost the love of his life, his paramedic take-no-crap girlfriend Ally after hurling her brother through a sliding-glass door at a family holiday party. The brother making the mistake of taking a present meant for Brittany in a gift-swapping game.

The first episode of the new season centres on an exchange of guns for money, a transfer we know from the start is doomed to go badly. The low lifes after the guns plot to double cross Ray who will be escorting the changeover. It’s an amusing scene that takes place at a suburban family barbecue.

While Ray is badly beaten in the encounter, he turns the tables on one of the gang and holds him hostage, chained to a wire fence, while he questions him, brandishing a smoky, spluttering chainsaw. Because Ray is a generous kind of bloke, he wants his guns back and $30,000 and he’ll let bygones be, well, bygones.

Of course it doesn’t turn out like that and double crossed once more, with the help of his associates, Gary (Justin Rosniak) and Dave (Matt Nable) he takes his revenge. When the gang leader Graham (played brilliantly by former footballer Ian Roberts), mutters before dying that he should have paid the cash, Ray simply says, “Coulda shoulda”. (This incidentally is the rather droll title of the episode.)

There’s a lovely moment when the men exchange names, oddly poignant, at the point of death. And afterwards Ray wanders off and simply stares out into the surrounding bush.

Ryan’s writing is crisp and taut — there’s no sense that like many writers working in the crime genre he is learning what the story is as he is telling it, that breadcrumbs are leading him along. He is as abrupt and obdurate as his leading man.

Raymond Chandler had a habit of writing his crime novels by typing on small sheets of paper, which could only hold a dozen or so lines. This meant for the author of The Big Sleep that each scene, regardless of subject, had to contain what he called “a bit of magic”.

And Ryan and Edgerton do something similar with this show, constantly achieving a delicate counterpoint between the ironic and the gruesome, every scene having its own set piece moment as well as providing a hook for the next. Like: kids playing joyfully in a suburban backyard pool while gangsters plot a violent heist; Ray grinning happily through the smoke of a chainsaw as he’s about to cut the leg off a gang member who won’t give up his mates.

Edgerton as a director has a gift for constructing a narrative that embodies in heightened form the pure skeleton of the hard-boiled generic formula. Like his hero he has little time for mucking about and has an uncanny ability to express the pattern with simplicity and force in highly coloured episodes and images.

Sometimes too he, somewhat elliptically, comes in the middle of a scene, the scripts never over explaining anything. “People working on the show just need to understand a bit more about why choices are made the way that they are,” Edgerton says. “Once you see it visually, it makes sense. We try not to spoon feed the audience everything.”

As The Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert pointed out in reviewing the first season, the show lacks a particular plot arc or a central dilemma to sustain its story. “What it offers instead is a conundrum, complicated by Ryan’s charisma and the woeful state of the men who surround Ray,” she wrote. “Is Ray morally irredeemable? Or — given the world he lives in — does his code begin to make a strange kind of sense? Maybe the answer, like Ray, falls somewhere in the middle.”

And it seems pretty obvious from the start of this final season that while redemption is not a word one would use in relation to Ray Shoesmith, “a strange kind of sense” is what, maybe, is going to play out across the next final episodes of this clever little drama.

Mr Inbetween is streaming on Binge.