Larrimah gets a gossipy true crime doco

HBO peels back the layers of the disappearance of resident larrikin Paddy Moriarty in this glossy outback tale.

Larrimah resident Bill Hodgetts, Picture: Jason Walls

Boiling Point
Premieres on October 31 at 8.30pm
on BBC First and Binge

So, imagine The Bear, but with all the chipper American characters replaced by a bunch of stressed-out Brits finetuned in the art of banter. Boiling Point is the TV show adaptation of Philip Barantini’s 2021 excruciating and brilliant single-shot film of the same name. If you haven’t seen it yet, drop everything and watch it now (it’s available to stream on SBS on Demand). You can return to this in a week once your heart rate has normalised. Boiling Point is set in a high-end restaurant in London, and all the essential drama revolves around keeping the joint from going belly up, night after night. There is a side-plot involving Stephen Graham’s character Andy (the star of the film), but let’s not get into that for the sake of those who haven’t seen the film; just know it’s fabulously depressing. There really isn’t a bad word to say about this show. It is smashing across the board — the drama is nailbiting, the acting flawless, and the writing whip-smart — it is four hours of pain and pleasure.

Bodies
Netflix

Those who loved Boiling Point may gripe with the lack of screen time Stephen Graham has in the series. Fear not, because he stars as a sinister time-jumping overlord in the new Netflix show, Bodies. This adaptation of Si Spencer’s 2015 graphic novel is a lot to get your head around. It’s about four London detectives who find the same body — a naked man with a gouged-out eye and a wrist tattoo that one suspects is full of hidden meaning — in the same spot, across four different timelines: 1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053. Our detectives are DS Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor), a Muslim single mother working in Britain when far-right nationalism is on the rise; Karl Weissman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), a wartime Jewish detective whose colleagues are a bunch of nasty anti-Semites; the repressed homosexual Victorian DI Edmond Hillinghead (Kyle Soller); and DC Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas), the snoop from the future who looks a lot like a resident DJ at Berlin’s Berghain. It isn’t without its flaws — the constant time-jumping can become tedious, but it is dangerously addictive.

Last Stop Larrimah
Netflix

Larrimah is one of those oddball Australian towns that most of us would likely have never heard of if it weren’t for the disappearance of resident larrikin, Patrick “Paddy” Moriarty, and his dog in late 2017. Afterwards, the entire town — population 10; demographic: mostly retirees — became suspects. The mystery of Moriarty’s disappearance was bolstered by The Australian’s Walkley Award-winning 2018 podcast, Lost in Larrimah, from journalists Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson (which they later turned into a book). Now, there’s a gossipy HBO documentary into which we can sink our chompers. This “Outback Tale in 5 Chapters” peels back the layers of Irish-born Moriarty and the rest of the residents/suspects inhabiting this freaky little town (including Fran, the meat-pie queen, a grandmother and arch rival to Paddy, who used to caution tourists against eating her pastries). While this series overstays its welcome and treads ground already covered in the podcast, it’s good enough entertainment if you are in the mood for a true-crime documentary that feels like an Ozploitation film.

Framing Britney Spears
9Now

For 13 years the pop star Britney Spears lived under a monstrous conservatorship put in place by her father, Jamie, in which she could not see her children without approval, drive a car, drink coffee, choose meals, or remove her IUD. All the while, she was forced to perform, against her will, a series of Las Vegas residency shows that generated millions of dollars from which she was allowed only to access $US2000 a week. In her debut memoir, The Woman in Me, released this week, she writes movingly about her experience as a woman whose humanity and autonomy have been stripped away. For those not up to speed on Spears’s conservatorship horror, Framing Britney Spears, an elegant Emmy-nominated documentary from The New York Times is a worthy primer. In 2021, the then-39-year-old singer publicly demanded to be freed from the legal agreement. This documentary goes into the nitty-gritty of what that conservatorship entailed, and details Britney’s court battle with her father over who should control her estate.

The Long Shadow
Stan

To say that this series, which concerns itself with the murders of Peter Sutcliffe aka the “Yorkshire Ripper”, is classy is a stretch, but it’s miles more sophisticated than most of the other true crime tosh out there. Like this year’s thrilling The Sixth Commandment, The Long Shadow, about which Graeme Blundell wrote extensively a few weeks back, wisely sidelines the killer in favour of hinging the drama on the lives of the victims. It’s a damning, depressing look into the sexism that dogged the era and the police force. The sex worker victims were seen as expendable, and the women who were attacked while having the gall to go out alone were victim-blamed — prejudices that ultimately threw the case. This is a paint-by-numbers genre piece buttressed by quality writing and sturdy performances. Toby Jones is especially heartbreaking as a dogged police officer. If you like true crime, you won’t need much convincing.