Redfern Now delves into the lives of ordinary people

DRAMA series Redfern Now takes viewers straight to the fragile hearts of its characters.

Kirk Page, Saskia Williscroft and Oscar Redding in series two of Redfern Now.

"YOU confuse two concepts," Anton Chekhov wrote to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, who had been pressing him to be more definitive in his statements as a writer, "the solution of a problem and its correct presentation. Only the second is incumbent on the artist."

It could have have been legendary English television writer Jimmy McGovern in defence of his own highly original, open-ended narrative art, though he almost certainly would have used saltier terms.

McGovern, author of Cracker and more recently The Street and Accused, both screened on the ABC, is one of TV's revered writers and his influence can be felt all through the new season of Redfern Now, which returns this week and on which he is credited as story producer.

The original six-part drama series was the first written, directed and produced by indigenous Australians. It was developed by McGovern in collaboration with Rachel Perkins's Blackfella Films, with producers Darren Dale and Miranda Dear and the ABC's Sally Riley.

That first series centred on a diverse group of individuals from six families whose lives were changed by a freakish or serendipitous occurrence. Like McGovern's characters in The Street and Accused, they were caught at moments that in time defined them: a decision to pick up the phone, to ignore a cry for help, the refusal to sing the national anthem, a moment of sexual jealousy, a seemingly insignificant car accident, a thought that suddenly consumes.

The new series is governed less by specific incidents, although the first episode, Where the Heart Is, from gifted writer and director Adrian Russell Wills, is made even more poignant by a missing yellow Post-It note. It could have changed everything that happens.

But while each episode is quite different, once again we have six stories that reflect McGovern's interest in moral dilemmas that emerge as consequences of mistakes, unwise choices and weakness. Each episode is like a beautifully constructed short story that sees straight to the fragile hearts of the characters, without becoming sentimental or obdurately political. Instead of neat twists or morally pointed drama, we have simply the flow of life.

This is very much McGovern's way and the young scriptwriters who developed Redfern Now with him in a series of workshops are to be applauded for having absorbed so much of his technique. It must have been a confronting process. "As you write, find the strand that gets you in the gut and build it, build it to a crescendo of rage and emotion; pick a character and then torture them," he once told screenwriters at a conference I attended.

You can see his influence in Russell Wills's story, the narrative pieces fitted together, act by act, precisely and economically, the dialogue pared back - some scenes containing only a few words -and the actors' faces and their presentation taking us uncompromisingly through the narrative.

It's such a strong story to start the series. Peter (Kirk Page), a gay Aboriginal man, fights to retain custody of his child, Amy (Saskia Williscroft), after her other dad, Richard (Oscar Redding), is mown down in a hit-and-run accident. Their carefully constructed middle-class world is instantly, tragically, dismantled. As Richard lies comatose in hospital, Peter makes the decision to turn off his life support, over the protests of Richard's estranged mother Margaret (Noni Hazlehurst in an astonishingly anguished performance).

A custody battle ensues: Margaret has a team of lawyers and a well-prepared case; Peter is hampered by his grief and recklessness, despite the well-meaning ministrations of his best friend Lorraine (Deborah Mailman).

The story is quite simple and unadorned and no less compelling for that, and again like a fine short story, it seems simply to mirror the casual movement of reality itself. There are fluctuations of mood, ranging from lyrical delight at Amy's natural beauty to Lorraine's dry humour, to the malice and incomprehension of the grieving mother. These moments, though, are not orchestrated to lead us towards a definitive showdown or revelation, but are traced for their own sake, as events in Peter's life as it unfolds.

There is a kind of redemption at the end but it is low-key, almost thrown away as just part of the flow of events that happen and need to be endured. Things happen, you get over them or you don't. It's an ending that doesn't really solve anything in the conventional sense but it seems so right, the only way this story could come to a conclusion in such a superbly elided piece of storytelling.

Orchestrated by director of photography Mark Wareham, the first series established a look for Redfern Now that reflected the urban beauty of the community and maintained a quality of stylised naturalism throughout. Jules O'Loughlin directs the cameras in the new season and maintains that studied cinematic style. Again it's a striking look emphasising wide angles and occasional almost architectural framings, all planes and patterns of light, with actors often holding positions in corners of the wide-angled compositions.

This series is quite beautiful to look at even while the stories are often heart-wrenching. The acting too is mesmerising, the actors become the people they are playing; they do not need, as our TV actors so often do, to depend on the written lines alone for their characterisation. It really is as if they are acting with their lives, not their voices.

YES, I know I've said it before, several times in fact, and I'm delighted to say it again after watching him return to the ABC this week with Ja'mie: Private School Girl: Chris Lilley is a comic genius, the heir apparent to Barry Humphries. He's back with this new series about the adventures of Ja'mie King, the most accomplished student and school captain at exclusive Hillford Girls' Grammar.

We have watched her for some years now as she selflessly and altruistically has dedicated herself to making sure the school experience is an enriching one for all students. At 16, of course, she was nominated for Australian of the Year and first found herself on TV in We Can be Heroes.

Then she joined Summer Heights High as part of the "It's All About Education" campaign, a state-sponsored program to bridge the divide between private and public schools. She knew from the start of the assignment that she was the girl most likely to succeed in Year 11 because she was the brightest non-Asian student and she was good at sport, which most Asians aren't.

Now she's back at Hillford and her new TV adventure chronicles the final few months of school for the 17-year-old, her classmates and family. There are love interests, of course, catfights, a lot of unfriending and, inevitably, a sexting scandal. This week she's still seeking the attention of Mitchell, the hot new rugby player in Year 10 at nearby Kelton Boys Grammar, and working on her new idea, "the perfect prefects' party".

Lilley is in top form here, outrageous, often profane, and so transgressive that sometimes watching him is uncomfortable as he takes the piss out of privilege, entitlement and the discomfort of dealing with differences and awkward social situations.

Once again Lilley presents us with a rigorously controlled and tightly scripted comedy that takes place within a seemingly improvised observational format, parodying notions of anthropological documentary. Nothing too forced, contrived or broad is allowed to interfere with the realism of the show and there is an engaging sense of uncompromised vision at work.

Like Humphries, Lilley is a fundamentalist comedian, deadly serious about laughter. His producer, Laura Waters of Princess Pictures, once told me a great deal of funny material is left on the cutting room floor because it would interfere with the rigorous naturalism they demand. "The editing process is all about savage carving," she said.

And it always shows in Lilley's shows: the skill in what he does lies in taking the audience to the brink and no further, because if you go too far it will all collapse into camp and farce.

Patrick White said Humphries "crammed all the horrors of Australian suburbia into a very short space". The novelist found the satirist "a wonderful fantastic", and I think he would have delighted in Lilley too, another kidder with the heart of a killer and a sharpened understanding of the finer points of bigotry. Lilley may just be our greatest clown.

"They have the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolise; the right not to be taken literally; to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors," wrote John Docker in his brilliant study of the fool in Postmodernism and Popular Culture. "They have the right to blunt language and to anger, to rip off masks, to rage at others with a primeval, almost cultish rage."

And to do it frocked up - a burlesqued sexuality has always been present in our comedy, mocking gender ambiguities. Not only Roy Rene but Reg Livermore, Graham Kennedy, Humphries, Grahame Bond and Bert Newton loved pulling on a gown and Rove McManus later indulged in a spot of postmodern cross-dressing.

Fears of female aggression and sexuality are evoked, and there is play on anxieties about male homosexuality - fears subtly represented and then comically detonated. Though there is a darker side, perhaps. Old Joff Ellen, resident comic for years on Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight, used to do busty Myrtle MacGillicuddy, huge balloons pushing up his chest. "Have a good look, dears," he would say to the live audience. "It's the nearest thing you'll see tonight to a butcher's window."

There was the feeling that the nature and image of women need only be invoked in order to be laughed into oblivion. But Lilley as writer and performer is not simply making jokes; no one focuses on the issues and bigotries of race and class with the same comic and satiric scrutiny, mining their seething antagonisms, prejudices and resentments.

You wonder just how long he can keep it up. It all has a price. Just before Kennedy died, he repeated a line beloved, and feared, by comedians. "Dying is easy," he said to his nurse. "Comedy is hard."

WHEN it first emerged a couple of years ago from the BBC, Luther, starring Idris Elba, seemed to have something of the quality, intensity and ambition of the best American dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire and The Shield. And it centred on an emotionally intense murder detective in a series that spearheaded a new wave of darker British crime drama, probably best epitomised in the riveting and insomnia-inducing Broadchurch.

Luther, which returns this week for a third season, was created by novelist Neil Cross, described as Britain's Stephen King for his morally complex, scary books full of mordant psychological insights.

"I was originally marketed as a literary writer but I write suspense; opinions are not literature and I want my readers to stay awake through the night to finish the next chapter," he told me when he was here for the Sydney Writers Festival three years ago.

His TV writing (Cross also worked on Spooks) has a similarly high excitement level, alongside a pleasurable bit of genre blending (there is just a bit of the comic book superhero about DCI John Luther and a touch of Lee Child's Jack Reacher.)

"The old procedural series like Waking the Dead and Midsomer Murders have worn themselves out," Cross said at the time. "The BBC basically commissioned a modern detective icon and the series is a deliberate attempt not to be like anything else on TV, so it's not a whodunnit but an inverted detective story or a 'howcatchem'."

What Cross didn't want was yet another murder show with a miserable, misanthropic cop; he wanted the murderer up front and a cop so troubled he seemed on the verge of mentally ill, the thrust of the concept the stark reminder that murder is frightening. "I love to see heroes who fuel some kind of moral furnace inside them, who are driven to take on the evils of the world, despite the fact that the evils of the world are more powerful than them and, essentially, can never be defeated, but they refuse to bow down," Cross said recently. "And in order to enjoy that aspect of the hero, you've got to put them through hell."

And that's what Luther goes through at the start of this terrific season, emerging with his offsider DCI Ripley, played by Warren Brown, from a furnace, dragging anonymous criminals from a burning crime scene.

Then stillness and mounting dread, the show's stock in trade, take over as scenes of Luther preparing for bed and mourning his dead wife are intercut with a sequence in which an unknown woman also prepares for sleep until an unnamed fetish killer emerges from under her bed. Her murder eerily echoes an unsolved case from the 1980s, which Luther and Ripley investigate alongside the murder of a malicious internet troll who is found dead in his home.

There's an almost operatic theatricality about Luther that is thrilling, but it is seriously creepy and often quite upsetting. Be warned but don't stop watching.

Luther, Sunday, 8.30pm, ABC1.

Ja'mie: Private School Girl, Wednesday, 9pm, ABC1.

Redfern Now, Thursday, 8.30pm, ABC1.