Richard Roxburgh plays the go-to-jail card in Rake

RICHARD Roxburgh's dysfunctional barrister finds himself on the wrong side of the law in the new Rake.

Play the go-to-jail card

IF you've resisted his charms so far, Rake's Cleaver Greene is the glib, fast-talking Sydney lawyer who acts for those clients whose cases appear utterly desolate, a man always on the wrong side of conventional wisdom, his energy kinetic and his charisma inescapable.

He's played quite unforgettably by Richard Roxburgh in this long-running series, returning on Sunday week, from writers and producers Peter Duncan and Andrew Knight. And he never stops banging his head, sometimes literally, against the futility of human efforts and the inertia of evil. "The reason I get my low-life crooks off is because I care about the law; it is justice I don't give a toss about," is his mantra.

It's been an often hysterical journey with Greene and his cronies, enemies and conquests, and season three is no exception. An expansive, offbeat character study, a kind of comedy of rude manners, Rake generically echoes the legal thriller and the courtroom drama, but also manages to be a sex farce and a political study that examines in its satirical way why we feel our legal institutions so often fail us.

He's a curious sort of crusader, a comic hard-boiled hero who wanders through the endemic criminality, violence and corruption of contemporary Sydney attempting not so much to save society as to preserve the honour and integrity of his character. His shoot-outs, of course, are always verbal, sending his destructive words through the most dastardly of hearts.

Like the dapper and disreputable characters created by the playwrights of William Congreve's time, this rake also tends to create his own brand of morality, which includes a belief in the open pursuit of sensual pleasure and a dismissal of marriage. His wit - and Roxburgh delivers it astonishingly well - consists not so much in his defiance of traditional notions of right conduct as in the casual and unruffled manner in which he expresses his radical moral views. But for all that there's a strange melancholy about him. He evinces - Roxburgh never just shows something as an actor - a disgust at life that sometimes seizes on morally good people when they look at the world around them.

In the last season's final episode, he was in the clink charged with manslaughter before being bailed out by the sometimes exasperating Missy (Adrienne Pickering), flush with funds after optioning the rights to her bestselling memoir - written on the back of the tragic murder of her fiance - to Hollywood. Greene was still having problems with the energetic gang moll Kirsty Corella (Robyn Malcolm), determined not to be implicated in his trial and also that he pay back all the money he ows her.

And he was advised by his blameless and loyal friend Barney (Russell Dykstra) that while he will go down for manslaughter, it's likely he would beat a murder rap. Well it seems he didn't.

As the third season starts, with an episode directed with almost Tarantino panache by Jessica Hobbs, Greene, still on the road to perdition, has been in jail for 11 months. He's languishing in a Dickensian clink surrounded not only by his underworld enemies but many friends and former colleagues, both from the bar and the bench, Her Majesty's guests courtesy of corruption scandals.

Even in jail, his insouciant drawl more pronounced, edged with anxiety, he still defends his distinctive array of thieves, murderers and traitors, appearing at effective prison boss George Corella's (Bruce Spence) kangaroo court, which metes out prison justice with an iron fist.

Convicted murderer Mal (Dan Wyllie), in love with Greene to his dismay, watches his back, a full-time job, but Greene needs all his smarts to avoid assaults (he still cops several beatings), protect his mates and find a way from inside to outwit an appeals bench deliberately selected to keep him locked up forever.

"One of the lessons we learned from the first season is that the show works best when Cleaver's really under the pump, whether he's placed himself there or someone else has placed him there," Duncan told me of the second series. "It works off that notion of placing pressure on a man who has a great mind but who is also deeply, deeply flawed, and you constantly wonder which will triumph." And this prison episode certainly finds our hero placed in the most egregious of circumstances (this series has us all speaking like pretentious members of the judiciary) and it will obviously take him all of his famous luck and legal reasoning to find an escape route.

It really is a drama in which Roxburgh can properly abandon himself: he's given plenty of elbow-room, arm-room and leg-room for pyrotechnics. As Kenneth Tynan once said of John Gielgud, he's an actor who refuses to compromise with his audience; he does not offer a welcoming hand but binds a spell instead. But in this first episode there's an equally magnetic performance from Spence as gangster George Corella, a performance juxtaposing a kind of dervish fanaticism with a fastidious, mesmerising delicacy, those long, spidery fingers moving with independent floating grace. Roxburgh looks as astonished as the character he plays as this wonderful actor steals the show.

PREMIERING this week is The Moodys, an eight-part comedy series that focuses on this lovable yet seasonally dysfunctional suburban family, this time coming together for eight hopefully sociable events during a single year. It's a variation on A Moody Christmas - from the same company, Jungleboys, and creators Phil Lloyd and Trent O'Donnell - that played in 2012. They are the multi-AFI Award-winning team behind the critically acclaimed Review with Myles Barlow.

That show, so intellectually audacious and jauntily inventive in execution, was sneak-up-on-you humour that took a couple of episodes to assess, inevitably a cult rather than a popular success. A Moody Christmas, though, struck an instant chord with its clever premise: once a year - across six episodes - we dropped in on the dysfunctional title family on Christmas Day and were obliged, like them, to suffer the squabbles, bad gifts, boring uncles, overbearing in-laws and family secrets.

Each year Dan Moody (Ian Meadows) made the pilgrimage from London, where he worked as a photographer, to celebrate with the family he travelled to the other side of the world to escape. It was simply cringe-making comedy of the highest order, almost too realistic to be laugh-out-loud funny, that had you biting the cushions to stop yourself loudly identifying members of your own unlovely family. The show was so successful its creators signed a breakthrough Hollywood deal. A production by CBS Studios will air on Fox, with the creator of Entourage Doug Ellin as show runner along with Jungleboys' O'Donnell and Lloyd.

This time, in the new series Dan and Cora (Jane Harber), the family's "tumultuous lovebirds" have finally returned to Australia to set up home together and a year of emotional shenanigans unfolds against a backdrop of family gatherings.

They include Uncle Terry's (Darren Gilshenan) Australia Day barbecue, Bridget's (Rachel Gordon) baby shower, and Kevin (Danny Adcock) and Maree's (Tina Bursill) wedding anniversary.

The series takes the mundane and familiar and somehow renders them absurd and often comically outrageous. Just like the performances - especially the brilliant Gilshenan, old stagers Adcock and Bursill, and Patrick Brammall as that born lair and lurk merchant Sean Moody.

It is all very funny - an affectionate comedy of knockabout suburban manners, appropriately daggy - though the risks the dialogue takes with banality and repetition often render it oddly surreal, reminiscent of Caroline Aherne's The Royle Family. Like that series, the humour comes at you suddenly, often confronting in its bleak abruptness. Directors O'Donnell and Scott Pickett ensure the show is photographically uncomplicated and often present scenes as tableaus without intrusive close-ups breaking the comic momentum.

It sometimes seems as if we're watching a tough, small-budget independent movie rather than a TV sitcom; or an extended series of home movies.

Rake, returns Sunday February 9, 8.30pm, ABC1.

The Moodys, Wednesday, 9pm, ABC1.