Succession, The Last of Us and everything else to binge
It’s hard to imagine that such a turbulent year could produce such a stunning array of great shows. How many have you binged?
It’s hard to imagine that such a turbulent year could produce such a stunning array of great shows. Yet for all the disturbance there was no drought of edgy, challenging content, some of it made up of seductive, boundary-pushing hits.
Sally Wainwright gave us the final season of Happy Valley, with the incomparable Sarah Lancashire as the British police officer with a tragic past, who, once she finally gets her life back together, is tormented by the man responsible for her daughter’s death eight years earlier. She’s Catherine Cawood, a cop for whom a case is not merely a problem; it can become a crusade to root out and destroy the evils that have corrupted the urban world of West Yorkshire’s drug-ravaged, poverty-ridden Calder Valley.
Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez continued their often-hysterical work as a trio of crime-solving podcasters in The Arconia apartment block in New York. Disney’s Only Murders in the Building season three found Short’s Oliver back directing a play called Death Rattle after a terrible flop had earned him “15 years in Broadway jail”.
But then his leading man Ben Glenroy, an amusingly detestable Paul Rudd, died on stage. The play was over and so it seemed was Oliver’s career. Again. The cast, including a luscious Meryl Streep was in great form – her singing a pleasure, too. The comedy is sublime and the whole caboodle is not only funny but at times strangely moving. (The show also gave us “the White Room”, new to this old actor, a terrifying mental space where stage fright can take performers who freeze.)
Succession’s final season gripped us all. Jesse Armstrong’s timely morality tale brought an unexpected end to Brian
Cox’s Lear-like Logan Roy’s attempt to give away his media kingdom. The toxic conflicts in motion among his ruthless and spoiled children culminated in a tragic race to the bottom with an unexpected winner taking all.
There were winners in Bill Hader’s brilliant, off-kilter Barry, too, on Binge – and they were also surprising. Hader also starred as Barry Birkman, a former Marine and veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, who after becoming a depressed, low-rent hitman from the Midwest joined an LA acting class. The final season proved that few TV shows have achieved Hader’s mix of laugh-out-loud comedy with stomach-churning violence, which also at times was paradoxically utterly humorous. As for the final episode: “Wow” says it all.
Foxtel’s The Last of Us was the latest post-apocalyptic action drama, with all the obligatory horror motifs cunningly woven into a complex narrative, and while many of the ideas were familiar, it’s a work of some vision and cinematic accomplishment. This is understandable given the show is among the most expensive ever made, an astonishing spectacle from HBO, each of the nine episodes reportedly costing more than $US10 million ($14.9m).
Mike Flanagan’s The Fall Of The House of Usher, a baroque, Gothic melodrama, made in a distinctive visual style for Netflix, was full of literary allusions and references. It’s a modern reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe’s 19-centry poems and short stories, and it was enough to turn me into an instant Flanagan fan. This wonderfully macabre mystery is made with passionate respect for the source material.
Stan’s Poker Face was a beguiling, highly entertaining new series, the title expression used somewhat ironically to describe our heroine Charlie, played brilliantly by Natasha Lyonne. The show was created by the seemingly omnipresent Rian Johnson of Knives Out and Glass Onion fame. Like Peter Falk’s Columbo (there’s a clever retro feel at work here), Lyonne’s is no ordinary detective, and as is the case in that classic procedural cop show we first see the murder and then watch the star bring the killer to justice. And as in The Fugitive, Charlie is constantly on the run, hunted by a killer, turning up in a new place in every episode and occupying a new drama with new protagonists. Clever and very funny.
I enjoyed Lucky Hank, too, a sometimes-charming mixture of midlife crisis story, family drama, and workplace comedy centred on William Henry Devereaux Jr. – Hank, for short – a professor in the English Department at the Railton Campus of West Central Pennsylvania University, who also happens to be the department chair. Hank is inhabited by the inimitable and seemingly indefatigable Bob Odenkirk, somehow taking on another demanding lead role after playing Jimmy McGill aka Saul Goodman for the past 13 years in both Breaking Bad and prequel Better Call Saul. Odenkirk is TV’s master dissembler. Unmistakeable and inimitable, he vanishes into his roles but is somehow always recognisably himself.
In Blue Lights from SBS On Demand, the policing of Belfast in Northern Ireland was the subject for examination in this bracing, occasionally darkly humorous, and ultimately empathetic new series. It follows the story of several probationary police officers in the PSNI or the Police Service of Northern Ireland, successor to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) after it was reformed and renamed in 2001 on the recommendation of the Patten Report.
As an ensemble story it is beautifully acted, the characters all authentic and believable, and at times the Belfast accent gives the most banal pronouncement an almost Joycean profundity.
Dark Winds, follows the investigations of a couple of Navajo tribal detectives, based on the novels of Tony Hillerman, who died in 2008, known for his 18 novels in the Navajo Tribal Police mystery series. They’re set in the Four Corners region of the Southwest United States, and feature two Navajo cops, war veteran Joe Leaphorn and, a little later, the younger Jim Chee. Zahn McClarnon plays the lead role of Joe Leaphorn, a tribal investigator, a Vietnam veteran with a degree in anthropology. And Kiowa Gordon is the impetuous Chee, a university-educated hotshot cop reluctantly returning to the reservation after almost a decade away.
The series is heartbreaking at times in the face of the outrage and helplessness of its lead characters who are up against class inequities and social injustices.
In gritty Justified: City Primeval, crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s US Marshal Raylan Givens was granted permission to inhabit another TV series following Justified. And it was another series that cleverly works the messy complexities of both hero and villain, and how the line between crime and justice can easily blur before being resolved in increasingly anxious moments of violent action. Givens is transported to the streets of Detroit, which once had 700 murders a year, in this new series where again, even though he’s a destroyer of criminals, he must find a way to maintain his code of behaviour in the face of the limitations of Motortown’s social institutions. And do it at a time when scrutiny of cops has never been more intense, relentlessly demonised as insensitive and racist.
The Sixth Commandment from the BBC on Foxtel, written by the accomplished Sarah Phelps, was the beautifully and respectfully made story not only of murder but the way that age so often defines and diminishes people, passing without a glance from passers-by, unwanted outsiders in society withdrawing into isolation. It told not only how a calculating, deceiving young man tricked and inveigled his way into the spotlight, manipulating people as if it were a game, but also tragically revealed the human cost of his deception.
Wolf, from the BBC and picked up by the competitive SBS On Demand, is based on Mo Hayder’s acclaimed Jack Caffery crime novels. A work of transgressive and unsettling drama, it certainly knew how to grab the viewers’ attention, even as it broke many of the genre’s cherished conventions. It was ineffably dark and riveting and at times weirdly, macabrely comic. And, as was said of Hayder’s books, if you were prepared to persevere, the journey conjured images that lingered and disturbed.
As did the unwieldily-titled British series The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies, which examined the rise of a very tricky charlatan, a true sociopath, and the two women who take him on at his own game. Created by sisters Penelope and Ginny Skinner, the five-part series looked at the coercive control exhibited by most conmen and the crossover with domestic abuse cases, and did it wittily and as directed by Robert McKillop with a great deal of cinematic style.
The year also saw the return of 30s noir Perry Mason, highlighting his role as a rather battered beacon of morality, and the effervescent Julia, which was such a delight. Errol Morris’s documentary portrait of David Cornwell, aka John Le Carre, The Pigeon Tunnel, also shone through in a year of fine factual TV.
It was a year that reinforced the way there is more TV than ever, even as so-called “linear”, or free-to-air TV dies before our eyes, with its business model in chaos. All the new content has been welcomingly integrated into our lives.
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