There’s insecurity aplenty in ABC-Netflix co-production Pine Gap

Pine Gap, Sunday, ABC, 8.30pm.The Haunting of Hill House, streaming on Netflix.

Parker Sawyers as Gus and Tess Haubrich as Jasmina in Pine Gap.

Commissioned by Netflix and the ABC, Pine Gap is a six-part Screentime production created by show­runner Greg Haddrick and co-writer Felicity Packard, who have been ­involved with some of our most successful ­dramas, among them the Underbelly franchise, ANZAC Girls, Cloudstreet and Janet King. They have written and produced hundreds of hours of TV shows but Pine Gap is their first commercial espionage thriller. And classy it is too.

Set in the secretive world of international ­intelligence at the US-Australian shared spy ­facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory, it appears at the end of the first episode — as is the case with so many stories from the bewildering landscape of spy fiction — that the real enemie­s of freedom may once again turn out to be not the forces of international terrorism but treacherous fellow citizens.

Pine Gap’s main tasks are to intercept signals and control satellites, using massive dish antennas protected by their widely recognised golf ball-like shelters, listening in on telephone conversatio­ns and satellite communications around our region. They provide early warning of missile strikes, guide anti-aircraft and missile defence systems, and paint targets for Aust­ralian and US weapon systems.

Controversially, Pine Gap also provides ­detailed geolocation intelligence to the US milit­ary that can be used to locate targets, including for drone strikes.

This was revealed by David Rosenberg, the series’ technical and creative consultant, a vetera­n of the US National Security Agency who completed his last 18 years with the agency in operations at Pine Gap. His book, Inside Pine Gap, was the first to be written about the facility by an individual who held the top secret security clearance that allowed him to work inside ­operations.

There is certainly a strong whiff of authen­ticity about Pine Gap from the start, and some ­lively visual and mechanical spectacle.

With little preamble except to explain in graphics that American global power relies on intelligence provided by three huge satellite ­facilities — Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado; Menwith Hill at Harrogate, Yorkshire, in Britain; and Pine Gap in the middle of the Australian outback, just outside Alice Springs — the series takes us straight to the complex operations floor at the facility.

There, surrounded by countless computer screens, console systems, multiple electronic displays and control panels, “A-Crew”, led by American mission director Gus Thompson (Parker Sawyers), determines that an armed Vampire missile is being aimed from somewhere near the Bangladesh border in the direction of an APEC summit in Myanmar, attended by the US president and Australian prime ministe­r. As they track the missile, they watch in horror as it destroys a civilian aircraft that ­happens to have four kickboxers from the US on board.

It’s a political disaster and a failure of process from the military point of view, with the pressur­e immediately on A-Crew to find the perpetrators. But when they call in a drone strike after determining that a small terrorist organisation called Sbadhinata was responsible, serious doubts arise as to its culpability. The Australian government is furious, concerned about Thompson’s leadership and a possible failure of intelligence.

The officer once seen as “an invaluable MD” is demoted back to the floor staff. Is it possible that A-Crew has been involved in ­assisting an international war crime — the ­destruction of the group of civilians it was so closely tracking — and how will management maintain zero transparency around what has happened?

One of the team discovers that Pine Gap’s server has been hacked and malware has been planted on the station’s system via the cafeteria. Then there’s the increasingly suspicious activ­ities of geologist Zhou Lin (Jason Chong), a Chin­ese negotiator with Shonguran Enterprises who is hoping to sign off on approval for a multi-billion-dollar gas field in Alice Springs, offering the local indigenous people a fortune for land that will never return to them if they let it go.

The first episode offers little indication of whe­ther this tantalising series will reflect a conspirac­y deep within the upper circles of governme­nt, with our central characters betray­ed and compromised by incompetence, treachery and bureaucratic rivalry at the top levels of the espionage establishment, or whether the complex plotting will lead us to Chinese ­involvement in the Pacific. My bet is on the ­former.

Expert at wrangling complex, ensemble-based narratives, Haddrick, Packard and their creative collaborators quickly establish not only this mixed bunch of Australian and American intelligence analysts working together to ­ensure global stability in this secretive joint-intelligen­ce facility but take us into their person­al stories of love, loyalty, career frustrations, personal ambition and the psychological dilemmas of reconciling the secretive life-and-death decisions they make at Pine Gap.

It’s not particularly new as an idea but the concept is played out with Haddrick and Packard­’s characteristic economy. No self-consciou­s artiness, just the right storytelling asperity­, the dialogue taut and elided, the shifting points of view handled with ease and economy by director Mat King and cinema­tographer Geoffrey Hall. Production designer Scott Bird’s Pine Gap facility has the right kind of texture too, that ­essential solidity of setting, a topography you can grasp so that you can sense just how people get from one place to another. This is something not always easy to achieve.

King’s photography often embraces the sparsely populated geographical emptiness ­surrounding Alice Springs where the characters live, travelling by bus to the heavily guarded base. He vividly captures the town too, once ­described by novelist Bruce Chatwin as “a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of LandCruisers”.

And there are lovely shots of the Mac­Donnell Ranges bordering the town. It’s a landscape writer Robyn Davidson — who lived there while training her camels for her desert trek in 1977, described in her nonfiction account Tracks — says reminds the locals “of incomprehensible dimensions of time”: ironic given the presence of a hi-tech ­facility whose letha­l milit­ary activities link so many times zones.

Julian Hillard and Paxton Singleton in The Haunting of Hill House.

Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House remains for many the gold standard of haunted-house stories. It’s an American novel apparently loaded, to quote one fan, “with so much psychological dread that it seeps its way into your bones and makes your blood run cold”. The story of the group of folks who decide to stay in Hill House to prove the existence of the supernatural has been brought to the big screen twice: in Robert Wise’s very good The Haunting in 1963 and then, 33 years later, in ­director Jan de Bont’s film of the same name — not so good, from all accounts. I must admit it’s not a genre I’ve followed closely.

Now Netflix has resuscitated Jackson’s novel in a 10-part series created, written and directed by Mike Flanagan, who has a high reputation in this area based on the features Oculus, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Hush and Netflix’s Gerald’s Game, based on Stephen King’s novel. Having only read synopses of the book, all I can say is Flanagan’s version, described as “a moder­n reimagining”, at least from the first episode, bears little resemblance to Jackson’s story.

It’s certainly moody and mysterious — kitten­s die, beetles crawl from the mouths of the dead and walls shake with supernatural vigour — and the drama juxtaposes several time frames as it follows a family, focusing on sisters Shirley and Nellie, who appear to have been traumatised by their stay in Hill House some decades ago, and the demons of the past continue to haunt their lives. I found it perplexing and eventually irritating. As I say, it’s not a genre I’m particularly fond of and I did not have the patience required to unravel a highly confusin­g plot featuring a bunch of characters about whom I cared not a jot.

Pine Gap, Sunday, ABC, 8.30pm.

The Haunting of Hill House, streaming on Netflix.