Wentworth is back: sex, violence and drama of TV women’s prison

Wentworth is back: Foxtel’s most unlikely drama has proved itself in this country and overseas as one of the best dramas on television

Pamela Rabe as Joan The Freak Ferguson in Wentworth

On its arrival seven years ago, Wentworth — an adaptation of the famous, if creaky Reg Grundy-produced Prisoner, the jail soapie that was such a hit in the early 1980s — came with low, if not derisive, expectations. The campy, overacted original might have run for 692 episodes but surely this daggy piece of TV history had no place in the emerging new world of high-end HBO-style ­production, in an era when TV was becoming the new cinema?

But Prisoner had retained a kind of quasi-­religious following long after most of us had forgotten its existence.

It was a kind of cult in some industry circles, a work that, as Umberto Eco said in defining cult movies, “must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s ­private sectarian world”. He went on to suggest this world was the kind “about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognise through each other a shared expertise”.

Well, the riveting storytelling of the reimagined Wentworth also gained a cult following when it started in May 2013, but the action-packed first episode, the somewhat startling combination of Sapphic sex, violence and Machiavellian intrigue, also made it the most watched Australian drama series to premiere in Foxtel’s history. It was quickly picked up by New Zealand and Britain.

I’ve enjoyed this show from the start — not only the way it’s peopled with the violent and the ridiculous, the stupid and the crazy, the brave and the loving, but the high-level cinematic ­direction and deft genre writing. And the writers and directors who created the series remain with it, the consummate Kevin Carlin, who established the kinetic, noirish aesthetic for the series in its very first episode, also directs the first in this eighth season, with a script by Pete McTigue, who has also been with it from the start.

Wentworth has amassed an impressive catalogue of awards and nominations locally with both the Most Popular and Most Outstanding Drama at the TV Week Logie Awards in 2018 — the first time an Australian drama has taken out both accolades in the same year.

And it’s feted and celebrated internationally with 158 territories including US, Britain, France, Canada, Finland, Israel and Macedonia screening the series, and adaptations produced in four countries. Critics love it too; The New York Times notes its “edgy prisoner conflicts” and suggests its readers may find themselves “devouring three or four episodes in a sitting”.

As always, watching this show I’m reminded of something the best-selling pulp novelist Mickey Spillane wrote, a kind of dictum: people don’t read books to get to the middle. They read to get to the end. And the same is true of crime fiction on TV. Producers, writers and directors have to grab the watcher by the throat from the start and do whatever is necessary to get us to the final scenes, ideally in one sitting. And that’s what the creators of Wentworth have done in creating a world in which, against all the odds, you want to spend more time.

This new season begins with a sense of rocketing pace, picking up sometime after the violent siege which ended the last season. We hear a lovely female voice singing Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love, a song in fact inspired by the Holocaust. Then a jewel heist goes horribly wrong for hardcore crook Lou Kelly, played superbly by a mesmerising Kate Box, and her sexually ambiguous lover Rob Keane, a convincing Zoe Terakes in a difficult and complex role. Carlin’s direction again underlines just what an accomplished action mechanic this director is, always adept at movie-style mega violence.

Kate Jenkinson as Allie Novak in Wentworth

Kelly and Keane’s entry to Wentworth is the start of a new era, Kelly a former top dog inmate known to prisoners as “Fingers Kelly” for her viciousness. “She’s psycho,” lifer “Boomer” Jenkins, Katrina Milosevic still awesomely convincing after all those episodes, tells the other women when the news of Kelly’s arrival circulates. “Like seriously; called ‘fingers’ because if you just f..kin’ cross her, she chops them off.” It’s obvious that Kelly’s arrival is the major plot point of many in the new season as she threatens to unsettle the brittle order and trust the women have rebuilt after the siege.

In a standoff with new top dog Allie Novak, played with some magnetism by Kate Jenkinson, she’s told: “I don’t tolerate violence in my prison. I got the women on my side so if you try anything there’s going to be consequences.” And indeed there are, after Kelly tells her, “You’re not top dog material — you’re just big lips with a pair of eye lashes.” (As always, the banter is great in this show, every scene containing gems of what writers call back-and-forth, leavening the darkness and reflecting the reality of prison life).

Meanwhile, Susie Porter’s Marie Winter, Wentworth’s most hated, is in isolation but about to be released into the general population; Kate ­Atkinson’s Vera Bennett contemplates returning to the prison in a new role as industries manager; and Leah Purcell’s Rita Connors, the abandoned former undercover cop, is in protective custody as she continues to negotiate her way around the police corruption that put her into Wentworth.

But the biggest plot point is the return of ­Pamela Rabe’s Joan Ferguson, the psychopathic former governor thought buried alive episodes ago. The Freak is back and no one is safe.

At Wentworth’s centre is the question all great crime fiction asks: why do we do the things we do?

For its many female characters Wentworth is a social world filled with anxiety, threat and dread and, perhaps, represents a punishment well beyond what the law intended. One thing they share is that life has taught them you have to survive.

For all its gaudy, violent, noirish flourishes and storylines straight from some pulp novel, it’s not hard to empathise with these characters — the incarceration of so many prompted by intimate partner abuse, victimisation, and acts of self-defence against men.

The prison is a place constantly on the edge of anarchy, a kind of frontier society, and within both the penal institution and the justice system authority tends to be weak and corrupt. (There’s a strip search scene at the start of the new season conducted by the venomous deputy governor Miss Myles, played by Jacquie Brennan, frightening in its depiction of the dehumanising glee emanating from the prison officers.)

It’s a series propelled by a canny use of surprises and reversals. On the one hand, facts about plot and character are established to misdirect us and then Carlin reveals the truth is very different from what we believed. On the other, the scripting sets us unexpected reversals or revelations that lead to a change in the character’s actions.

This is particularly true during the first episode with the character paths of Kelly and ­Ferguson. We can expect even more of these ­tactics as the series unfolds.

John Sandford, author of the best-selling series of novels featuring US investigator Lucas Davenport, said recently the real problem with a long-running series is to come up with villains “who are actually bad enough, and unique enough, to keep your attention”.

Well, Kelly and Ferguson fit the bill. Both are wonderfully detailed figures and superbly played, inhabited with the utmost relish by these two seasoned performers. Rabe’s Ferguson is the personification of evil but so watchable. She might be sleeping rough but there’s something of the supernatural predator about her. And Box’s Kelly, violent and unpredictable, is touching and empathetic in the way she looks after and protects Reb. It’s as if a genetic code flows through her veins that knows only this otherworldly compassion and death.

Welcome back, ladies of Wentworth.

Wentworth, Tuesday, Fox Showcase, 8.30pm. (Seasons 1-7 available on demand.)