What to watch in 2021: Jack Irish returns for ABC and SBS delivers New Gold Mountain

After the real-life dramas of 2020, there are big promises for TV in 2021, including new series like The End and the return of old favourites.

Dame Harriet Walter and Frances O’Connor star in The End, a 10-part co-production between Foxtel and Sky UK.

This year’s TV was a welcome surprise as most of us thought the pandemic would curtail production but it was a miraculous time for new shows, even as streamers, networks and studios struggled with restrictions enforced by the demands of COVID. Postponements and delays bedevilled programming schedules through the year, so many fine-sounding projects were put on indefinite hold in 12 months of terrible misfortune.

But there are big promises for 2021, despite reports of problems with insurers having stopped covering independent film and television productions against the risk of COVID threatening the supply of new projects.

Here’s a few shows I’m looking forward to viewing in the new year; a small glimpse of appealing options during a time in which it’s estimated more than 600 scripted series and hundreds more unscripted shows will premiere across a mind-boggling variety of platforms.

Foxtel, battling for its life as even more streamers are projected to start beaming TV out across Australia in the next 12 months, has struck early with a nice slate of new programs. The standout is possibly, at least initially, The Nevers. Promoted as an epic science-fiction drama created by Joss Whedon for HBO, it follows a gang of Victorian women, known as “The Touched”, who find themselves with unusual abilities, relentless enemies and a mission that could change the world. Trouble is, Whedon, who was to have written and directed, recently resigned from the project, unable to meet “the physical challenges of making such a huge show during a global pandemic”. Still, the idea is good and HBO supremely capable.

While we are on HBO, The Sopranos creator, David Chase, has been re-enlisted by the network to write, executive produce, and direct a new drama series about the dawn of Hollywood with the enticing title, A Ribbon of Dreams.

At this stage we know little, even though the project has been around for some time but, according to Entertainment Weekly, it’s set in 1913 and derives its title from an Orson Welles quote describing films as “ribbons of dreams”; with a narrative that will apparently involve two men who encounter a number of legendary figures responsible for shaping the modern entertainment industry.

Ten-episode Valley of Tears, another astute Foxtel buy, looks compelling, an example of the expanding international market for Israeli TV in America, typified by adaptations such as Homeland and direct exports like Fauda, Asylum City and Mossad 101. Inspired by the events of the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel, reviews suggest its intertwined stories play with universal themes of war, trauma and national upheaval without being overly didactic.

Rap Shi#t is the new series from the supremely talented Issa Rae, who gave us Insecure, that loud, abrasive comedy that presents such a penetrating concentration on the lives of contemporary American black women and the men with whom they become involved. Also on Foxtel, it follows a fictional south Florida female rap group who are attempting to break into the music industry.

And Mindy Kaling (The Office, The Mindy Project) presents another female-fronted show in The Sex Lives of College Girls, following three 18-year-old freshman roommates at Evermore College in Vermont, described as equal parts loveable and infuriating.

The End, a 10-part co-production between Foxtel and Sky UK, should be a big one for Foxtel. It stars Frances O’Connor (The Missing) and Dame Harriet Walter (The Crown), and is described as centring on three generations of a family with separate but intersecting obsessions – trying to figure out how to die with dignity, living with none and making it count.

After it aired recently in the UK, the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan implored that it shouldn’t be forgotten when awards are handed out.

Foxtel’s BBC First also has a promising slate of new British shows, including adaptations of Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing starring two-time Academy award winner Glenda Jackson, and Chernobyl’s Emily Watson heads up psychological thriller Too Close. And there is the welcome return of Tcheky Karyo’s great Belgian detective, Julien Baptiste, diving into Budapest’s corrupt underworld to find a British ambassador’s missing family. And there’s also Nicola Walker’s DCI Cassie Stuart and Sanjeev Basker’s DI Sunny Khan investigating another cold case in a fourth series of Unforgotten.

The BBC has also just finished shooting The Serpent, which stars Tahar Rahim as French conman and mass murderer Charles Sobhraj, based on the true story of how he was caught and brought to trial in the twilight years of the Asian Hippie Trail. Dr Who’s Jenna Coleman is Sobhraj’s partner and frequent accomplice, Marie-Andrée Leclerc. There’s also The Vigil from the BBC, starring Suranne Jones, which follows the mysterious disappearance of a Scottish fishing trawler and a death on board a Trident nuclear submarine, which brings the police into conflict with the navy and British security services.

And for cop-thriller fans, the BBC is bringing back Line of Duty, again starring Martin Compston, Vicky McClure and Adrian Dunbar in the sixth season. And the BBC tells us this time they confront their “most enigmatic adversary” in the form of Kelly Macdonald’s newcomer, DCI Joanne Davidson.

Netflix has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, many productions halted and in limbo, but it’s promising a new Tony Collette vehicle called Pieces of Her based on a novel by the best-selling Karin Slaughter. There’s also The Journalist, a Japanese drama based on the movie of the same name created by Isoko Mochizuki, and The Unlikely Murderer, from Sweden, based on Thomas Pettersson’s 2018 award-winning book of the same name, another fictional look at the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme.

And if you happen to be an Amazon Prime subscriber, its Lord of the Rings show will drop sometime through the year, exploring new storylines it seems that occur thousands of years before the events of The Fellowship of the Ring movie.

On the local front, the ABC and SBS have come up with some promising dramas, considering their ever-diminishing budgets. The Newsreader looks promising, a six-part series set in a newsroom amid the catastrophic events of 1986 – from the shock of the Challenger explosion, to the hype of Halley’s Comet, to the complexities of the AIDS crisis. As does Wakefield, which looks like a rather intense encounter with the subject of mental illness centred on a psychological mystery. A great cast includes Mandy McElhinney, Geraldine Hakewell and Wayne Blair.

The standout drama, though, might be the ambitious Fires from gifted producer Tony Ayres; each episode, it seems, based on character studies of those involved so directly in last summer’s catastrophic events – like volunteer firefighters and families who lost homes, livelihoods and loved ones, and the terrible choices they were forced to make in order to survive. Classy writers include Belinda Chayko and Jacquelin Perske.

But for me, the delight is the return of Jack Irish, the late Peter Temple’s private eye manqué, criminal lawyer, gambler, barracker, fixer, people-finder, debt collector and part-time cabinet-maker, played again by the appropriately strung-out-looking Guy Pearce. It’s the final series but all the regulars return, including Roy Billing as horse racing identity Harry Strang, Aaron Pedersen as Harry’s trusted offsider, Cam Delray, Shane Jacobson as old-school detective Barry Tregear and Kate Atkinson as IT-guru Simone.

Guy Pearce in Jack Irish.

SBS too has been industrious through the pandemic with five new commissioned drama series. A co-production with French company APC Studios, Copping It Black, comes from enterprising Bunya Productions, the company behind Mystery Road. A neatly original murder mystery, it sees a detective hunt for a killer through indigenous art communities in the Northern Territory then to art galleries across the world.

The big one, though, is New Gold Mountain, SBS’s most ambitious and expensive drama series, a murder mystery described as exploring “the story of the Australian gold rush from the perspective of Chinese miners who risked everything for a chance at unlikely wealth in a strange new land”. Director Corrie Chen says: “I am particularly excited to be directing a show that will finally let me put Chinese-Australian cowboys on screen and revising the canon of the classic Western.” Sucked me right in.

It’s extraordinary to think how far TV has come since a kind of big bang expanded the boundaries of its universe in the 90s and the mass audience, once the bread and butter of TV, fractured into smaller niches. And we began to live so blissfully through this cubist breaking apart of traditional prime-time genres.