Year of watching dangerously

An exhilarating year has delivered some great and not-so-great viewing in this exciting new era of television.

Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll

To those of us who can still recall the skylines of our cities changing as hundreds of poles with branches and spokes in all directions began to spring up on the rooftops as TV entered our lives, it is as if we have now entered the future of the future. Some had predicted that the heights of so-called Peak TV had indeed already been reached but this year the excitement and anticipation increased as new streaming outlets joined and it became acceptable to admit that you just couldn’t keep up with TV’s grand narratives. So many of them become cultural events, not merely what we used to disdainfully call telly.

For both this column and Foxtel TV show Screen I’ve watched more than 90 shows this year and I feel not only exhausted but exhilarated at the way the world that was once so banal has become, as Michael Wolff suggests in his brilliant book Television Is The New Television, “the hothouse of the unexpected”, offering quite astonishing inventiveness.

So here’s a quick look back at the best of 2019, this column’s reviews of the most interesting shows, many still available, of a wonderful year. It’s hardly exhaustive even if your columnist is. And he still has The Crown, Unbelievable, Mindhunter and the quite brilliant new Stan show The Commons, starting on Christmas Day, to binge over summer. Though The Commons, a character-based techno thriller from Shelley Birse starring Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt and developed around the ethical questions surrounding motherhood in an Australia slightly in the future, may not be the most relaxing TV postprandial. The world it persuasively creates is at the crossroads of accelerating climate change, the water crisis decimating regional Australia, many country people forced into internment camps outside the cities, and an insidious disease creeping throughout the land. It’s as good as anything I’ve seen this year. Its prescience makes your skin crawl.

There weren’t many duds among all the shows I’ve watched, which included feature documentaries, comedies, dramas, and true crime series, and many of the proliferating newish genre of half-hour and shorter shows that have the subversiveness and unpredictability of independent cinema.

Russian Doll, a kind of existential New York comedy, conceived for Netflix as a four-hour movie in half-hour chapters, was among the best of these. Natasha Lyonne stars as Nadia Vulvokov, a chain-smoking, abrasive and boisterous New York-based game designer whose death happens repeatedly giving her multiple second chances but each time she’s reanimated she finds her life slowly dissolving. It was clever and deeply affecting.

The biggest fail of the year was the expensive BBC remake of H.G. Wells’s story, The War of the Worlds. Few creatively involved escaped the massive invading tripodal war machines – the best-looking things in a dismal show – from outer space with their integrity intact.

Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen from Games of Thrones. Picture: Helen Sloan / HBO

Game of Thrones finally finished, the last episode aptly titled The Long Night and it was a terrible ending, disappointing for fans, causing a collective cringe around the globe. It was also dark as in hard to see, especially the climactic Battle of Winterfell. New York Times critic James Poniewozik said, “It reduced a climax eight years in the making to an inky, ill-defined scrum of beards and bones.” The show’s cinematographer Fabien Wagner blamed the settings on the world’s TV screens.

Beyond GoT, Years and Years from Russell T. Davis fast became the most talked about show of 2019, along with the second season of Succession. Inspired by both the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote, it told the story of the rise of a populist dictator, Viv Rook, played scarily by Emma Thompson. Davies concentrates not on her terrifying rise to power, the political mechanics of her ascension, but rather on the ordinary people affected as they navigate extremist politics, even more technological encroachments on their lives and the nuclear threat. Sure it was bleak viewing at times, but cleverly juxtaposing social realism, a kind of sci-fi dystopianism and a caustically satirical look at populist politics, it was also funny.

Jack Bannon as Alfred in Pennyworth.

The first season of Pennyworth, which turned up on the until now underrated Foxtel channel Fox8, was a total surprise arising out of yet another reimagining of aspects of the widely loved Batman mythology. It gave us a different version of the caped crusader’s faithful butler and confidant, Alfred Pennyworth, this time played by very dapper newcomer Jack Bannon with wonderful echoes of Michael Caine’s working-class Alfie.

Pennyworth punched and counterpunched his way through a grim, stylised 1960s London, combating right-wing villains, standing up against the arbitrary power of bullies and power-seekers. It was great fun and one of the most stylish shows of the year. (The brilliant US period martial arts series Warrior, set against the background of the Tong Wars and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, was also a surprise on Fox8, startlingly resonant and highly cinematic.)

Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Watchmen

Watchmen, the new HBO series from writer and producer Damon Lindelof was also an unexpected if somewhat confronting pleasure. It’s his adaptation of the iconic comic of the same name created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 30 years ago, that alternative history examination of authoritarian governmental power, which imbued the comic book genre with a high seriousness. Lindelof has turned it into a stunningly cinematic look at white supremacy, policing and race in the US. Watchmen is mystifying but hugely entertaining, if deeply troubling.

There were many fine feature documentaries, among them Joshua Rofe’s Lorena, a forensic re-evaluation of the story of Lorena Bobbitt, who amputated the penis of her sleeping husband after she claimed he raped her moments earlier. The film was a fine example of how increasingly filmmakers with the benefit of socially conscious hindsight are re-evaluating the way identity issues from the recent past like gender, race, religion and class played out unapologetically as highly prejudiced tabloid stories at the time.

A scene from Chernobyl

And HBO’s shocking series Chernobyl, created with an awesome attention to historical accuracy and detail, brought back that harrowing event with frightening clarity and a superbly orchestrated sense of danger and dread. Even now it’s easy to conjure up mentally the first episode in the moments before the explosion that starts the appalling chain of events. That ominous orange glow in the distance signalling the reactor core blowing was followed by a shockwave of roaring danger.

The Cry, an ABC production in conjunction with the BBC, filmed in Australia and Glasgow, and written by the accomplished Jacquelin Perske, came early in the year. It set a high benchmark for local drama, a tense, stylistically ambitious domestic noir, family relationships providing the perfect context for this haunting psychological thriller. Directed by prodigiously talented Australian Glendyn Ivin, the series looked at the notion of motherhood itself and how so many women find themselves inadequately prepared for the unpredictable adventure they have embarked upon.

Foxtel’s Lambs of God was another brilliant local production too, a highly original investigation into the nature of faith, love and redemption. Writer Sarah Lambert and that omnipresent director Jeffery Walker created a kind of magic realist web of religious symbolism and allusion that at times teetered over into Stephen King territory, and at other times was eerily comical. It also marked the first Australian TV show for the great cinematographer Don McAlpine, his work on the show a wonderful example of the way a stylistic renaissance has so blurred the line between cinema and television in terms of narrative and visual quality.

Total Control was another powerful production from director Rachel Perkins and her producers, Darren Dale and Miranda Dear, from the estimable Blackfella Films. It featured a passionate advocate, an indigenous woman, Alex Irving, played with compassion and empathy by Deborah Mailman, who, thrust into the national limelight after a horrific event, takes on the conservative Australian political system from the inside. An angry show, it was still fiercely entertaining.

Kayvan Novak as Nandor in What We Do in the Shadows

What We Do In The Shadows was the zaniest series of the year and one of the most amusing, created by New Zealanders Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. The series dropped us into a satirical universe of co-habiting vampires in contemporary New York. While they suffer the monotony and absurdity of an immortal existence, carrying a heavy freight of self-importance they can’t help themselves referencing and riffing on the iconic vampire canon from Bran Stoker’s Dracula to Anne Rice to Twilight. Mark Proksch gives the standout characterisation of the year as Colin Robertson, an “energy vampire”, who feasts on humans but not on their blood, draining them of life by simply talking them to death.

Amazon Prime’s Undone, which combined computer animation with oil paintings, a technique known as Rotoscoping, created the gorgeous, shifting world of a young woman called Alma Winograd-Diaz, played wonderfully by Rosa Salazar, suffering from a kind of existential despair and desperate to shake herself free of it. It was the most visually captivating show of this exhausting but exhilarating year.