Television: it’s ‘look at moi’ as Australian drama has a moment
Streaming television services are investing heavily in Australian stories, and audiences can’t get enough.
Nothing can prepare teenager Oly – or viewers of Bump – for the moment she goes into labour in a high-school toilet cubicle. The ambulance is fast but her baby is faster and arrives before she makes it to hospital.
Taboo-breaking scenes such as this in the opening sequence of Stan’s hit series, starring French-Australian actor Nathalie Morris, are well-trodden territory in subscription TV, where stories have always pushed the boundaries.
Viewers need only look to the groundbreaking Sex and the City, which emboldened women to talk about their sexuality, to see how the subscription model has liberated storytelling.
“When HBO did Sex and the City it was the sort of show you would never see on an American network,” says Screen Australia CEO Graeme Mason.
“They were able to push it slightly because they were not worried about advertisers. It has lifted the bar for everybody.”
That first season of Bump broke viewing records for Stan after it premiered in December 2020 and was sold to several international networks, including the BBC. And now, the third season of the drama, starring and co-produced by Claudia Karvan, is in production in Sydney in what can be only described as a purple patch for locally produced series that are commissioned by streaming services.
Australian drama is having a moment, with local stories flooding both free-to-air and subscription video-on-demand services. According to Screen Australia’s annual Drama Report, released in December, in the past financial year production companies spent $874m on making Australian dramas for film, television and online platforms, $116m of which was spent on titles for subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix. What’s more, the streamers are spending more to make series; the average budget for a title had risen from $800,000 in 2016/2017 to $13.5m in 2020/21.
With a plethora of services now available in Australia, from niche horror platform Shudder to documentary trove DocPlay and behemoth Disney+, there’s a healthy jostling for brand recognition, with the production of local stories being one way for streamers to deepen their connection with audiences.
“From an economic point of view, if you’re a new player [in the streaming market] here, you cannot just rely on foreign stuff,” Mason says.
“As Australians we like to see ourselves on screen. There’s still something about hearing your own voice or seeing your own country reflected back at you.”
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Along with the third season of Bump, Stan has entered into production for Bali 2002, a four-part show based on the 2002 Bali terrorist attacks starring Richard Roxburgh and Rachel Griffiths. As part of its Originals series, it will also produce Bad Behaviour, a series derived from Australian writer Rebecca Starford’s memoir of bullying at an elite country boarding school; North Queensland mystery series Black Snow; and a Bump spin-off called Year Of.
Netflix has commissioned a revival of 1990s high school drama Heartbreak High, Queensland crime drama Irreverent starring Wayne Blair, an eight-part series based on Trent Dalton’s phenomenally successful novel Boy Swallows Universe and Wellmania starring comedian Celeste Barber.
Sydney-based journalist Brigid Delaney, on whose book the latter series is based, recalls every writer’s dream: the moment in the pitch meeting that Netflix showed interest in buying the show, which is produced by Fremantle Australia.
“I had to struggle to stop screaming during this meeting,” she says.
“Afterwards, I hung up and I just danced around the house. I drank a bottle of champagne. I was so high. It was beyond my wildest dreams.”
While the series differs from her story about travelling to various monasteries around Southeast Asia, it essentially has the same DNA.
“It’s still one woman on the cusp of 40 searching for meaning and wellness and connection. That is still very much driving the story. But it’s an eight-part comedy series starring Celeste Barber, so it does differ.”
Holly Ringland also joins the Australian authors celebrating the transplanting of their books to the screen. Amazon Prime has cast Sigourney Weaver to star in the series adaptation of her debut novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which recently wrapped filming in and around Alice Springs.
‘What we really want to do is uncover those never-been-heard stories and voices from all corners of Australia’
Que Minh Luu, Netflix director of content for Australia and New Zealand, says the streaming giant – which unveiled its first Australian commission, Tidelands, back in 2018 – looks for stories such as this that are “uniquely and distinctly Australian”.
“Our biggest opportunity and what we really want to do is uncover those never-been-heard stories and voices from all corners of Australia and bring them to life with our amazing storytellers,” she says.
One of the newer players in the market, two-year-old Binge, has just announced its second locally produced series, Colin from Accounts, a rom-com created and written by, as well as starring, husband-and-wife team Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer. Binge executive director Alison Hubert-Burns says it has been a tough couple of years, so she wanted Binge’s first few originals to be “uplifting and funny, and kind of make Australians lives better”.
Colin From Accounts follows the huge success of Love Me, which starred Hugo Weaving as a widower who is trying to negotiate dating and grief with his new girlfriend (played by Heather Mitchell), and Bojana Novakovic as his wry yet endearing daughter painfully and clumsily trying to overcome her own fear of rejection.
“I just really wanted a contemporary love story,” says Hubert-Burns, an executive producer on the series. “I just felt like we were overdue one – we’d had Love My Way [Karvan’s powerful Sydney-set drama that debuted in 2004] – I wanted a complex, rich, interesting, juicy, gorgeous contemporary love story with an Australian bent, so we had to make it.”
Love Me premiered in December and has become one of the top 10 most popular shows on Binge, alongside mega-budget overseas offerings such as Game of Thrones. Given its success, is a second season of Love Me on the cards? “Watch this space,” Hubert-Burns says.
The growing number of local offerings from the streamers has sparked calls from some in the industry for more regulation.
Screen Producers Australia CEO Matthew Deaner says he would like to see the government introduce a firm framework for the streamers around the production of local content, including a minimum ongoing expenditure obligation in line with comparable international territories, to ensure they produce Australian stories in a sustainable way.
Still, there’s no doubt the current activity is providing abundant opportunities for creatives.
“The competitive energy about streamers being in the market is assisting everyone to lift their game – both creatively and financially – to higher than it’s ever been before,” Deaner says. “It’s taking an internal industry and allowing Australian creatives and Australian stories to travel globally because the streamers obviously have a big footprint.”