Australian and New Zealand TV

In Australia: Thursdays, 9.30pm, Network Ten
In the UK: Acquired by Channel 5

If you ask me, this format thing is getting out of hand. Secrets and Lies is Australia’s latest piece of event TV – or at least Network Ten’s attempt to create a piece of event TV. In it, Brisbane family man Ben Gundelach (Martin Henderson best known for, of all things, The Ring) comes across the body of a dead child while running. When he reports it to the police, his whole world falls apart as first the cops, then the media then everyone else he knows begins to suspect that he killed the boy. Did Gundelach do it and if he didn’t, who did? Could it even be one of his neighbours?

It’s six episodes long, it has a companion mobile app (Zeebox), there’s social media channels and a web site dedicated to helping viewers solve the mystery – it’s a big thing. Or wants to be, anyway. Whether it is or not is debatable, given it got 403,000 viewers for its first episode and finished in fourth in its timeslot.

Yet ABC in the US committed to remaking the format even before the show had aired. They’ve just cast Ryan Phillippe and Juliette Lewis in the pilot.

This, I think, is jumping the gun. Because the show’s okay. But only okay.

The first episode treads a very ordinary path, in fact. There’s a little bit of the emotion of The Killing in there; there’s the usual tropes about the police, innocent man accused and so on. About the only extraordinary thing about it is how ordinary Gundelach’s character is. He’s just a house painter – a guy with regular kids and a rocky marriage who spends all his time trying to drum up business, promising to do the work he’s already promised to do, and larking around with his next door neighbour.

Can’t see Ryan Phillippe doing that myself, but let’s see how it pans out.

Now, whether later episodes will give us a mystery worth solving, since there have been no apparent clues as to motive, other suspects or even much by way of foul play at this stage, is something we’ll have to wait to discover. At the moment, although Henderson is a compelling lead, one contractually obliged to only wear a top 50% of the time, we’ve not yet got a compelling story that tells us anything more than ‘it’s crap being accused of a crime you didn’t commit’. The police are still menacing caricatures and his family are little more than human beings arranged around him to convey disappointment.

So is it worth a remake? Not yet. But I’ll stick with it for now…

In Australia: Thursdays, 8.30pm, ABC1

Australia’s ABC1 has been undergoing something of a drama renaissance over the past few years. In between 2005 and 2011, the channel produced absolutely no long form drama at all. Then along came Crownies – essentially an Australian This Life about a group of novice solicitors – and the channel hasn’t looked back, giving us the likes of Serangoon Road, Rake, Redfern Now, and The Doctor Blake Mysteries, to name but a few (or maybe all).

Crownies only lasted for one series though, but even as it aired, the possibility of a spin-off series involving some of the characters was being worked on. Lo-and-behold, we now have Janet King, featuring guess which stand-out Crownies character?

It doesn’t take long for anyone who hasn’t seen Crownies to realise this is a spin-off, since the show delivers on a plate a big set of characters with pre-existing relationships and acts like we’re supposed to understand what’s going on. It does make a few concessions, not least to the question of what King’s been up to since Crownies – she’s been having a baby with her lesbian life-partner – and for a perilously long time, it looks like Janet King is going to be an innovative new format of TV programme, the legal/childcare advice show, telling us how to prosecute paedophiles while trying not to accidentally express breast milk.

However, initial introductions out the way, it does settle down and start to give us some story that doesn’t entirely rely on either other lawyers being miffed that King is back to work and apparently being prioritised over them – the show does do a good job at hinting at less overt forms of sexism, as well as overt – or babies needing looking after. It’s a two-strand piece, with an artist being accused of paedophilia and a top cop accused of murdering rather than euthanising his sick wife. The former has a decent visual payoff that requires the viewer to have paid attention, while the latter is a story set to continue in subsequent episodes.

As with a lot of legal shows, Janet King seems to rely on the police not having done much investigating, leaving it up to the lawyers to do it instead. In Janet King’s case, that’s the same lawyers who didn’t have time to prepare for their trials and missed important legislative changes that would have enabled them to send the accused down, so isn’t a great plan. Indeed, much of the first episode sees King mucking up almost constantly, getting things wrong, over-compensating, and more, making it hard to see why she’s so well regarded.

The show’s much better when it’s in the court room than out, and with the Australian legal system so similar to the UK’s, it’s easier to understand for UK viewers, too. Although the show sometimes feels like someone wanted to make “Julia Gillard: Crown Prosecutor”*, King’s Crownies wow factor isn’t much on display and unless you’re a Crownies fan, you’d be hard pushed to come up with a reason to watch what is a relatively ordinary lawyer show.

Worth a try if you want to see a good collection of female professional characters or you’re a Crownies lover; otherwise, I’d say give this one a miss.