Amazon green lights: series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
Australian TV
Stan green lights: series of cold case crime drama The Gloaming and youth-restoring plant drama Bloom, and No Activity Christmas special
Scandinavian TV
Viaplay (Sweden) green lights: series adaptation of Per Schlingmann’s I maktens öga as The Inner Circle (Den inre cirkeln), with Niklas Engdahl, Nanna Blondell and Ebba Hultkvist Stragne
Sometimes, you really can get the wrong end of the stick with these international productions. When I first heard about Safe, it was via an article in Le Figaro. Audrey Fleurot from Engrenages (Spiral), Michael C Hall from Dexter, in a Netflix drama written by US thriller writer Harlan Coben and set inside a gated community? Brilliant! It’ll be like Sky Atlantic’s Riviera – except good.
Sure, it was also going to feature the likes of Marc Warren (Mad Dogs) and Amanda Abbington (Sherlock), and at least some of it was going to be filmed in Britain, but I mentally glossed over that. Audrey, Michael, Harlan, all that talk by Le Figaro of Harlan’s obsession with French actresses – it was going to be exotic, wasn’t it? Maybe a bit in the UK, but mostly it would be in France, right? Or maybe 50/50? Why else cast Fleurot?
Then I saw the trailer.
Wait. That was all Britain. Nothing but Britain. No sunshine, no France, no French. Just Britain. Not even a good bit of Britain at that, but Manchester.
And what was that accent, Michael? Why haven’t they allowed you to be American? And have you been watching The Only Way is Essex with Chris Pratt?
Then I remembered – Harlan Coben had co-written that Sky1 show The Five with Danny Brocklehurst, hadn’t he? And Brocklehurst was one of the writers for Safe, too.
Oh dear God. This was actually a British show. It was basically a Sky1 show with a slightly more international cast than usual, but on Netflix. Oh the horror!
So that was the stick I incorrectly grasped with Safe. Although we in the UK obviously associate Netflix with bringing us both their own programmes made overseas and other country’s programmes that they’ve bought up, that’s something they do for everyone else, too, and this was going to be like The Crown – another entry in the ‘international TV that we made in the UK for everyone else’ category. We would be the rest of the world’s ‘exotic’.
However, there was a second stick. My assumption was that because it was UK TV made in the UK by a UK production company and written by UK writers, it was going to be unwatchable rubbish. Just dreadful, I thought.
Surprise! It’s not. Indeed, Safe isn’t half bad. A bit silly and even comedic in places – and not just Hall’s accent – with episode endings that push the boundaries of plausibility to their limits, but actually halfway decent. I even watched it all the way through to the end. That’s a first for me and a British TV drama in rather a long time…
In Australia: Sundays, 8.30pm EST, Showcase
In the UK: Acquired by BBC Two. Will air in 2018
Many countries have works of classic literature that are little known or regarded elsewhere. That’s true, even for countries that speak the same language. How many Brits have heard of, let alone read the US’s Faulkner, for example?
Joan Lindsey’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is one such classic. Indeed, so unlikely is it that you’ve heard of its author, you probably didn’t notice I spelt her name wrong just then. Although, to be fair, it’s not like I’m immune to typos.
Written ostensibly in the style of true historic happening – complete with references in the style of The Ipcress File and The Andromeda Strain – it details the disappearance of three boarding schoolgirls during a picnic near the titular Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia, on St Valentine’s Day, 1900. No one knows what’s happened to them as the one person who saw them disappear loses her memory and there are decidedly supernatural overtones to the whole affair. The rest of the book is then about the effects on the community, the girls’ school and its strict headmistress Mrs Appleyard.
If you’ve heard of Lindsay’s classic Australian novel, it’s probably because of a classic from another medium: Peter Weir’s 1975 movie Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was one of the first Australian films to gain international recognition and commercial success:
And now we have Foxtel Australia’s six-part interpretation, starring Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones, The Tudors, Elementary) as Mrs Appleyard.
Rocky
With six hours’ of runtime, it’s no surprise that Foxtel’s version of the story gets to mine the source material far more than Weir did, as well as come up with its own additions and mine Weir’s version on top of all that. It also gets to do something that Weir never could – use elements from the original but excised final chapter of Lindsey’s novel, which was published posthumously in 1987 as The Secret of Hanging Rock.
Dormer is clearly a different Mrs Applegate from previous versions, here escaping a past that requires her to switch from a cockney accent in voiceover to posh Kensington in-story. Will she get found out when she starts roughing up a man who tries to take advantage of one of her girls and everyone realises she might not be as genteel as they suspected?
Meanwhile, the disappearing girls have a bit more background, with everything from a love affair to social rivalry – with so much of the story owing to Aboriginal lore, it’s apt, if a little surprising given the exclusive setting and the mores of the time, that one of the girls is aboriginal, too (let’s not forget the area was part of the aboriginal clearings of the mid-19th century).
However, there are some things this version has in common with the original, too. The plot is much the same, right up to the disappearance of the girls, although the manner of their disappearance has changed. The fixation with clocks and time are a constant, too.
Too varied a serving
However, I’m not convinced that all this extra runtime has been good for the people behind it, because tonally, it’s all over the place. The first episode alone wanders between Bildungsroman, Pride and Prejudice-style social comedy, feminist critique of the patriarchy, crime novel and outright fantasy, touching on but never really doing much with any of its elements – as though it’s emptying all its toys on the floor and hoping to spot something it wants to play with. Certainly, the first 40 minutes or so up to the point the girls disappear are tougher going than they should be and don’t really win you over to the characters, although it comes close with the plucky Dormer.
Clearly, visually it owes a massive debt to Weir’s version, since everything looks almost identical, albeit a lot glossier. You could even swear they’d hired some of the same actors, were it not for the years between their making. Unfortunately, one thing it doesn’t borrow is Weir’s dreamier direction, the scene of the girls disappearing far too knowingly surreal but without scaring and Dormer’s dream is more laughable than profound.
Not a classic
All of which makes this a very flawed, not especially watchable, rather long remake. Whether subsequent episodes will make more of elements of the book that Weir barely touched on, such as the police investigation, remains to be seen and might make everything more interesting. I like Dormer – at least, when she’s not trying to do cockney – and the presence of the now ubiquitous Don Hany (East West 101, Serangoon Road, Strike Back) also suggest things could improve in later episodes, too.
But as it stands, this Picnic at Hanging Rock is less a classic, more a glossy remake designed to hook international interest than because it aims to contribute greatly to Australian culture.
