In the past few years, Australian TV mysteries have started finding favor with American audiences who favor the British TV mystery style to American shows. The Australian shows are interesting in that they share a similar judicial and police structure but have their own cultural sensibility, informed by location, history, and the social mix of the South Pacific location. Some of the differences are subtle, some are more obvious, but both Janet King and Jack Irish present a mix of modern urban life and outlaw sensibility with ties to Asia and South Pacific countries.
Janet King: Series 1 – The Enemy Within (Acorn, DVD) is a dense, complex, and compelling Australian series that plays more like a mini-series than a serialized legal drama.
Marta Dusseldorp stars as Janet King a Senior Crown Prosecutor returning to work from maternity leave and immediately embroiled in a controversial case involving a high-ranking senior police officer that turns out to be tangled up in international child pornography. She butts heads with the Chief Superintendent (Vince Colosimo) over a murder case that lacks conclusive evidence (she’s proven correct when new evidence leads in other directions), then finds her career targeted by a vindictive judge and her family targeted a car bomb. The cops want to chalk it up to the botched case but she’s convinced it is connected to a pornography ring that her investigation traces back to Australian police and judicial officials. In a fitting dramatic turn, she bends the rules to take charge of a case she’s too personally involved in to be objective and demands police action on her hunches and theories, the very things she criticized in her professional capacity in the early episodes.
The character Janet King was introduced in an earlier Australian series called Crownies, where she was a part of the ensemble, and this is technically a spin-off but it stands on its own and creates its own world from the first episode. It delves into the office politics of work (where an ambitious prosecutor played by Owen Mitchell undercuts her efforts), the collision of prosecutors and the police over the prosecution of crimes, and the media obsession over unverified scandals, all while Janet balances work with her new responsibilities as a mother of twins while her wife, also an ambitious professional, resists taking her turn at maternity leave. It’s intelligent and inventive, with cases and stories all intertwined and the story building over the eight-episode series.
8 episodes on DVD, with a featurette.
Jack Irish: Season 1 (Acorn, Blu-ray, DVD) follows the three feature-length telefilms starring Guy Pearce as Jack Irish, a former lawyer content to scrape by as a low-rent debt collector and part time private investigator. Those films (previously released on disc by Acorn) were directly adapted from the novels of Peter Temple. This “season,” subtitled Blind Faith, is essentially a six-part mini-series, and it is the first completely original story.
It begins with Jack taking the case of an artist (Claudia Karvan) whose sister, the mistress of a televangelist in a shady and secretive religious sect (there are shades of Scientology in their set-up), disappears without a trace. Suddenly his bank account is frozen and finances put on hold, he’s attacked by thugs in a dark alley, and when he doesn’t back off they take more extreme measures. Marta Dusseldorp (that’s right, Janet King herself) co-stars as Linda Hillier, an ambitious journalist and Jack’s sort-of girlfriend (he’s not much for commitment) who leaves for a posting in The Philippines and, while tracking down the mysterious bank that froze Jack’s account, uncovers a deadly conspiracy connected to a massacre of a village in the lawless countryside.
It gives this mystery, the first not based on an existing novel, a bigger scope than the previous Jack Irish productions. Pearce is likable and low-key as Jack, but he’s also another in a long line of damaged detectives and this series spotlights the limitation of his easy-going approach to detective work and life. Dusseldorp’s Linda is a strong, active character and gets almost as much focus as she tracks her story into the heart of the militia-controlled countryside. The mix of shaggy character humor, the scruffiness of the Melbourne underworld, and the brutality of international crime conspiracies makes for a memorable and compelling series.
6 episodes on Blu-ray and DVD, with a featurette.
Also recently released: Jack Irish: The Movies (Acorn, Blu-ray, DVD), which collects the previous volumes of Jack Irish releases in a single set.