There are good reasons why crime stories are TV perennials. They offer an ideal structure and they're malleable. A typical crime story has a clear beginning, middle and end. There's an event – often a murder – its investigation and a resolution, usually the killer being caught.
That basic shape can stretch to span one hour, eight hours or 20 and it also comes with an elasticity that appeals to a broad range of producers. The focus might be on the police or detectives working the case. It could be on the killer, or the community where the crime occurs. Or it could be on some combination of the three. Visually and tonally, the genre can accommodate everything from Midsomer Murders to Mindhunter, anything from whodunits set in pretty villages where bad things happen but order is invariably restored, to profoundly disturbing, colour-bleached meditations on the nature of evil.
Replay
We've recently seen a couple of local stabs at crime dramas, neither of them destined to lift the genre to thrilling new heights. SBS's Dead Lucky just finished its run on the primary channel (available on SBS On Demand) and Bite Club has just started on Nine. They're fairly hollow efforts that feel as though they're trotting out the familiar tropes of the genre while focusing on international sales potential.
In recent times, SBS's drama output has been limited to a couple of four-parters a year. But the network has found inventive ways to tailor its productions to suit its requirements as a multi-cultural broadcaster endeavouring to distinguish itself from its free-to-air counterparts. With series such as The Principal, Sunshine and Safe Harbour, it's offered crime-based stories that present previously unseen perspectives on Sydney's suburbs and Melbourne's Sudanese community, as well as tackling some of the issues surrounding the dangerous realities of refugees arriving in Australia by boat.
Bite Club suffers from a lack of tension.
Dead Lucky feels more like an exercise in dutiful box-ticking. Troubled female protagonist: tick. Ethnically diverse cast: tick. Psycho killer: tick. Beaches and Sydney Harbour views: tick.
Created by Ellie Beaumont and Drew Proffitt and directed by David Caesar, Dead Lucky begins by introducing detective Grace Gibbs (Rachel Griffiths), one of those maverick cops with lousy people skills and anger-management issues who is also the smartest person in any squad room. Grace comes from the school of female detectives founded by Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) in Prime Suspect: she's abrupt and abrasive, and dogged about cracking her cases. Grace also has an ostensibly cheeky dash of Kojak in her fondness for lollipops.
Her case involves The One That Got Away, serial killer Corby Baxter (Ian Meadows), whom Grace describes to her Chinese-Australian trainee detective (Yoson An) as "the worst kind of killer". Baxter's return to Sydney coincides with an armed robbery and a fatal shooting at a convenience store that involves an Iranian medical student (Mojean Aria) and his Chinese violinist girlfriend (Xana Tang). The storyline focusing on the pressures on international students is one of the drama's more interesting elements.
Griffiths delivers a controlled performance, keeping Grace's legendary temper pitched at the level of understandable irritation rather than atomic explosions. And Caesar tries to deliver the eye candy, saturating scenes with rich colour in an effort to enliven the pallid proceedings.
Rachel Griffiths stars in Dead Lucky.
But Dead Lucky lacks tension and the plot takes leaps that are incredible, though not in a good way. Grace barges into people's homes without a warrant and seizes possible evidence. The eventual explanation for the convenience-store death is a credulity stretch, and Baxter is reduced to a token bogeyman. The whole enterprise lacks conviction, though a small compensatory bonus comes with the opportunity to see Justine Clarke cutting loose in a supporting role as a brassy bitch.
Nine's Bite Club also suffers from a lack of tension, the same sense that boxes are being ticked and an attention to beach settings that seems tailored to an international market. To their mix, series writers Sarah Smith and John Ridley have also added sharks.
In its set-up, detectives Zoe (Ash Ricardo) and Dan (Todd Lasance) are lovers headed for marriage and a Hawaiian honeymoon. But their romantic future is ripped apart by a shark attack. By the time he reappears three years later, she's shacked up with the police psychologist (Damien Walshe-Howling) and an uncomfortable triangle is the result. There's also a body on the beach that requires their attention. And a weirdo police dog handler, played by import Dominic Monaghan (Lost, The Lord of the Rings), perhaps cast with an eye towards overseas sales potential.
They investigate a case in which nothing significant is at stake other than finding the culprit. The final minutes of the opener introduce a potential story arc in Dan's suspicion of a serial killer on the loose whose signature move is the removal of a tooth from his victims. Cue the dog handler, opening a tin box of teeth and looking menacing.
It's a pity these series aren't more exciting. We need a healthy local drama scene. Let's hope that those who can help to create it stop focusing on formula and instead devise productions that are inventive, emotionally potent and compelling. And they don't always need to have beaches.
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