Dead Lucky (Wednesday at 9.30pm) just might be the most SBS show ever made.
The four-part series, which winds up this week (but is available on SBS On Demand for another month or so), is ostensibly a crime thriller, and a pretty decent one at that. There's a serial bandit and cop killer on the loose, a missing-presumed-dead girl, a shop owner who's been slain with his own gun, and a man wrongfully accused of his murder. That's plenty to be cracking on with on a school night.
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What elevates this within the line-up of SBS programming is all the boxes it ticks in terms of hot-button issues – which, let's face it, is the niche the network has claimed as its own in recent years.
Domestic violence: check. Foreign students working as low-paid labourers: check. The franchise-store scandal: check, with both ends covered – underpayment of workers and gouging by head office – so really that's a double-check, mate. Sexism in the police force: check. PTSD: check. The trade in forged essays among foreign students under pressure from home to succeed: check. Gambling, drugs, money laundering: check, check, check.
Yoson An as Charlie Fung and Rachel Griffiths as Grace Gibbs in Dead Lucky.
That might make it sound like an identikit of a show, cobbled together from stock features, but Dead Lucky works. Not perfectly, not seamlessly, not in the slick overly-scripted way of a CSI or Law & Order, and not with quite the depth of character of a Prime Suspect. But it's thoughtful, considered, twisty and pacey enough to warrant not just being seen but being granted a second season, to see how far these characters, and this take on contemporary Australia, can go.
At the centre of it all is Grace Gibbs (Rachel Griffiths), a detective still smarting from the death of a plain-clothes officer on her watch. She's a good cop with what management – in the form of Rhys Muldoon's Richard – considers a bad attitude, given to sucking on lollipops and following her instincts rather than protocol. Call it the blame game or call it old-fashioned sexism in the ranks, but Richard is just waiting for an opportunity to drum her out of the force.
We first meet Grace at a compulsory session with a police psychologist. She has an anger management problem, she's been told, and she agrees. "Some people think I get angry, and they happen to be in management."
Richard assigns Grace a rookie detective, partly because he's sure it will irritate her, and partly so he has an informer on hand for her next transgression. But Charlie Fung (Yoson An) turns out to be more asset than enemy to Grace.
Justine Clarke plays against type, and Simon Burke wonders how badly this might work out.
Theirs is a classic tough-love relationship, but there are some nice and subtle twists on the theme. There's a great side-bar relationship too, between Grace and her ex (Matt Nable), a Federal Police detective whose own investigation she strays into, with less than desirable results.
It's messy, tangled and it all unfolds at a frenetic pace. Respite comes in the form of regular stops in the overcrowded multinational student household – or it would were Mani (Mojean Ali), an Iranian, not so frantic with worry over the fate of his missing Chinese girlfriend Bo-Lin (Xana Tang).
Sarah Thamin, Mojean Aria, Xana Tang and Tessa de Josselin in the student share house.
There's pleasure to be had in some of the supporting turns – Justine Clarke playing against type as a bigoted Sydney blonde (the daughter of Hungarian refugees, and virulently anti-immigrant) is a particular treat – but Dead Lucky is Griffiths' show.
"I'd love to have my own Jack Irish, Rake, five-season franchise, because having set up a character you can just have such fun with it," she told me recently.
Dead Lucky is too plot-driven to be that, but this season has at least erected the framework for Griffiths to do some Helen Mirren-type character development should it get a return outing. For her sake and ours, I hope it does.
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