‘HOW GOOD IS Bluey?’

‘I know, right?’

‘Is it true the whole world’s watching it? Even the Yanks?’

‘Yes! It’s true!’

‘Good on ya, Bluey.’

‘Bloody legend.’

This is the broad shape of my barbecue conversations when I’m asked what I do for a living and I explain that I write for Australian television. Often, these exchanges segue directly from ‘I write TV’ to ‘How good is Bluey!’

I don’t write for Bluey, but I do love these chats because I can really sense the passion people have for our favourite canine family (or maybe it’s just ‘family’ – I don’t think the Rafters, Kerrigans or Day-Knights can compete). It’s more than Bluey’s undeniable entertainment value (‘We watch it with the kids!’) – there’s a punching-above-our-weight pride that comes with this little show, made in inner-city Brisbane, about a very Australian family, about how it’s captured the hearts and minds of the world. Variety recently reported that Bluey was leading the US TV ratings for all shows in 2024.

These barbecue conversations quickly move on to the other Australian shows: Colin from Accounts, Fisk, High Country, Five Bedrooms (phew, they finally mentioned one of the shows I worked on). It’s fun to hear people’s passion for homegrown stories – and the general assumption, given how well shows like Bluey are doing, is that the Australian TV drama industry is in rude health. And there is a lot to celebrate: the shows I mentioned above all enjoy lots of love from Australian and overseas audiences as well as critics.

But, as any industry insider will whisper to you over a stiff drink, Australian TV drama is facing its toughest time on record. Overall TV drama hours are down (particularly since Covid), costs are spiralling, government support is finite, audiences are ageing and international competition for eyeballs has never been more ferocious. I don’t want to get lost in the very thick weeds of the global media jungle to explain why this is happening, but suffice to say that we’re not alone – traditional TV industries all around the world are facing similar pressures.

What I want to explore instead is a recurring question for Australian producers who are trying to ensure that Australian stories – like Bluey, like Fisk, like Colin – continue to be made. And that question is… What are we good at?

JULIE ECKERSLEY, TELEVISION producer and former drama commissioner at SBS (and an old friend from my days at Matchbox Pictures), has been thinking about this a lot lately while developing an industry White Paper to map out the challenging road ahead:

Bluey should be a rising tide for every Australian show. High Country should be a rising tide for every Australian show. Colin from Accounts should be building our brand [of] Australia and, in this complicated world, we do not have a strong brand… We have a really distinct identity and distinct voice, and we don’t own it.

Eckersley points to the success of countries such as South Korea and the Scandinavian nations who have, over many years, successfully branded their unique national storytelling styles. Think about it – if you see the words ‘K-Drama’ or ‘Scandi-Noir’ displayed in the on-screen carousel, you’re going to have a very strong sense of what you’re getting. In K-Drama, it’s going to be high emotion, romance, a touch of whimsy and the occasional bat-shit crazy setting (Squid Game). In Scandi-Noir, it’s going to be messed-up crimes, messed-up protagonists and full-length trench coats (The Killing, The Bridge). And, as Eckersley points out, none of this was an accident: ‘Korea didn’t just happen. You can read their strategy papers.’ 

Of course, Australia has a challenge that neither the Scandis or the South Koreans have: we speak English, the same language as the US and the UK, the two most influential TV nations in the world. When a South Korean viewer chooses a show to watch, finding one in their native language is frequently a deciding factor. As a result, South Korean TV producers can rely on a baked-in local audience. In Australia, not so much.

It works against us the other way too, especially in the US, where Australian accents can prove a barrier to audiences. Jason Burrows of Jungle Entertainment, the company responsible for the hit hitman comedy Mr Inbetween and the car-bound cop comedy No Activity, both of which enjoyed success in the US, has seen this firsthand:‘I think the challenge is still [that] anything in an Australian accent is considered niche,’ explains Burrows. ‘Something like Colin from Accounts or Mr Inbetween, it’s kind of successful on the coasts of America [but] not middle America.’

This isn’t something we can change, although we can turn it to our advantage: the astonishing success of Bluey, which has seen US parents complaining that their kids are adopting Australian accents and phrases (‘dunny!’), may offer us our best chance yet at selling ourselves internationally.

But what are we selling? What Australian sensibilities are local and international audiences buying into when they watch an Australian show? What’s our version of K-Drama, of Scandi-Noir?

THIS IS A question Kylie Washington, the Australian head of the local branch of BBC Studios, thought about a lot when she made the bold decision to develop an Aussie version of the UK classic The Office. Eventually, Washington and her collaborators landed on two distinct elements for the remake: a female lead (a first among the thirteen international remakes so far) and a uniquely Australian approach to work. She explains:

In the UK, the workplace is a place where people go to die and, in the US, it’s a place where people go to live their dreams. But in Australia, we’re just waiting to get to the beach. We just have this healthy disrespect for the job and for hierarchy.

A healthy disrespect for hierarchy. You can see this in Bluey, in Fisk, in Colin. Similarly, Burrows believes our unique sense of humour helps many of our shows stand out internationally, as do our locations: ‘People see us as a place to escape, you know, it’s a bit wild, and you might get killed by a croc.’

Indeed, location is central to arguably the best articulated genre of Australian TV drama: ‘Outback Noir’. Featuring sprawling, unforgiving wilderness, twisty mysteries and rugged, down-to-earth types just trying to do their job, the local and international success of shows such as Mystery Road and High Country has hopefully laid the groundwork for the future success of shows such as the recently released Netflix epic Territory. And the Apple Isle has harnessed its unique locations to loosely define ‘Tassie Noir’, with shows including The Kettering Incident, The Gloaming and the delightful piss-take of the entire crime genre, Deadloch. 

Yet there’s a genre of Australian television storytelling that we haven’t defined well, perhaps because it’s hiding in plain sight. It’s captured in the DNA of Neighbours, Home and Away, The Secret Life of Us, Bump, Heartbreak High, Five Bedrooms, House Husbands, Doctor Doctor, Offspring. These locally and internationally successful shows all capture a certain sensibility I like to call ‘ordinary people in ordinary situations’. Our screen history is densely populated with average and very relatable mums and dads, teachers, doctors, cops, shop owners, tradies and more who face everyday problems in average yet relatable small towns, suburbs or inner-city neighbourhoods.

While this sort of low-stakes, small-scale storytelling isn’t unique to Australia, when you compare our lifestyle to the rest of the world, our ordinariness is potentially our superpower. It’s why very, very few of our adult dramas (children’s TV is different) feature the sorts of through-the-roof stakes routinely seen in overseas TV shows – zombie pandemics, intergalactic odysseys, international espionage, rips in the fabric of time and space, terrorist attacks, dragons, Vikings! Broadly speaking, Australians just don’t see themselves in these sorts of genres because they don’t make a lot of sense here. Life in mainstream white Australia, when you compare it to large parts of the world (and most of Indigenous Australia), is pretty blissful. No doubt, we have problems – housing, racism, creeping inequality. But these aren’t war, terrorism, dictatorships. From an overseas perspective, we come across as a wealthy, peaceful and highly successful multicultural utopia where neither religion nor overt ideology has divided the community (yet). It’s a uniquely Australian way of being in the world, an ease that allows us to relax and not take ourselves too seriously. This sensibility is present in Colin from Accounts, it’s in Mr Inbetween (a show about a hitman!), it’s in Fisk and, yes, it’s in Bluey.

When I share this description with Julie, she recognises it and sounds a little deflated: ‘As a people we’re not passionate, we don’t express big desires [and] therefore sometimes I think our characters don’t have big arcs because they don’t want big things.’

It’s true. It’s long been observed that Australian screen stories are routinely low stakes and lack the big ‘hero’s journey’-style arcs of our UK and US siblings. Sure, sometimes we go big, very big – Miller’s Mad Max, Baz’s Australia, Warwick Thornton’s Firebite and, most recently, the epic scale of Territory. But this is not the ‘ordinary’ bread and butter of our storytelling traditions.

If that’s the case, what’s the pithy phrase (a la ‘Scandi-Noir’, ‘K-Drama’) that captures our special way of spinning a TV tale? A label that could apply to a range of stories, settings and genres without becoming a creative straitjacket. Something relaxed, irreverent, playful…

It’s a good question. I’ll start.

‘Aussie Droll.’

Discuss.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons