Call it an “upstairs/downstairs” police procedural. Britbox’s newest original series, The Tower, follows a team of detectives investigating their fellow coppers after an incident on a London rooftop goes horribly awry, resulting in the death of a civilian and a veteran beat cop. In three short episodes, the story grows increasingly complex as secrets are revealed, careers unravel, and conflicting loyalties test every character. The British ITV series is now streaming on BritBox via Amazon.
Interesting commonality can be found in the first seasons of two supernatural series, Starz’ 2020 supernatural series The Gloaming, set in Tasmania, and the old Australian town-based 2015 Netflix series Glitch, and a third series, the 2018 Australian outback Western Mystery Road, now streaming on Acorn. Each of these series is anchored by police procedural stories led by male and female leads, and strong leads at that. Each of these straightforward stories could be spliced into any time period, as components of countless cop shows. But the real value of each series is the unique setting. Like the unusual nature of filming a British cop show in the stark, remote north Great Britain in Shetland, here viewers are transported closer to the southern pole. There viewers will find the commonality of a shared past with England, the common language, and the colonial history that forms an active wrench in the relationships between different peoples still today. In Mystery Road, it’s illustrated by the obvious physical differences and characteristics of the loose cannon, cowboy hat-wearing, Western style (with Aussie flare), indigenous Detective Jay Swan, played by Aaron Pedersen (also co-star of The Gloaming) and the confident and wise older local cop, Emma James, played by twice Oscar-nominated actress Judy Davis (A Passage to Indie, Ratched, Impromptu).
The first season of Netflix’s imported series Glitch is so well done, it’s easy to compare it to the first season of TV’s Lost–another genre-bending series that held enough back that viewers never quite knew the secrets behind the strange happenings to an unusual assemblage of characters. That’s the good and bad part about Glitch, because by the end of the second season the story loses its way and ultimately doesn’t deliver the payoff the first season deserved. That said, a great cast of Australian actors, including some familiar faces from the Star Wars franchise, and great mystery and intrigue ultimately make the series worth watching despite its drawbacks. Something wicked this way comes–again–to Australia, co-starring Emma Booth, the lead in the Starz series The Gloaming. When officer James Hayes appears one night at a cemetery in his small town of Yoorana, Victoria, who could know that people would begin pulling themselves out of their graves? Is this a zombie show or something with more to say about humans and the world? It’s not the payoff but the journey that is so much fun in this 2015-2019, three-season, 18-episode tale now streaming on Netflix.
Something wicked this way comes–or at least is coming by way of Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of Australia. The stark beauty of Tasmania is the best feature of the first episode of the new Starz original series The Gloaming (which means twilight or dusk), from mountain tops to rolling weather changes to waterfalls. But that’s where the beauty ends as a detective from Melbourne is called in to join a woman from his past who is also a cop, both to investigate a murder tied to the death of his girlfriend long ago. It all takes place in a part of the world most Westerners will find entirely curious and new. Written and directed by Victoria Madden (The Kettering Incident),The Gloaming begins this week with a slow-paced introduction that explains little and throws a lot at the viewer. This isn’t a travelogue for Tasmania, as each image seems connected to some kind of evil lurking around the next corner, like a new take on The Wicker Man.
