You have to like a drama that doesn’t mess around. Two minutes into Reckless and June (Tasma Walton) and Charlie (Hunter Page-Lochard) have already run over an old man seemingly out for a late night stroll down the middle of a suburban street. After the accident, the pace doesn’t slow down; there’s a lot of ground to cover in the next four episodes, and crime waits for nobody.
Reckless is the latest in a small but steady stream of local series from SBS, a network that punches well above its weight when it comes to quality storytelling. They’ve recently settled into a pattern of broadcasting a couple of dramas a year, without a dud in the schedule.
If there’s a secret to their success, it’s in looking for stories that are outside the usual for local productions but aside from that, all bets are off.
Australian dramas on SBS – quick links
SBS steps off the beaten path
The fun and frothy While the Men Are Away was a lighthearted look at Women’s Land Army on the home front in the second world war that focused on female friendships (and sometimes more than friendships) while the patriarchy was (mostly) distracted.
Firebite was a vampire series that portrayed bloodsuckers as Australia’s original sin, with Indigenous vampire hunters keeping the menace at bay. And the recent reboot of Erotic Stories was … well, you can probably figure that one out.
That’s not to say there aren’t a few themes to pick up on. If drama’s your thing, SBS’s streaming service SBS On Demand is the best value money can buy (and not just because it’s free). Pulling in programs from across the globe, one of their big crowd-pleasers is the wide range on offer of Nordic Noir – the crime genre that swept the globe around the turn of the century and just keeps on going.
Australian drama that offers a fresh take on crime
So with the more traditional mystery side of crime covered – though the noir line-up on SBS also features a number of more offbeat crime stories – in recent years many of their local dramas stayed on brand as far as crime goes, only to use the genre as a hook to look at a range of wider issues. Which as crime fans know, is something the genre does best (alongside all the crime).
The 2023 series Safe Home focuses on a young PR specialist who leaves her Melbourne corporate gig to work with a family violence legal centre. There she encounters people fleeing domestic violence and struggling with a woefully underfunded system while dealing with issues closer to home than she might have thought.
Both a thoughtful, slow burn drama and a way to shine a spotlight on a side of the justice system usually overlooked, Safe Home was one of the drama highlights of the year.
Definitely different in tone but still in the same wheelhouse is Swift Street, a street smart series about a father-daughter team who turn to crime (not that they were all that far from it in the first place) to pay back dad’s $26,000 debt. She’s mostly into small scale scams and hustles; he’d be past his prime if he ever had one in the first place. The pace is relentless, much like the forces against them.
Even when SBS does tackle a more traditional crime series, there’s always something new on offer. True Colours is about an Indigenous detective in the Northern Territory whose investigation into a suspicious car accident requires her to return to the community she left behind. What she uncovers goes global – the global art world to be specific, where Aboriginal art is prized but the creators are often left behind.
SBS drama Reckless flips the whodunnit on its head
Which brings us back to Reckless. Pretty much all the classics of Australian crime have focused on criminals, not catching them, like Blue Murder, Chopper and Mr Inbetween. We do our best with characters at their worst. Reckless slots in nicely to that list. The mystery here isn’t whodunnit, but how those who did do it are going to get away with it.
Read: Reckless review: the best Australian comedy of the year
If Charlie and June (they’re brother and sister) had simply turned themselves into the police after the accident … well, we wouldn’t have a series for one thing. But there’s also a number of good reasons – all outlined in the moment by June, who just happens to be a lawyer – why handing themselves in would be a bad idea.
They’re driving home from a wedding, and while sober-but-stoned Charlie (who’s driving) will probably go to jail, the tipsy June (whose car it is) will certainly be disbarred and lose her firm. That’s a lot to give up for someone they don’t even know, even if they did just kill him.
Reckless is a series where people are constantly talking themselves into bad decisions. Sometimes they have good intentions; other times it seems like if they just do one more bad thing then all their problems will go away. Just to be clear, this never happens.
The whole point of this series is that things can and will spiral out of control at every possible opportunity. Especially if you expect organised crime figures to make your problems vanish.
Creators Kodie Bedford and Stuart Page (adapting the Scottish series Guilt) keep things moving by having the characters reveal themselves through action. We know Charlie is a nice guy because he drags the corpse of the man he killed back into his house and sets him up in a comfy chair. We also know he’s maybe a bit too nice because he then puts the TV on (Grand Designs, good choice) and that the world he’s about to fall into is going to chew him up.
As for June, she seems like a ballbuster. But the next morning when she finds dirt on her fancy shoes, her frantic washing of them – and her hands – suggests someone putting up a front. So as her relationship with Kate (Jane Harber) starts to fall apart, and as she tries to solve her spiralling problems by reaching out to the worst possible people, we know there’s a softer side there … somewhere.
Maybe there is a link between SBS’s local series after all: they all put character first.
