Reckless review: the best Australian comedy of the year

Absolute dynamite together, Mystery Road star Tasma Walton and Fires actor Hunter Page-Lochard will blow up your screen as squabbling siblings June and Charlie in Reckless.

Grudgingly loving, though semi-estranged and oft-outright battling, we meet them drunk-driving home at night through Freemantle’s docks after attending a wedding together.

June’s drunker and Charlie’s behind the wheel of her fancy car, hanging shit on her for being too stingy to drop cash in the newly married couple’s wishing well – even though she’s a high-flying lawyer to his cash-strapped record store owner.

Then it happens.

THUMP. A stranger in the night sails over the car roof. ‘He’s probably just winded,’ Charlie offers, not entirely convinced, suggesting they call the cops. But June’s having none of it. Her sharp legal mind instantly assesses how bad this looks for them when there’s no pulse.

Two Black folks, both a bit boozy, have hit and killed an old white dude.

Charlie will get done for driving under the influence resulting in a death. June will be criminally liable for pressuring him to do so. Charlie’s co-parenting his young daughter, Kiah (a delightful Maddie Young), and her mum (Perry Mooney) already wants to move her to Sydney. He’ll lose access.

‘And for what?’ snaps June. ‘Because some old white guy went walkabout in the middle of the road?’

Watch the Reckless trailer

Reckless: In too deep

That darkly comic line lacerating this morally thorny show opener will tell you exactly what register this Reckless misadventure, a First Nations-led production for NITV/SBS, is shooting for (or running over).

Squabbling like territorially outraged magpies, the panicked siblings (mostly enforced by June) decide to do an I Know What You Did Last Summer. Both that 1997 cult horror classic and its recent requel (reboot and sequel) of the same name pursue the consequences after a gaggle of boozy teens hit and run. But whereas the victim in that franchise survives, meting out vigilante justice, the ‘old white guy’ here is definitely a goner. So, June and Charlie drag his broken body into his nearby home – the address was on his driving licence – and deposit him, lifeless, in an armchair. June even spies a doctor’s letter referring to his terminal pancreatic cancer and reasons that, ‘We saved him months of bone-crushing pain and have given him the gift of a quick death’.

Not that June and Charlie are in the clear. Reckless, co-written by Kodie Bedford (Mystery Road) and Stuart Page (Total Control) and engrossingly directed by Beck Cole (High Country), wouldn’t be much of a show if they were.

June may play it cool, project managing the cover-up, but in the bathroom, she’s obsessively scrubbing dirt and flaked car paint off her hands like Lady Macbeth. All while trying to keep her mindfulness-obsessed, art gallery owning partner, Kate (Jane Harber) off the scent. Which is easier said than done when Kate’s already suspicious thanks to June’s extramarital misbehaviour.

Charlie hasn’t slept a wink and is wigging out way more than June. Not that that stops him from crushing on the dead man’s niece, Sharne, as played by The Survivors star Jessica De Gouw, with a knowing wink of a plummy Brit accent that sounds like she swiped it from Mary Poppins’s magical carpet bag.

June positively encourages this wild swing, mostly just to keep Sharne happy until she inherits and promptly buggers off back to Blighty. But June cracks it when Charlie gets in way too deep and Sharne extends her stay, further complicating the siblings’ get-away-with-it plan.

‘What the actual fuck?’ June hollers. ‘The connection is you killed her uncle.’

Reckless: Deadloch droll

Not unlike Deadloch, Reckless (which is adapted from the Scottish mystery thriller Guilt by Neil Forsyth, produced by Expectation Entertainment and Happy Tramp North for BBC) leans more dottily droll than SBS’s rep for brutally austere Scandinoir. Cole and the writers revel in June and Charlie’s increasingly daft cover-up of the cluster-fucking mess they’ve made infinitely worse.

Gloriously silly curveballs spiral every which way across four frantic episodes, with Freo apparently as full of secrets as Twin Peaks. There’s more to Sharne than she’s letting on. And June inexplicably fakes being a trumpet player to explain why she’s invested in securing Sharne’s fortune from her brass-blowing, six-feet-under uncle.

Read: Annabel Crabb’s Civic Duty review: snappily paced series explores how Australian voting works

Nosy (and pretty nasty) neighbours led by Tracy Mann’s Valda know way more than they’re letting on, plus there are shady gangsters tied up in June’s not entirely upstanding legal firm, with rent-a-bruiser Steve Le Marquand (Penny Lane is Dead) always a welcome screen presence.

A fishy business from which June’s just fired Roddy also features, as does a drunken private investigator played by fabulously charismatic Top End Bub star Clarence Ryan – except he turns out to be way better at his job than June realised.

Throw in cinematographer Eric Murray Lui’s liberal use of sassy split-screen sequences and suitably funky needle drops on music supervisor Allegra Caldwell’s banging soundtrack, and all this mayhem adds up to an utter hoot. One that’s ably corralled by Cole, making chaos look easy, and expertly stitched together by editors James Manché and Kasra Rassoulzadegan.

Championed by the sparkling energy of Walton and Page-Lochard, Reckless rocks up as one of the best times you’ll have with Australian television this year.

Reckless premieres on Wednesday 12 November at 8:30pm AEDT on SBS, NITV and SBS On Demand.

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