If there has been one major change to my viewing habits in recent years it has to be the amount of limited episode streaming series I watch . Series TV passed me by back in the day. I’ve never seen an episode of The Simpsons let alone all those other network staples. Somehow or other though I’ve got hooked on more than a few things that only go out on the streaming services and which you can binge watch in huge dollops. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad were examples. I only got to them years after they began. Now I hunt them down though I haven’t reached the stage of repeat viewings. One run through of every ep of Spiral or The Bureau has been enough. There always more out there and some, like The Man in the High Castle took a while to get through, which doesn’t help the comprehension of the very twisty network narrative plots. But here are eleven shows I watched this year.
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| Richard Gere, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Fassbender The Agency |
THE AGENCY (Created and written by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, based on The Bureau/Le Bureau des Légendes by Eric Rochant, Paramount +). The Bureau is one of the great ones. The Agency less so. But it has its own charms and a superior cast (Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere and a late appearance by Hugh Bonneville which might develop into a much bigger part in the already announced second series).
Solid plotting but not in the ranks of the best spy stories. It stays fairly close to Eric Rochant’s original, a drawback rather than a plus I suspect. The original, just by the way, was once described to me by a Canberra denizen as the most authentic picture of what modern spies do he had ever seen.
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| Brian Tyree Henry, Wagner Moura, Dope Thief |
DOPE THIEF (Created by Peter Craig, based on a novel by Dennis Tafoya, Apple TV, 2025, thanks Rod Bishop for the steer to this one) In the grimy backblocks of Philadelphia a couple of lowlifes (Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura) have a steady sideline in impersonating Drug Enforcement Agency officers, busting small time drug dealers and making off, only, with any cash on the premises. Needless to say one such goes badly wrong, they hit a much bigger operation that involves heavyweight gangs and undercover DEA officers and all shit rains down on them throughout the eight episodes. It has the grimmest set of characters, few with a solitary redeeming virtue. (Spoiler Alert) Moura’s character is killed off. Amazingly there’s the slightest moment of hope at the very end which suggests a possible series 2 but no news there yet.
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| Beth Goddard, Tom Cullen, The Gold |
THE GOLD Series 2 (Written by Neil Forsyth, BBC production. Series one went out in 2023 and was based on a remarkable London airport robbery where a bunch of crooks looking for a modest haul happened to come across about £26 million worth of gold. Needless to say the police were not amused. Hugh Bonneville played the lead copper and Jack Lowden the leading crook. Series two of The Gold is speculative. I’m quoting The Guardian here:” At the end of the first series of The Gold, it dawned on the officers of the Met’s Flying Squad that for all of their multiple investigations into the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983, they had only ever been chasing half of the stolen bullion. Arriving two years after its highly entertaining predecessor, series two sets off with an irresistible premise: what exactly happened to the rest of it?... a note at the beginning explains that the (second) series is based on both real events and theories as to where the loot went.”
No Jack Lowden this time. The chief spiv is Tony Palmer (Tom Cullen), who got away with it in series one but this time the net closes in. The prolific Scots writer Neil Forsythe also provided the starting point for Reckless, q.v. below.
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| Katharine Kelly, In Flight |
IN FLIGHT (Co-created by Mike Walden and Adam Randall, directed by Chris Baugh) Set in Belfast this once centres on Jo (Katherine Kelly) an air hostess whose son gets caught smuggling drugs in Bulgaria. She becomes entangled with the gang smuggling the drugs and is forced to become a drug mule herself. Six eps. A Channel 4 UK series (copy supplied by a friend) but apparently headed for SBS and its SBS On Demand streaming service. Watch it there if you don’t mind the constant distraction of advertisements you cant ignore. Many of the ads are just promos for other titles on the stream. A good program selection but mostly easily avoided because of the way stuff is shown.
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| Tasma Walton, Hunter Page-Lochard, Reckless |
RECKLESS (Lead writer /creator Kodie Bedford, NITV production for SBS and the BBC. Bedford is an Indigenous woman, slowly assembling a high quality series of credits writing for episode TV. The director is Beck Cole another Indigenous woman with a seriously good debut feature, Here I Am, and some exceptional TV drama and documentary work on her C.V. Reckless adapts the Scottish TV drama Guilt to a Fremantle and Perth locale and plays fast and loose with the relationships. Brother and lesbian sister are in entanglement after entanglement. The plot twists are funny as well as clever. Tasma Walton and Hunter Page-Lochard as the blackfella brother and sister, she being of the view that her brothers and sisters get far too much doled out to them by government, he finally having it dawn on him his business is a cog in a criminal enterprise, are great character creations. There was a second series of Guilt in the UK. Let’s hope for more here.
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| Mark Coles-Smith, Tuuli Narkle, Mystery Road Origin |
MYSTERY ROAD ORIGIN Series 2 (Written by Stephen McGregor, Jada Alberts, Erica Glynn, Samuel Paynter, Gary Hamaguchi, Directed by Wayne Blair, Jub Clerc, ABC-TV and ABC I-View, BBC) Ivan Sen’s redoubtable, phlegmatic, take no bullshit detective Jay Swan is now up to its sixth iteration. After two movies and three prior series, two with Aaron Pedersen and now two with Mark Coles-Smith devoted to the early detective story of the young Jay. In this one, set in WA forest country, he has a heavily pregnant wife (Tuuli Narkle) and his cop colleague (Robyn Malcolm) is a lazy female sergeant who calls him, until he snaps, “Boney”. You have to go a long way back to know the meaning of that one. Clarence Ryan who plays Jay’s brother Sputty is a great character actor. He‘s also brilliant as Roddy in Reckless. The two series made by Indigenous film-makers this year are as good as it gets for Australian TV.
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| Sascha Alexander Gersak, Petra Schmidt–Schaller The Marnow Murders |
THE MARNOW MURDERS Series 1 (Written by Holger Karsten Schmidt, Directed by Andreas Herzog). Marnow is a town in what used to be the DDR. This element provides lashings of plot and skullduggery and dirty dealing because the background is the old DDR’s willingness to conduct medical experiments on whomever can be pressed into service. Detective Elling (played with much sweaty, unkempt and unshaven relish by Sascha Alexander Gersak) gets a case to investigate a fairly gruesome murder. Elling has problems with a wife he suspects is having an affair with her boss. He has two offsiders both of them with some eccentricities. Lonas Mendt (Petra Schmidt–Schaller) lives in a motor home and Soren Jasper (Anton Rubstov) has a fiancée but is still quickly in the romantic thrall of Lona. Sub-plots abound, chief of which is Elling tempted by an offer of a bribe. There is quite a bit of monkey business with that brown paper bag. Crime stories which delve into digging up the past are staples of the genre but the extra dimension of yielding up the secrets of the East German regime adds some extra oomph. It’s another one streaming via the advertisement filled SBS On Demand and if you can handle that element it’s worth a look. Series two awaits.
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| Gary Oldman, Slow Horses |
SLOW HORSES Series 5 (Showrunner Will Smith, Written by Will Smith, Morwenna Banks, Jonny Stockwood, Mark Denton. Edward Docx, Sean Gray, Directed by James Hawes, Jeremy Lovering, Saul Metzstein, Adam Randall). Meticulously working through Mick Herron’s novels, one book per series, some say it turns them into cartoon versions of the books, others, moi included, think they are knockouts. Australian company Seesaw seems to be the lead producer but some credit for the rigor of them might also go to one of the credited producers Graham Yost, whose talent for smart episode TV has previously been on show with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Justified and is also on show in Sneaky Pete. Screens on Apple TV.
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| Jack Gleeson, Safe Harbour |
SAFE HARBOUR (Created and written by Mark Williams, Directed by Mark Williams, Arne Toonen, Inti Calfat, Dick Verheve. For some reason the creators don’t bother to explain, the drug trade in Rotterdam is being fought over by, on one side, the son (Jack Gleeson) and daughter (Charlie Murphy) of an Irish drug dealer (Colm Meaney) who mostly prefers to stay at home and fuss over his prize horse stud until it comes to the crunch round about the second last ep. On the other side is an equally young gang leader of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin. The Irish siblings are a complicated pair. The sister is running the show. The brother is a murderous, conscienceless thug. She’s gorgeous. He’s not even remotely good looking, a visage made worse by affecting a wispy moustache. The Irish pair first enlist and then enforce the help of a pair of young computer hackers (Alfie Allen and Martin Lakemeier) who work out how to bust into the security system of the Rotterdam port. It sounds, and is, wildly farfetched but it has a certain edgy, twisty, unpredictable quality and a level of violence to rival Gangs of London. Streaming on SBS On Demand.
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| Giovanni Ribisi, Sneaky Pete |
SNEAKY PETE Series 1 – (Created by David Shore and Bryan Cranston, showrunner for series Graham Yost, separate director for each ep including Bryan Cranston (ep 8)) The pilot was made in 2015 and the series in 2017. It was followed by two subsequent series that I await with some anticipation. Con man Marius Josipovic (Giovanni Ribisi) assumes the identity of his prison cellmate, Pete. He heads for Pete’s domicile and fools his relatives. He’s taking refuge from a casino operator/gangster played by Cranston who wants both money and revenge and is not averse to chopping off the brother’s fingers to get Marius’s attention. As with much else described here when you want to run your story through ten eps (as here) and approximately 500 minutes then you have to have lots of dizzying twists, turns, misdirects, cliffhangers. Enough to satisfy Louis Feuillade in fact.
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| Martha Plympton, Mark Rufalo, Task |
TASK – (Created by Brad Inglesby. Written by Brad Inglesby with additional writers for some eps, Directed by Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield. Made for HBO. Streaming where HBO streams including Prime.) In the backblocks of Pennsylvania Tom Brandis, once a Catholic priest is seeing out his days as an FBI agent by running booths at careers exhibitions. But the FBI is shorthanded and a major operation is mounted when some maverick crooks start robbing a series of drug houses run by a bikie gang, The gang are not happy at all and they suspect they have a mole of some kind who is tipping off the robbers, a couple of garbagemen named Robbie and Cliff. Are we seeing a riff on Dope Thief ( q.v.) or vice versa.Tom has the job of quickly assembling a team. Needless to say the team bring a bundle of personal neuroses to the story. Mark Rufalo, all shaggy and downtrodden with a family backstory that interrupts the action, is terrific as always. Series 2 is promised.
For 2026 a new Mick Herron adaptation, Down Cemetery Road already beckons. As does a big catch up on Sneaky Pete and follow up series of Task, Marnow Murders, The Agency and Slow Horses. Perhaps we can also hope for another series of Justified just to top things off.
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