Criminal Minds - A quick run through eleven series of crime, thriller and spy stories that went out on TV and the streaming services.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Streaming on Stan - Dylan River and Tanith Glynn-Maloney ace it with THOU SHALT NOT STEAL (8 eps, Australia, 2024)

Miranda Otto, Sherry-Lee Watson, Will McDonald, Noah Taylor

It's only wild surmise of course but I reckon if Dylan River and Tanith Glynn-Maloney were to go on Mastermind their specialty subject would have to be The Films of Joel & Ethan Coen. They have learned the lessons well, probably following them up with intensive scrutiny of the TV series spinoffs of Fargo.

Not to be sneezed at in a time when too many of our film-makers, often working in pairs, cant get beyond repeating (a neutral term intended) the tropes of mostly hack horror movies or the more violent moments of Quentin Tarantino. 

In Thou Shalt Not Steal a  runaway from 'juvie", as a naive local cop calls it, Robyn (Sherry-Lee Watson) steals a taxi and heads for her dad's home after busting him out of hospital. Dad is dying and wants to give her father, whom Robyn doesn't even know is alive, a Cup. In pursuit are the authorities and the taxi driver. ...at least for starters. They start off somewhere in the Northern Territory before the action shifts to Coober Pedy and then to Adelaide. 

By about episode four it dawns on you  that there has still been absolutely no explanation as to the source of the bag of money got into the boot of the taxi ...and there never will be unless you assume that prostitutes can earn such amounts in the outback and keep it in travelling bags in the boot of their car. We know it's causing Miranda Otto's taxi driver a lot of grief and to do some rather revolting things in cahoots with Robert (Noah Taylor, seedily brilliant) who's a fake preacher who otherwise spends his life sly grogging to remote blackfella communities.... and jacking off in his caravan. 

Director River and his co-creator Glynn-Maloney are very good at doing some slight time shifts and some brilliant changes of perspective, a Coen brothers trope. Thus the various introductions of Robert's son Gidge (Will McDonald) almost always grab you with a start - the 'suicide attempt', the discovery in the back seat, the pissing scene around the tree and the appearance trussed up in the car boot are just ripper bits of comedy, superbly timed and staged to maximum effect.  If you want an example (small spoiler alert) it occurs with the scene with shotgun in  the back seat. 

The series rips through its eight eps at just 27 minutes or less each. 

It's the best thing done in these parts all year and I was somewhat amazed that Stan backed it until the credits reveal that Amanda Duthie is now running this part of Stan's business. Another impressive notch in her career as a commissioner and producer.

Streaming on Binge, Foxtel Now - Rod Bishop highly recommends the Australian rom-com COLIN FROM ACCOUNTS (Patrick Brammall, Harriet Dyer, Australia, 2022)

This is a surprise - a genuinely original Australian rom-com series that isn’t afraid to be edgy. It’s also keenly observed and effortlessly alternates between being very funny and painfully poignant.

Like many rom-coms, it has a “meet-cute” set-up and this is all over in the first five minutes. Gordon (Patrick Brammall) is a hipster micro-brewer in his 40s and is driving to work in his vintage Toyota Cressida through inner city Sydney. He encounters a pedestrian, the 29-year-old medical student Ashley (Harriet Dyer). 

Distracted, he hits a dog. It’s badly injured and, guilt-struck, Ashley and Gordon take it to a vet where they bond and decide to share responsibility for the now “high-needs” dog, which they name Colin (from Accounts).

From here, the real-life husband and wife team of Dyer and Brammall take on a plethora of issues, seemingly unafraid of much at all. They include intergenerational love; unbearable parents; woke-jokes; sleepwalking that ends in embarrassing urination; inappropriate trans jokes; ‘husband stitches’ added during female perineum-repair; obnoxious Millennials; feral animal shelters; gender-fluidity; cancer survivor collectives; ‘dexy’ snorting; ketamine consumption; and mistakes in texting dick pics.

Patrick Brammall (l), Colin from Accounts (c), Harriet Dyer

Despite the edgy material, Dyer and Brammall successfully maintain the rom-com format and the chemistry between them stays palpable throughout the eight 30-minute episodes. There’s also a lot of laugh-out-loud humour.

And, much like the hilarious Millennial party that takes over Gordon’s micro-brewery for Ashley’s 30^th birthday in episode seven, Colin from Accounts is definitely binge-worthy viewing. 

On Channel 7 and streaming on 7Plus - Rod Bishop recommends AUSTRALIAN GANGSTER (Gregor Jordan, Fadia Abboud, Australia, 2021)

Delayed from its original release in 2018 due to “legal problems”, Australian Gangster sprawls over close to three hours and depicts the life and times of real-life Sydney “underworld figure” Pasquale ‘Pat’ Barbaro (Alexander Bertrand).

Known as an “Instagangster”, Pat is portrayed as a health-conscious gym-junkie who worries about the sugar content in yogurt, drinks low-carb beer and isn’t afraid to order a latte in front of his murderous Sydney gangbanger mates. He drives an ostentatious Lamborghini, plots murders, snorts and deals coke, loves his tatts, posts on Instagram in poses with assorted party “skanks” and is progressively sleep-deprived after having mistakenly shown Child’s Play to his two young children who now wake up screaming all night long.

The “legal problems” appear to have been issues with depicting real-life figures. Apart from Barbaro, other characters from real-life include Pat’s wife, the long-suffering Melinda Barbaro (Louisa Mignone); the height-challenged Brothers-For-Life gang member Mohammed Hamzy aka “Little Crazy” (Rahel Romahn); and Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Barbaro (Steve Bastoni), Pat’s criminal dad who once shared a prison term with his son, after the two of them were convicted of running an interstate amphetamine ring. Thanks to my mother’s favourite read New Ideafor this information.

Sydney’s well-known suburban driveway assassinations; the Lebanese, Pacific Islander and Italian Mafia gangs; and coked-up day-and-night parties on Harbour cruises all get an airing, as does a fascinating corrupt construction company designed to wash drug money through the hiring of cranes on gigantic CBD sites. There’s one too many drives across the Anzac Bridge and too many scenes set in an apartment with a point-blank view of the Bridge for the New Year’s Eve fireworks.

Much is made of Dad and Son’s Italian heritage from the Barbaro ‘ndrina clan of the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta crime and mafia mob.

Australian Gangster, written and co-directed by Gregor Jordan is something of a return to form for the filmmaker after his disastrous attempt to bring Tim Winton’s Dirt Music to the screen. It’s recommended for anyone with an interest in Barbaro and his ilk.

Across the three-hours, there are tonal inconsistences and some character relationships that fall flat (Bertrand and Bastoni don’t make a convincing father and son). Jordan’s research has obviously been exhaustive and his dialogue is peppered with great Aussie slang including the much neglected “cracking the shits” and the perhaps over-used “rooting sluts”.  

On several occasions, Miranda Kerr is spoken of as a venerated divine goddess. You don’t get that in many local television series.