Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends "one of the best television series of the year" - THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH (Justin Kurzel, Australia, 2025)

Jacob Elordi

Turning a book as detailed as Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize winner into a film or a television adaptation isn’t easy. There’s a lot to get in. 

But this exemplary and extraordinary five-part screen version comes pretty close.

Even Flanagan’s brooding literary style is successfully created through an alchemical combination of Justin Kurzel’s hypnotic direction, Shaun Grant’s restrained screenplay, Sam Chiplin’s atmospheric cinematography; Jed Kurzel’s aching score and the note-perfect work from the cast. 

Following the structure of Flanagan’s novel, Shaun Grant splits the life of the central character Dorrigo Evans into three timelines.

Early in the Second World War, stationed in Adelaide, Dorrigo (Jacob Elordi) strays from his wealthy fiancé Ella (Olivia DeJonge), to have an affair with his uncle’s younger wife Amy (Odessa Young) before he ships off to Syria. 

Later captured in south-east Asia, he serves time as a surgeon and an Australian prisoner of war in the notorious hell-hole of the Burma Railway (aka The Death Railway). At 77 years of age in the late 1980s, Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds), now long married to Ella (Heather Mitchell), is still a surgeon, but has become a celebrated and reluctant war hero, permanently haunted by the hidden demons of post-traumatic stress.  

Kurzel and Grant don’t blink from showing three of the major horrors Flanagan describes in his novel. There’s a beheading, somehow ritualistically portrayed and excused by a Japanese soldier as some sort of an aesthetic, energizing gift to the Emperor. There’s an operation to amputate a gangrenous leg using little more than a knife, a saw, a spoon and some string; and then a vicious hours-long beating to death of Dorrigo’s great friend Darky Gardiner (Thomas Weatherall) while the POWs are forced to watch.

Richard Flanagan

Not all of Darky Gardiner’s story from Flanagan’s book has made it to the screen, however. In the book, the 77-year-old Dorrigo Evans talks with his brother Tom Evans (not in the television series), and Tom tells him he once had an affair with his next-door neighbour’s wife Mrs Jackie Maguire, “a blackfella, you know”. The offspring, an illegitimate boy brought up by “a family called Gardiner”, later “died during the war. My only son and I never met him”. Very late in his life, Dorrigo learns Darky Gardiner, his loyal mate in the jungle, so viciously and callously murdered by the Japanese, was his nephew.

The Burma Railway was designated as a war crime committed by the Japanese and 32 of their military were sentenced to death. A total of 90,000 south-east Asians died during construction (Malaya Tamils, Javanese, Burmese, Thai) and 12,000 Allied soldiers (British, Australian, Dutch, New Zealanders and a Canadian).

Dorrigo Evans, as confused and messy in love as he is working to prevent death from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, cholera and murder by the Japanese, is a triumphal creation from Flanagan. The writer’s father was on The Death Railroad, under the command of the legendary surgeon Sir Ernest Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, whose medical work and leadership capacities clearly inspired the character of Dorrigo.

If this all sounds like too hard a watch, you’d be missing out on what will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the best television series of the year. From anywhere. 

Ciaran Hinds

Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop grapples with SWARM (Donald Glover, Janine Nabers, USA, 2023)

Donald Glover

The dramatic centre to this new series from Donald Glover and Janine Nabers (Atlanta) is a toxic pop-music fan known as Dre. 

Dre is willing to do anything – and she really means anything - to protect her Goddess-like heroine, the singer Ni’Jah (a fictional version of Beyoncé). 

Her particular targets are Ni’Jah’s social media haters and she becomes a serial killer, travelling the country, stalking and murdering people who have dissed her favourite singer.

It’s satirical, but based in real life in the USA where the mental health instability of toxic media fans has no equivalent in this country or any other that I know of (except maybe India). 

I’ve only seen this behaviour once, twenty-eight years ago, at the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards (of all places). I was there as the guest of the Dean of UCLA’s film school, himself a film critic on public radio.

Arriving at the venue, I was very surprised by the huge crowd of fans being kept behind barriers by the LAPD. This was a Critics Awards Night? Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder were among the guests and when it was over, the four of us found ourselves together as we waited for the valets to bring around the cars. The crowd of fans had grown decidedly larger, more vocal and emotionally volatile and were threatening to break through the protective barrier. 

Billy Wilder took one look at them and decided it would be quicker and safer to fetch his own car. He left Jack Lemmon waiting with the two of us.

Lemmon, much smaller in stature than I’d ever imagined, was clearly very frightened and asked if he could hide between us to avoid the crowd spotting him. Wilder, perhaps even smaller than Lemmon, finally arrived in his enormous Rolls Royce and they left. 

The crowd, yelling and screaming, moved on in search of more celebrities to harass. 

It had no similarity with the award night of the Film Critics Circle of Australia at the Paddington Town Hall. 

Watching Swarm, I realized I knew so little about Beyoncé, I didn’t even know she had amassed 32 Grammys from 88 nominations.

I didn’t know the name Swarm was a direct reference to Beyoncé’s fan base known as Beyhive; or that “stan” is short for “standom”, (itself short for superfan); or that Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles physically attacked Beyoncé’s husband, the rapper Jay-Z, in an elevator in 2014 while Beyoncé passively watched on.

I am not sure my life is enriched by knowing any of this, but I am indebted to Time Magazine’s “Comprehensive Guide to all the Beyoncé references in Swarm”. Apparently, there are 32 of them spread across 6 of the 7 episodes.

The only time I remember taking any interest in Beyoncé was hearing she’d made a surprising reference to the Black Panthers during her half-time show at the 2016 Super Bowl. So, I consider myself entirely unqualified to comment on much of Swarm, in particular the pop culture references.

But I do know Swarm is a very different kettle of fish to Donald Glover’s previous outing Atlanta. That was three seasons of seriously witty, droll and incisive commentary on race relations in America, with a host of sympathetic characters brought to life by Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz and others.

"...chilling performance..." Dominique Fishback as Dre 

Swarm does have one chilling performance - from Dominique Fishback as the superfan or “stan” Dre - but there are no other recurring roles. The rest are caricatures rather than fully-formed characters, and all light-weight as a result.

Pop performer Billie Eilish does her best in episode 6, but is stuck with one of those let’s-laugh-at-the-silly-New-Age-hippie roles.

Billie Eilish

In Atlanta, Glover provided a hugely entertaining twist to systemic racism and there was no escaping the seriousness of the underlying messages.

For Swarm, his own rap career as “Childish Gambino” has clearly given him experience with the toxic “stans”. In his 2018 rap song, This Is America, there are references to violent social media along with massacres in schools and churches, black-face Minstrels and Jim Crows. It won four Grammys including Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

What’s missing from Swarm is the counterpoint he found in Atlanta – there’s almost no comedy or no empathetic characters behind his message. It makes for very strident viewing.

Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends WEWORK: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Dollar Unicorn (Jed Rothstein, USA, 2021)

It takes a while to accept what you are watching is actually true. 

Adam Neumann - an Israeli, whose only qualifications appear to be a kibbutz education, a stint in a business school in New York and starting a children’s clothing company - becomes the co-founder and the public face of WeWork. It’s euphemistically described as a “commercial real estate company” but in reality, it’s just an “office-space”start-up. 

Neumann’s ‘schtick’ is to lease real estate, trick it up with paint and furniture, divvy the space up into smaller lots, then re-lease it to idealistic millennials who want to change the world with their tech startups. He provides them with a love-in environment, including communal living spaces called WeLive that come fully equipped with ready-made friends and the carrot of likely romantic relationships. 

Adam Neumann, WeWork

He also holds his own annual Woodstock-like ‘Summer Camp’ for his We followers – seminars until 4pm, then as much alcohol as they can drink followed by rave parties and music concerts.

After ten years of operation, WeWork was valued at a staggering $47 billion and issued an IPO (initial public offering). It was a catastrophic failure and by the time the IPO was withdrawn, the valuation had crashed to $10 billion. 

Neumann was forced out as CEO, given a $1.7 billion payout, a $185 million consultancy fee and whatever else he could extract from WeCompany before his resignation.

Only in America, as my mother would have said. 

One of the great omissions in this doco is how Neumann managed to raise such investment. The gullible millennials – and it’s painful to hear some of them talk of their gullibility – are one thing, but the biggest venture capital investor in the world, SoftBank from Japan? They chucked in $13 billion. For an office-space leasing company? That operates on bonhomie, booze, communal living and all-night parties? 

The only real explanation given is FOMO or ‘fear of missing out’ on the next big tech success like an Amazon, Uber or Facebook. 

Earlier this year Apple TV+ announced a forthcoming program on the rise and fall of WeWork to be called WeCrashed.

Venture capitalists call start-ups valued at over $1 billion “unicorns”. Luckily, Neumann’s WeCompany only managed WeWork and WeLive. WeGrow (kindergarten education) almost took off as did RiseByWe (wellness, now permanently closed). On the books he had plans for WeSleep (the mind boggles), WeSail (boggles again) and WeBank (unimaginable). Oh, dear.