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.

On SBS and streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison enjoys NO KIDS/SIN HIJOS (Ariel Winograd, Spain, 2015)

The agreeable production line entertainment features that were the backbone of movie-going most of my life have all but vanished. I watched The Fall Guy for which a couple of name stars in a comedy-crime piece wasn’t enough. They had to add-in takes where the camera follows a character up four flights before dropping them down a lift well, dialogue about split screen that was done in split screen, Sydney Harbour locations, multi rolling cars and setting the lead on fire. 

I came home wanting a break from all this overkill and the TV put up SBS doing something called No Kids, which turned out to be Sin Hijos, a nine year old Spanish movie with the immensely watchable Maribel Verdú and Diego Peretti, anticipating director Ariel Winograd’s line of polished, agreeable romcoms, the 2022 Hoy se arregla el mundo /Today We Fix the World, 2020’s El robo del siglo / The Heist Of The Century, and the much re-treaded 2017 Mamá se fue de viaje / 10 Days Without Mum. I find that No Kids also was re-made in 2020.

 

No Kids has that cycle’s nice mean streak. Hangdog Perretti now shares the custody of his nine year old daughter Guadalupe Manen, juggling that with running Cabau’s Music Store, the inherited family business, when who should walk into the shop but his decade cherished crush Maribel, who doesn’t remember him. She’s irresistible. When she proves multi-lingual, he asks which she speaks and she says “Many – badly, like the Pope.” There’s only one problem. She hates children – a demo in the park where a baby bursts out crying on seeing Maribel but beams at Peretti. Frantic exertions follow, converting his flat into an economically furnished bachelor pad when she visits and back when Manen comes home. Diego passes the kid off as his sister by a long-lived dad. At one stage, Peretti is stuck on a pier collecting a ship load of keyboards and desperately tries to find someone in the family who can pick up his daughter from music practice, finally only left with Maribel. He rushes home and his first question is “Did you kill her?” In the nicest passage. Manen figures it out and starts running the operation.

 

Diego Peretti, Maribel Verdú Sin Hijos/No Kids 

Winograd’s act is juxtaposing his comedians with children. Characteristically in 10 Days Without Mum, his daughter warns dad Perretti (again) that if he fires the so nice baby sitter, she’ll learn to drive and run him over.

 

No Kids is nicely developed – Perretti’s ex-wife’s kung fu instructor new husband is glimpsed in the background showing Bruce Lee moves to brother Martín Piroyansky, the runaway white rabbit in the park is the link back to Diego’s magician father and particularly we get the school concert where Maribel sees Peretti accompany Menen’s song on guitar. His “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to lose you” is as much reality as one of these can handle. The piece has built enough good will to carry it past the inescapable feel-good ending.

 

Bright coloured good living settings – the apartment glass balcony – sustain the mood and the leads couldn’t be better. Weathered Perretti is a welcome departure from the conventional romantic hero. It’s a big deal when he shaves his permanent stubble to impress the winning Verdú. I think that the enjoyment of watching Winograd’s films is in no small measure that they are a reminder of the fading concept of movies as an agreeable way to spend time rather than gather record first day takings, demonstrate refined taste or signal sympathy with the underprivileged. I recommend hunting this one down in SBS’s repeats or on demand.

Streaming on SBS On Demand - HIDDEN ASSETS (Two Series, Showrunner Peter McKenna, Ireland/Belgium, 2021- ) & KIN ( Two Series, Created and written by Peter McKenna, Ireland, 2021-)

Charlie Cox, Ciaran Hinds, Kin

Aha Peter McKenna. ... A name to conjure with. Full Forward for Collingwood for 13 years and 838 goals before  playing a final season with Carlton and 36 goals. Never played in a premiership side, though he did win the Coleman Medal twice, though not in 1969 and 1971 when he kicked 143 and 134 goals respectively. Hudson beat him both years.

Peter McKenna

Collingwood of course was once the domain of John Wren who made his money running an illegal tote  down in its very dirty backblocks of the day. Wren loved the football club and Wikipedia informs us that he was well known for supporting exemplary Collingwood players in the VFL's  pre-professionalised era. While players were paid a per-game salary, the amount was meagre until the late 20th century when the sport became professionalised. To compensate for this, Wren was known to send monetary gifts to players who performed well, often paying ten to twenty times the normal game salary to certain Collingwood players. Among the beneficiaries included Collingwood legend Gordon Coventry after he scored a then-record 16 goals in a game in 1929; however, in his case, League Laws prevented him from doing this, so he exploited a loophole by gifting 50 quid to Coventry's wife (A$1,995 in 2018 terms) to buy a suite of furniture. In the thirties when, as now though not so easily, money could help buy a premiership, Collingwood won a lot including four in a row from 1927 to 1930, the only time it has ever been done in VFL/AFL history. 

Wikipedia tells us the tote eventually earned Wren £20,000 per year (A$2,646,000 in 2021 terms). Wren's wealth also caused other family dysfunction problems and once again Wikipedia lays it out simply "Others of his children had troubled lives. His son Anthony committed suicide after being disinherited following an argument with Wren, while his daughter-in-law Nora and grandchildren only received a meagre allowance. When another of Wren's grandchildren, Susan Wardlaw, died, her two brothers had her buried without notifying her husband Greg, who was then given 24 hours to leave the family home, while another of Wren's daughters, Angela, purportedly died of malnutrition when she was 39, leaving an estate worth £97,000.

My goodness. You could write a book or make a TV series out of it though I'm not sure that Peter McKenna despite his post-footy media career would have been up for it.

But Peter McKenna (no relation, above) is these days the author of two terrific crime series made in Ireland and now streaming on SBS. McKenna however might be channelling something from Collingwood and Wren's past with his tales of dysfunction, betrayal and sheer brutality among a couple of Irish crime families. Kin is the more ferocious of the two. You get the impression it might be written from close hand observation or knowledge. In each series there is one crime lord who stops at nothing to have his way. The body count piles up throughout. In series one that lord is played by the wonderful Ciaran Hinds as Eamonn Cunningham, a rival of and supplier to the Kinsella family and in series two, having been set up at the end of series one he's played by Francis Magee as Bren Kinsella,  fresh out of prison and more violently psychotic than anybody else on screen. (Spolier alert). Things dont turn out well for either.

In the meantime, it's the women of the family who have the most intriguing parts  as wives, sisters, mothers, children and lovers. In most circumstances they are just smarter and more subtle than the blokes, with the possible exception of Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox), also fresh out of prison and shortly thereafter committing another murder. Must see stuff.

Wouter Hendrickx, Angeline Ball, Hidden Assets

With Hidden Assets you get the impression that McKenna probably had a research team to help with the intricacies of money laundering, technical police investigation involving a lot of banging away at computers followed by 'gotcha' moments, and the various bits of business chicanery that take place in Ireland and Belgium. There's also the background of a false flag terrorist operation and the involvement of a populist/racist but corrupt politician. But again it's family betrayal, dysfunction and retribution that keep you on edge. However, the cops are much more prominent in this one, especially the Belgian detective Christian De Jonge (Wouter Hendrickx). Strangely the Irish female cop in series one is only referred to as having 'got a promotion to Madrid' to explain her absence in series two. Maybe the character,  the rather abrasive Detective Sergeant Emer Berry (Angeline Ball) didn't play well with the focus groups. Similarly terrific. 

Our Peter McKenna has long left the footy and media scene. Their Peter McKenna seems likely to develop a following. Perhaps next a series about Irish crims in Melbourne. You could start with a roman a clef about John Wren.

ON SBS-TV - Rod Bishop warns about ROGUE HEROES (Sc: Stephen Knight, Dir: Tom Shankland, UK, 2022)

Connor Swindells, Rogue Heroes

For show creator Stephen Knight, Rogue Heroes is his view of the origins of the British SAS - lawless, viral macho killers with virtually no wartime morality, motivated solely by killing and then killing some more in order to defeat Rommel and his Panzers in North Africa. 

If you miss the point of all the anarchistic, authority-hating viciousness (and how could you?), there’s at least eight loud AC/DC numbers along with Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead and a range of British punk from the 1970s and 1980s, to put you in the right mood. 

It’s like watching the wartime equivalent of British soccer crowds. Nationalistic Brit “wolf-warriors” in the North African campaign - well done, those boys!

The Brits lost up to 35,000 during the 3-year engagement, but there were also some allies there. Here they are only mentioned in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. The SAS lads steal Australian food and other supplies. And in the case of the New Zealanders, the Brits sneak in under the cover of darkness after the moon has set to pinch the Kiwis’ desert army vehicles and other fighting kit.

A couple of Australians appear in early scenes and are prepared to take on the SAS leader Stirling (known as the “Phantom Major”) in a Cairo bar, but quickly turn tail and meekly depart after Stirling runs through a list of the ways he can kill.

The Americans arrive (“About time!”) but we never actually see one. 

And the Scots are reduced to Cairo street-brawlers, left unconscious in their kilts in dusty alleyways. A Barmy Army chorus singing “Jerusalem” is all that’s missing, but it might have been in there somewhere, drowned out by AC/DC.

As for any mention of the Rats of Tobruk, dug in and holding the town against superior forces for eight months with 3,000 casualties, they are not even remotely on Stephen Knight’s radar.

It’s the sort of series where ten minutes is probably enough to get the hang of it, because not much will change – it stays essentially one-note throughout. The SAS mantra “Who Dares Wins” crops up to replace “Go.Kill.Return.Go Again” and, at the end, an Irishman known as “Paddy” (of course) declares “Now the blood will flow”.

I guess he, at least, is looking forward to a second series.

On SBS, NITV and streaming at SBS On-demand - Rod Bishop enthuses over THE BEACH (Warwick Thornton, Australia, 2020)

Warwick Thornton

Eighteen months ago, SBS broadcast the 14-hour The Kimberley Cruise, a slow TV event aboard the Coral Discoverer, a 72-passenger ship making its way from Broome to Darwin. 

It was excruciating viewing. The ship was too big to get anywhere close to the Kimberley coastline and for much of the 14-hours the land was a thin ribbon on the horizon.

The Beach, however, another slow TV event from SBS and NITV, takes place on one of those strips of land and is a wholly different experience. If the ship from The Kimberley Cruisewere passing by, it would be nothing but a speck on the horizon.

Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton needed an extended alcohol-free break. He had a beach shack built at remote Jilirr (Chile Creek) on the Dampier Peninsula in The Kimberley, 30 minutes south of Lombardina. It’s a stunning location with kilometres of sand to drive and walk and huge tides capable of leaving his shack completely surrounded by water. In one of many stunning shots, the drone photography makes the shack look much like the house in the final shot of Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

Warwick brings three chooks with him, ostensibly for eggs, but also for something alive to talk to. He also talks to crabs, fish, his food, himself and inanimate objects like the traditional spear he adapts for hunting.

Warwick Thornton and vehicle

His vehicle is a work of art. Something like a cross between a rusted tank base and an open-topped desert-jeep, it looks like a wreck waiting to be resurrected by the lads from Bush Mechanics. (An English friend emailed me after watching an episode of Bush Mechanics remarking “I didn’t realise windscreens were optional”).

Most surprising however, is a lot of footage that should be called Cooking with Warwick, dish after dish methodically crafted and presented to himself like a night out at Tetsuya’s. There should really be a The Beach recipe book.

Given the fresh ingredients, the deal seemed to be for the crew to bring something fresh back from Lombardina where they bunk down for the nights, but Warwick is responsible for all the fresh protein. Which means mastering the spear or a net for fish and lobster; collecting crabs; clams; mussels and oysters. One of the chooks comes in handy, as well.

If all this sounds a bit thin for a 3-hours running time, Warwick’s son, cinematographer Dylan River produces some of the best images of remote Australia I have ever seen. Certainly, the best from the Kimberley. Ravishing landscape shots after ravishing seascape shots are interspersed with startling detail in and around the hut - the play of light on the tin and wood; the jars of spice and condiments; and, of course, Warwick’s ravaged visage. The cinematography is nothing short of magnificent.

Music from Melbournians The Dirty Three and Rowland S Howard isn’t too shabby, either.

Talking of her time with Warwick at CAAMA in Alice Springs, Rachel Perkins observed: “He just used to grunt and not speak much”.  And he grunts and swears a lot here too, but when he has a story to tell, it pours out eloquently, even though the chooks seem wholly unconcerned: “Are you listening to me, ladies?”

Somewhere in the final hour and without explanation, a dog appears, settling into the hut, sleeping on his bed and trotting around with Warwick as he goes in search of protein. He talks to it sometimes, but not very often. He seems afraid of it.

When it’s time to leave, a slimmer, energized Warwick packs up the jeep-tank and drives off down the vast beach. And the dog? 

No spoilers, but it is black.