A documentary about Alan Jones, a legal drama starring Hugo Weaving as a down-on-his-luck barrister, and the return of Fisk are among the highlights of the ABC’s programming for the next 12 months.
The line-up was announced at a star-studded event in Sydney on Wednesday, with ABC head of television Jennifer Collins saying the slate represented a significant uplift in scripted drama, comedy and children’s content, driven by a $50 million boost over three years from the federal government that was announced last December.
“Our baseline has always been around four comedies and four dramas, and we’re looking to increase that by 50 per cent for the next few years,” Collins said.
The 2027 slate includes six six-part drama series, plus returns for the comedy series Dog Park, Ground Up, Fisk and comedy-drama Return to Paradise. Race Around The World, Muster Dogs, Grand Designs Australia and the first new season of You Can’t Ask That since 2022 are also among the returning titles.
Collins added that in children’s programming, “we’re looking to double the amount of premium shows we’re making across the next three years … there was a time when we were a contributor to the children’s industry, now we commission 94 per cent of children’s offerings in Australia, so we see both of those areas [scripted and children’s] as really critical in terms of our charter and supporting the industry, and our audiences are really responding.”
Leading the children’s slate will be a new series of the much-loved Little Lunch, the first new episodes since 2016, and a new show starring former Wiggle Emma Watkins, the scripted series Emma’s Dance Club.
The news that brown-suited probate lawyer Helen Tudor-Fisk is returning for a fourth season is also likely to get a very positive response from ABC viewers, who have made the show a massive hit since its debut in 2021.
Star Kitty Flanagan, who co-created the series with her sister Penny, said there had been no plan to return when the third season wrapped in 2024. “I never assume, so I’ve always wrapped up each season with a bow so that if we don’t come back, viewers can feel satisfied,” she said. “That’s always our first step [with a new season]: how do we undo that bow we tied so tightly at the end of the last episode.”
Despite the retirement of Ray Gruber (Marty Sheargold) at the end of season three, Flanagan promised he, and all the regular cast, will be back.
“We’re an ensemble show, and I think one of the big reasons the show works is because of the characters, the people we chose to play the characters, and all the relationships between the characters,” Flanagan said. “And I think if you take out a missing piece of the puzzle, it’s not going to work.”
Suburban law firms aside, if there’s a common theme across the broader ABC slate it is crime: all six scripted dramas are crime stories, albeit some leaning more towards comedy than drama (as they say about country and western music, ABC audiences like both types of crime – serious and funny).
Fortitude Valley is a contemporary crime drama set in Brisbane, with echoes of the bad old days of the corrupt Joh Bjelke Petersen era of the 1980s. It stars Hunter Page Lochard, who is one of the writers and creators of the show, alongside Stephen M. Irwin and Leigh McGrath, who co-created Tidelands and Harrow. The series also stars Wayne Blair and English actor Rupert Everett (My Best Friend’s Wedding) as a shady property developer.
From See Saw, the makers of Slow Horses, comes The Great White, in which Hugo Weaving plays a disgraced barrister who takes on a dog as a client and ends up rediscovering a sense of purpose. Mia Wasikowska is one of the show’s directors.
John Bailey: The Enemy Within is a crime thriller based on the long-running series of novels from former ABC TV News managing director Tim Ayliffe. The series stars David Lyons as the titular character, with Anthony LaPaglia and Yael Stone among the cast.
In the crime-comedy space is Rural Crime Unit, an outback police comedy-drama co-created by Adam Zwar (Agony Aunts and Agony Uncles) and Darren Ashton (Austin), and Help Me!, starring Sarah Peirse (Treasure and Dirt, The Letdown) and Kate Box (Deadloch) as a mother and daughter drawn into a plot to bump off wealthy old ladies. The show is created by Sarah Lambert (Lambs of God, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart).
In the documentary stakes, Richard Baker, a former investigative journalist with this masthead, presents a three-part look at religious cults. Pray Harder grew out of his podcast of the same name, and stakes as its linchpin the death of an eight-year-old girl whose parents opted for prayer rather than medical treatment, leading to 14 members of their sect being charged with manslaughter.
The King In Australia draws on the ABC’s wealth of archive footage to tell the story of the relationship between the British monarch, who spent a couple of terms at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus in the 1960s, and this country. It is set to air in December.
Wild Wild Whips looks at intense family rivalries in the whip-cracking community, a show that Collins says has echoes of Tiger King. Mutiny on the Boundary revisits the centenary test of 1977 as the critical moment in cricket’s move to big-money professionalism, and the cauldron from which World Series Cricket emerged.
Battle on the Waterfront revisits another turning point in recent Australian history, the 1998 waterfront dispute, while Terra Futura is a nature documentary with a difference, an attempt to imagine what life on planet Earth might look like 3.8 billion years into the future.
But the show most likely to garner headlines when it airs is The Rise and Fall of Alan Jones, which promises to explore his “use of power, tolerated for so long by so many … and how that intersects with the indecent dealing accusations Jones is now facing in court”.
Precisely when and in what form the program airs will, of course, very much depend on the outcome of that trial.
“We don’t know when we’ll be able to air it, but it is a story that I think is important to tell,” says Collins. “This is a regular thing for us when we’re dealing with stories that are before the courts – sometimes we do have to make changes, and we do have to delay transmissions. But we’ll work through it as we go.”
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