The Adventures of QueerPenguin

Tagged + Australian Television in Good Production Shock

As per my policy on tagging - I reply to them to be polite but don't tag others, since a/ I'm lazy and b/ this website is all about me and how phenomenal I am, and nobody else - I accept the challenge from Richard.

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences along with these instructions.

5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Since I'm at work, the only book on hand is "Essentials of Corporate Finance" (ooooh, note for stalkers*, hint about where I work!). So umm, here goes:

"The cash flows here have the form of a four-year, $1,000 annuity. The present value is $3,000. We need to find the discount rate, r. Our goal in doing so is primarily to give you a feel for the relationship between annuity values and discount rates."

Yeah, you're right. I should get another job.

(*I hope I have stalkers. Only pretty and popular people have stalkers.)

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Fireflies. Headland. X-Factor. Yasmin's Getting Married. The Surgeon. The Master. The Hot House. The Resort. Let Loose Live. Greeks on the Roof. Hamish and Andy.

The list of intelligent and successful Australian television productions in the last 3 years goes on and on.

So it's actually quite a pleasant surprise to discover an Oz TV show that a/ is not "reality" crap, b/ has good production values, c/ is well-acted, d/ dares to assume viewers have some modicum of intelligence, and e/ supports local talent.

Yep, it's Bryan Brown's Two Twisted.

If memory serves, there was a general invite to all emerging or unfilmed screenwriters to submit Twilight Zone-like scripts, the best of which would form this series. That in itself is such a better idea for a show seed than, say, "oooh, what should we at Channel 10 make next? I know! A rip-off of a UK show which is actually a rip-off of another UK show!" (The seed of X-Factor)

Anyway, the four stories I've seen thus far are tops. OK, maybe they're a little obvious, but this is a brave attempt of Oz TV to not completely suck, as it usually does. Let it crawl before insisting it walk. And one of last night's effort, featuring the excellent Greta Scacchi as an apparently grieving wife who ends up cheerily feeding her husband's heart to a dog, was just delicious (not literally, obviously).

In offering the tagline of "Australia's best", maybe I wouldn't lump Scacchi, Sam Neill or Wendy Hughes in the same category as Lisa McCune (all of whom star at some point), but that's just splitting hairs. This is good, old-school televisual entertainment - tense, spooky, stylish and not afraid to be adult. I guess this is how it found at home at Channel Nana.

Initial ratings would suggests it's not doing phenomenally well but I really hope it's given the chance it deserves, or at least a DVD box set release further down the track. If we don't support this sort of stuff, it'll just be more of Yasmin Honey, We're the Biggest Australian Celebrity Dancing Brother on Ice from our good friends at the local studios.

Does that sound appealing to you?

posted by Sam @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006