Its been a bumper year but Australian TV drama is on a knifes edge

For fans of Australian TV comedy and drama, this is the best of times. This year we’ve had The Newsreader, Wakefield, Fires, Jack Irish, Rosehaven, Aftertaste, Frayed (all on the ABC), RFDS, Australian Gangster (Seven), Doctor Doctor, Amazing Grace (Nine), Back to the Rafters (Amazon Prime Video), Five Bedrooms (Paramount+), The End, Bump (Stan), The Unusual Suspects, New Gold Mountain (SBS). We’re about to get Spreadsheet (Paramount+), Preppers and a second season of Total Control (both ABC). Throw the Aussie-made Clickbait (Netflix) into the mix, and it looks a lot like the golden age of television has finally scattered a little dust our way.

But the real picture is more complicated. The scarcity of scripted content for 2022 unveiled by Seven, Nine (the owner of this masthead) and 10 at their recent upfronts suggests the industry is, in fact, on a knife’s edge. If we’re not careful, some fear, the worst of times could be just around the corner.

Anna Torv and Sam Reid in The Newsreader.Credit:ABC

Seven’s commitment: four hours of drama, in the two-part mini-series The Claremont Killer (plus Home & Away). Nine’s: a new Underbelly, about the disappearance of Melissa Caddick, and After the Verdict, a fictional tale about four jurors who realise too late they may have made a terrible decision. From 10, there’s nothing at all on free to air, apart from Neighbours; a new season of Five Bedrooms, and the mini-series The Last King of the Cross will drop on its subscription streaming platform, Paramount+.

Foxtel, meanwhile, this week announced just two new Australian scripted shows for 2022: courtroom drama The Twelve and the second season of Tim Minchin’s Upright.

Actor Erik Thomson â€" once one of Seven’s biggest stars via Packed to the Rafters, 800 Words and All Saints â€" bemoaned the state of things on Facebook following his old network’s upfront. “In my time there, over 14 years and three series, I heard the various CEOs say that ‘drama was in their DNA’. It seems that is no longer the case.”

The cast of Five Bedrooms (left to right): Katie Robertson, Stephen Peacocke, Kat Stewart, Doris Younane and Roy Joseph.Credit:Paramount+

What’s changed is that the government has eased the requirements that the commercial networks commission local scripted and children’s content. First came an emergency amnesty to account for the disruptions of COVID. Then came new regulations that give the broadcasters more flexibility in how they spend their points, and reward the soapies much more handsomely.

When these changes were introduced last October, I predicted “Seven and Ten will acquit most of their obligations through their long-running soapies”. On top of Home and Away, I suggested, Seven would need to produce “a single 2 x 2-hour drama miniseries ... That’s it. Done and dusted.” And so it has proved.

The decline in output was already well underway even before those changes. A study released in August found that adult Australian drama on the commercial TV networks declined by 68 per cent from 1999 to 2019, from 208 hours a year to 67. Across all broadcasters, it was down by around one-quarter, from 254 hours to 187 (the figures exclude Neighbours and Home and Away).

To be fair, change of some sort was inevitable and overdue. The free-to-air networks argued, with justification, that ad-free streaming services have stolen away drama and comedy audiences, yet the costs of making such content continue to rise. “The basic maths on drama are difficult,” Seven’s programmer Angus Ross told me recently.

“There are challenges there, and that means you really have to sharpen what you’re looking for,” Nine’s Hamish Turner added. “You don’t have the opportunity to do a lot of them, so the ones you do you really want to make sure you’re getting right.”

The daggy charms of Rosehaven have been a draw for five seasons, but now it’s over.Credit:Michael Brook

Like Seven, Ten has the luxury of a soap to soak up most of its drama obligation. Like Nine, it also has a streaming service, and a two-year window within which a drama made for SVOD can be screened on FTA and still count towards those points (a strategy that neither has yet used, though Nine and Stan have announced co-commissions).

The ABC and SBS have no quotas, but they continue to pump out the scripted content â€" Sunday has become Australian drama night on the ABC this year â€" but the great hope in this changing of the guard is streaming. And yet the SVOD services remain free of any obligations to commission Australian content at all. And that leaves Australian drama and comedy in a very precarious state.

“My perception is we’re kind of stranded at the moment, in the middle of this restructure where we’ve had a rejigging of the quotas on free to air but nothing on the streaming side,” says Rob Gibson, chief executive of Easy Tiger, the boutique production house behind Jack Irish and Doctor Doctor.

Or as Matthew Deaner of Screen Producers Australia puts it: “The fact that this all happened before the safeguards have been put in place upon streamers is a significant gamble. Once the current burst of work subsides and we have caught up on some of the delays created by COVID we risk a dangerous contraction in the local production sector, and that is really bad for local audiences.”

Zoe Kazan and Kate Lister in Clickbait.

That appears to be the view too of a parliamentary committee that this week released a report on the future of the cultural industries in Australia. The multi-party committee recommended in its Sculpting a National Cultural Plan report that the government introduce legislation requiring SVOD services “to allocate at least 20 per cent of their local revenue on new Australian drama, documentary, children’s content, commissions, co-productions or acquisitions of content”.

That’s twice as much as other parliamentary committees and inquiries over the past four years have called for, and is in stark contrast to the government’s position of merely requiring the streamers to self-report their spending to the ACMA for a period of two years. The fact that five of the committee’s eight members are from the Coalition makes it truly remarkable.

In fairness, some international streamers have shown a willingness to commission local content â€" Netflix alone has six Australian drama series in the pipeline for next year â€" though whether they would remain so keen if the threat of regulation disappeared is hard to say.

Stan (which is owned, like this masthead, by Nine) brands itself as the home of premium Australian drama, and has committed to produce 30 new Australian shows or movies a year by 2025. It is unlikely to welcome any move that reduces its point of difference, especially if it also increases the cost of production (if all streamers are required to produce local content, it will create a surge in demand for cast and crew, and inflate costs).

Tony Ayres, the co-creator of Clickbait, the Melbourne-made thriller that topped Netflix charts around the world recently, has made content for FTA and streamers, and argues we should be understanding them as equally important parts of a complex ecosystem.

“It’s really important to remember that shows like Clickbait can’t happen without a local industry that is training the crews, training the actors, giving people experience,” he says. “It’s an accumulation of experience that leads to your ability to make work at that level.”

The line to Clickbait threads backwards through The Slap, Barracuda, Wanted. For many others working at the highest levels of the industry, here and abroad, it snakes through the likes of Offspring, The Secret Life of Us, Blue Heelers â€" the sort of long-running shows that have all but disappeared from our screens.

Along with Neighbours and Home & Away, those shows created opportunities for emerging talent to learn their craft. And that in turn has underpinned our ability to make content that can mix it with the best the world has to offer. Quantity begets quality, says Ayres; lose volume and the next Clickbait will be that much harder to come by.

“It’s not right to think of this as a binary thing,” he says. “The more we have on screen the better and healthier our industry will be.”

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Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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