It's the golden age of television drama. So why has the ABC gone MIA?
Lauren Carroll Harris
As streaming giants ride the global upswing in TV storytelling, homegrown drama is conspicuously scant at Australia's cash-strapped national broadcaster
Sigrid Thornton and William McInnes in SeaChange, a comedic drama that was hugely popular on ABC TV in the late 1990s. Photograph: ABC TV
Thu 8 Mar 2018 12.00 EST
Last modified on Mon 21 Oct 2019 05.52 EDT
Since diving into the ABC's drama offerings for 2018, I've thought often of the words of Sandra Levy, the former ABC director of television, more than 10 years ago: "I think the future for ABC television is very bleak."
We speak a lot now about the golden age of television. But as longform, serialised storytelling has emerged as a global point of cultural interest, the ABC has stepped away from drama as a staple of its programming. How ironic that in a period of intense global creativity and demand, the predicament of Australian drama is that it's missing in action on the ABC.
For decades, drama was the mainstay of ABC television. During my own childhood in the late 1990s, SeaChange dominated the drama landscape. From inside the dark neoliberal drift of the Howard years, Deborah Cox and Andrew Knight's comedic drama offered a glimpse of a different set of values – Sigrid Thornton's highly strung lawyer ditching her corporate career for a more humble job as a local judge in a beachside town in Victoria.
SeaChange was preceded by grittier fare, much of it in the crime genre: Fallen Angels, Police Rescue and Wildside. At the culmination of this period – 1998-99 – the ABC broadcast 157 hours of locally made drama. Last financial year, the figure for new fiction was a grim 70 hours.
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This year, the ABC's drama flagship remains very slim indeed. Rake is looking to be 2018's narrative-storytelling saviour, and antihero Cleaver Greene's new place in the Senate should orient the series towards national and global politics. Jack Irish and Rosehaven are the drama slate's reliable regulars, made in the satisfying template of old-school weeknight television. There are one-offs like the recent queer telemovie Riot. Beyond that, two new scripted titles in the ABC's 2018 program could mark exceptions: Pine Gap, made in association with Netflix, and Mystery Road – The Series, the only Indigenous drama to be announced so far.
But the current slate still represents a downward slide that has become the new normal.
The reduction in drama comes down to a combination of government underfunding and wobbly adaptation to the digitisation of the broadcast space. The state of the arts has languished due to the culture wars waged by successive governments and the effects are ongoing.
Mystery Road – The Series (a spin-off of Ivan Sen's feature film), starring Judy Davis and Aaron Pedersen, is due to screen on the ABC in 2018. Photograph: Jack Friels/ABC TV
The link between underfunding and the decline of drama is tangible: between 2013 and 2014, when the $136m funding boost from the Rudd government to enhance local content and build a dedicated children's channel was fully felt, 126 hours of drama were aired. In 2016-17, it was down to 70 hours of both scripted drama and comedy, with a $45.2m spend. Earlier this year the ABC promised to ramp up investment in local content. But the details are fuzzy: it's not known how much of this will go towards drama and it doesn't come close to redressing the 28% funding decline in real terms since the mid 1980s, including $200m in the last two years.
That means we can't take it for granted that the ABC will always deliver a broad, diverse gamut of drama. After all, there is no specific obligation in the ABC charter to sustain a certain level of homegrown drama, to embed it into the national broadcaster's DNA.
Of course, television is in constant flux, like all parts of the entertainment and screen industries. The ABC's move away from drama is preceded by many other peaks and troughs. Think of the way in which Australian television was once dominated by the family variety show, an era that ended in 1999 with the demise of Channel Nine's Hey Hey It's Saturday. Just two years later, Big Brother debuted on Channel Ten and reality TV changed the television landscape forever. This last shift, to reality TV, has affected the ABC in a sneakily sideways manner – with the onset of light entertainment.
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Light entertainment looms as a more inexpensive spectre, enthusiastically embraced to the point where it has become the ABC's version of reality TV. In recent years, there has been the Annabel Crabb tidal wave of politician-celebrity banter as a way to collide politics with leisurely fare (The House, Canberra Al Desko, Kitchen Cabinet). Then there's the deluge of fun-and-games panel shows. This year, there are those in the Gruen universe, quiz shows hosted by Paul McDermott, the latest being Think Tank, as well as the third season of Tom Gleeson's Hard Quiz. This kind of light entertainment lacks the development costs and honed cultural production sensibilities of drama and traditional scripted shows, as do the bite-sized arts documentaries such as Behind the Second Woman and You See Monsters, wonderful as they are, that populate iView.
Of course, there's space for all types of programs for different audiences at a national broadcaster. But gone, it seems, are the plentiful, sustained, serious, culturally diverse, narrative-based dramas that tap the pulse of life and society – with a scale and scope of ideas that can't be contained in short-form storytelling; with complexity of narrative and character; with the capacity for intellectual and emotional nourishment in many repeated viewings. Despite the global upswing in brilliant television narratives, the ABC is a marginal player rather than a leader here.
Josh Thomas's Please Like Me: providing respite from the light entertainment tsunami. Photograph: ABC
Where is the next Please Like Me, Josh Thomas's sparkling comedic drama that provided momentary respite from the light entertainment tsunami? Apart from Ivan Sen's Mystery Road series, where are the other independent directors making longform stories for the small screen on the ABC? It's hard not to notice the ABC's absence in the present wave of mature, intelligent storytelling and hard not to think of it as a missed opportunity.
The days of appointment-based television are over. The new streaming giants are a huge source of competition to the ABC, but they are producing precious few scripted local dramas. The solution may come in the form of an amendment in the ABC's charter to commit to drama, a quota to mandate a minimum, the sharing of production costs with a partner like Netflix, or a more organised and vocal expression of demand from us as the audience to replenish the national broadcaster's eroded funding base.
In a digital environment, the media ecology is breaking and remaking itself. But can we really afford to let ABC drama continue to decline in this time of change?
Australian television
Australian media