Follow Up – Underbelly: The Golden Mile

Underbelly: The Golden Mile – Nine – 8:30pm Sunday – AUS

Did somebody say ‘music montages, tits and a never ending stream of narration delivered by Caroline Craig’? That’s right, Underbelly is back and this time it’s taking to the streets of Kings Cross in Sydney, specifically the so-called Golden Mile of the title. We followed the rise of Carl Williams during the stellar first season and the emergence of Terry Clark during the shoddy second season and now we get to follow young John Ibrahim around as he grows from teenage bouncer to underworld heavyweight.

As is customary with a new season of Underbelly every time we meet a new character their name flashes up on the screen ala Snatch, but The Golden Mile manages to shove nearly a dozen character names down our throat before the opening credits as if we’re supposed to somehow memorize the difference between Mel Mal and Grimy Graham. We do learn that our new boy John is a Western Suburbs school boy who is described by his mate Hammer as not being able to do as his told. He’s a young upstart who wants to be as successful as George Freeman (yes, Peter O’Brien and his bad wig are back for another season).

We also meet up with the dodgy cops from the second season, most of whom seem to have changed character traits during their time away. Really Evil Bald Cop is now a Senior Sergeant who thinks the corruption should stop, Kind Of Evil Bug-Eyed Cop is now the really evil corrupt cop, and nervous doesn’t really want to be corrupt cop Trevor (Dieter Brummer) is now the kind of evil cop. The way you can tell they’re corrupt cops is that they’re always laughing at stuff that isn’t funny. A group scene with the corrupt cops can’t go by without them all cacking themselves over witty aside about taking kickbacks or folks ‘getting what they deserve’.

Joining John and the corrupt cops in this tapestry of hoodlums and no-good-scumbags are a pair of on the street cops who I affectionately refer to as Blondie and Bean Pole because I must have missed their names when they smashed up on the screen. They’re the only good cops in the city fighting against the wave after wave of corruption. We also met Trevor’s wife Maria played by Natalie Bassingthwaighte in a So You Think You Can Cameo.

During the second hour we got to spend some time with Federal Police Officer Gerry Lloyd played by Sigrid Thornton who has appeared heavily in the advertisements which means she’ll probably ‘pull a Kate Ritchie’ and not be in the series after the third episode. We also got to meet our other lead character Kim Hollingsworth played by Emma Booth. Kim is a new girl in the Cross, she’s got a lousy boyfriend and needs some money quick – guess what she ends up doing? Yes, that’s right we get to see Kim become a prostitute. After her first less than successful encounter she later has sex with an Asian man before strutting down the Golden Mile to the admiration of onlookers while the narration wonders that despite ‘empowering’ herself whether she may have ‘sold her soul’. Yeah, the Narrator is back doing all the deep thinking for everybody these days.

The good news is that The Golden Mile is more like the first series than the meandering second one. Here’s hoping that we continue to follow the rise and fall of John and Kim rather than deviate off the path to explore whatever random criminal the producers were reading about this week. The biggest problem with the second season (other than that everybody was horribly miscast) was that it had no clear focus. Everything just blurred together in a big long mess that was propped up by music montages and sex scenes every time the story got into trouble. Of course The Golden Mile still threatens to follow the same path and while there wasn’t an over reliance on nudity, there were at least 15 music montages by my count, which is still pretty ridiculous even by Underbelly standards.

While a lot of what was on display was frothy fun there were moments which fell dead in the water, especially any time the show attempted to be ‘funny’. One of the big clunkers was the scene where Kim, as a struggling new prostitute, is asked to give a blowjob and literally blows on the guy’s cock. But special points go to the scene where John goes to the school social in a koala costume, he of course stole the costume from a guy who was asking for donations… in the middle of the night… on a corner in King’s Cross. Yet another moment where Underbelly is trying too hard to be funny when they can just find laughs by letting the humour come from their characters like they did with Carl Williams in the first season and Mr. Rent-A-Kill in the second; the sort of character comedy that made Chopper such a massive hit.

Most of the time Underbelly is happy to let the narration do all the heavy lifting and just let it’s cast run around in what is often nothing more than a glorified Gangs Of Oz style dramatic recreation. Underbelly is never going to be The Wire with its brilliant characters and intricate plot, nor is it trying to be, but even as a populist crime romp Underbelly needs to put in the hard yards and make us care about these characters beyond their silly nicknames. Still, it’s good to have Underbelly back on the TV if only because no other series could give us a ‘Next Week’ preview that shows us a cat in danger of being dropped from a window. Will the excitement never end?!