Review – Tangle
Tangle – Showcase – 8:30pm Tuesday – AUS
It’s a great time to be an Australian who loves television. America and Britain are in the middle of a golden age, delivering more and more quality television shows year after year. We’re in the unique position where we cop the full cross section of the best from America and from Britain, whilst also enjoying a resurgence in scripted drama from home. No matter what you think of the shows themselves, the fact that there are so many original scripted programs coming from all of the networks is a good thing. The content is even uniquely Australian, which is something that not even Canada can boast, what with all their bland series that attempt to appeal to American audiences by removing all traces of national identity from the program.
Tangle debuted last October on FOXTEL channel Showcase, and launches its second series tonight. Having missed the season when it was on, I’ve decided to celebrate the new season by watching the first episode of the original series. I figure, why be current when you can review new seasons by trying desperately to catch up with old episodes. Tangle is a drama that follows two families whose lives are “tangled” together. It stars a cavalcade of talented actors, including Ben Mendelson (Animal Kingdom), Kat Stewart (Underbelly), Justine Clarke (Love My Way), Catherine McClements (Rush, CrashBurn), and Joel Tobeck (:30 Seconds), along with a collection of teenagers playing their children.
Tangle was created by Jessica Hobbs & Fiona Seres who also created the acclaimed Showcase series Love My Way. I could never really get into Love My Way, I found it a touch pretentious and while Tangle works better for me they both suffer from slight cases of Australian-film-itis. Aussie films and drama series, especially the less mainstream ones, have a tendency, and this is simply because of low budgets, to avoid high concepts or new locales and instead work at delivering yet another variation on ‘all is not as it seems in suburbia/the city/a small country town’.
Tangle is expertly made; the show looks great, the soundtrack is eerie and evocative, the cast are obviously talented, but the subject matter of families with secrets and drama bubbling beneath the surface is such a well trodden path, especially in Australian drama, that you kind of wish they’d tried something else. There’s infidelity, distant teens, marriages in trouble, drug use, and all the sorts of ‘dark side of suburbia’ elements that are so secret and hidden that they seem to come to the surface whenever an Australian writer even glances in that direction.
Now you could argue that if this were an American series that I’d be falling over myself to declare my love for it, but if this were an American series there’d be more to it. Obviously Hobbs & Seres want to explore the ‘real lives’ of Australian families, just as they wanted to explore the ‘real lives’ of Australian thirty-somethings in Love My Way. It’s just that this sort of material doesn’t really inspire much excitement when shows like The Circuit or East West 101, and even Satisfaction, are able to deliver just as much character development whilst exploring a world we haven’t seen on television before.
I’m not trying to kick Tangle around or anything; for the most part the first episode is a well crafted and well acted piece of television. It’s just that this sort of drama leaves me cold. We’re introduced to a collection of unlikeable, unhappy folks who don’t have much of a sense of humour, and just expected to hang around because of how ‘honest’ everything is. Despite those misgivings Tangle feels like it’s worth sticking with simply because when a show is anywhere near this level of quality then it’s bound to take you someplace interesting eventually, it’s just not quite there yet.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright
