Review – Sea Patrol
Sea Patrol – Nine – 8:30pm Tuesday – AUS
Sea Patrol has just entered its 5th season on Channel 9, which is inexplicably titled Sea Patrol: Damage Control presumably because ‘generic titles’ + ‘silly rhyming’ = ratings success. When I reviewed City Homicide a couple of months ago as it returned for its final season I made it clear I’d only ever seen one other episode until I sat down for the fifth season. There were some who thought it was unwise to review a show based on just on that one episode. I mention this because that’s exactly what I’m doing again here today. I saw the very first episode of Sea Patrol and haven’t given it another look in since.
Why then bother with the premiere of the fifth season if I’ve had little interest in the program up until now? I stand by the belief that television networks ALWAYS want new viewers and what better place to start than at the beginning of a new season. Maybe I’ll see something in the show that will encourage me to go back and watch the earlier seasons, or maybe it will confirm what I’ve always suspected, either way I’m going to discover nothing by not watching it so why not dive in and see what we find.
The fifth season of Sea Patrol kicks off with a bombing in a night club on a small island nation. The comparisons to the Bali bombing are pretty obvious, especially with the ads for the programming warning that “it could happened again!” and despite it being nearly a decade since that tragedy it still feels kind of off. It mostly feels wrong because Sea Patrol handles it in the most ass-backwards way possible. The Bali bombing was a national tragedy, but the nightclub bombing here is just used to kick-start a dreadfully dull action adventure involving the crew of the HMAS Hammersley.
The crew are all given nicknames like Charge, Swain or Dutchy that everybody always refers to them by, but one of the characters is nicknamed 2Dads – which is fine – except after the big bomb blast as the crew search the wreckage calling out in desperation “2Dads? 2Dads?! 2Dads!? 2Dads, is that you? Are you okay 2Dads!?” It couldn’t have been Dutchy that got lost in the blast? You couldn’t have spent five minutes repeating Swain’s name over and over? You had to go with 2Dads? 2Dads is played by Nikolai Nikolaeff, and like the rest of the main cast is perfectly competent playing one of the honourable men in uniform.
The problem with this episode is that the crew are told what to do, told where to go, told who to follow, told who to wait for, and basically spend a whole lot of time not making any dramatic decisions of their own whatsoever. It feels less like twisty turny thriller and more like a list of co-ordinates that need to be ticked off once we get there. Everything is just so bland that torture, midnight operations and house raids barely elicit anything more than a yawn. If you removed most of the violence and the occasional curse word Sea Patrol plays out exactly like any number of afternoon kid’s shows. There’s this goody-two-shoes crew who uphold all that is good and right with the world, and no cardboard cut-out villain (represented in this episode by a silent suicide bomber and a bossy government agent who was a single slapstick scene away of becoming Hermes Endakis from Ship To Shore) can stop them.
Unlike the amateurish City Homicide, Sea Patrol is just mildly competent. All the water shots look suitably spectacular but everything else looks like every other drama on Australian TV, just with more white walls and water rocking in the background. The script is laden with dialogue spelling out everything just to double check the audience at home is following along. The actors do all they can with some fairly lifeless material but Sea Patrol leaves no lasting impact. It’s neither painfully awful nor slightly enjoyable; it’s just there. There was nothing in this episode of Sea Patrol to suggest sticking around for season five or checking out the first four seasons would be worth your time. Both Sea Patrol and City Homicide give us Australian drama series stuck in the mud happy to simply exist, afraid that if they try anything creative they won’t get to come back for another completely unmemorable season. If you needed further proof of this fact, just look to last night’s Logie awards where the dopey Underbelly: The Golden Mile walked away with ‘Outstanding Drama Series’. When something like that passes for ‘Outstanding’ the industry really needs to step things up.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
I’ve just watched an episode of this series on GEM and have no regrets about missing it first time around. I couldn’t help but conclude that this was a HUGE opportunity missed. Great locations, interesting scenario, well photographed and some stirring music. But it’s all dressing and little substance save for a strong undercurrent of political correctness. This is mostly down to the lame scripts and one-dimensional characters. But the most irritating thing about this “Girlies-Play-War” adventure is the way that most of the men are portrayed as buffoons who probably couldn’t tie their own bootlaces if it weren’t for the presence of women who never do anything wrong. Almost laughably, leadership has been boiled down to a Nike ad with Lisa McCune stomping around barking “Just do it!” at her male subordinates. It makes you wonder how on earth we ever managed to win 2 World Wars without women in the front line.