Review – Wild Boys

Wild Boys – Seven – 7:30pm Sunday – AUS

Just when you thought that Australian television drama was never going to escape from its pit of family dramedies, tired procedurals and stylized dramatisations trying to pass themselves off as crime sagas along comes a family-friendly adventure series about a gang of bushrangers and their adventures in the Australian bush during the 1860s. Wild Boys is such a breath of fresh air that while the show itself is a way off from being good, we should take a moment to appreciate it for what it is; a surprisingly fun adventure series that aims to please every possible demographic and very nearly gets there. Channel 7 has been home to some fairly painful drama series over the last few years so to see a network like that succeed at putting together a show like this is an achievement in itself.

Wild Boys stars Daniel McPherson as Jack, a bushranger who’s a bit too much of a goody two-shoes to really be all that good of a bushranger. His partners in crime are Dan (Michael Dorman) and Hogan, but after a stage coach robbery that goes awry Hogan ends up shot dead by the town’s new superintendant Francis Fuller (Jeremy Sims). Not long after Francis has Jack and Dan locked up and ready to ship out of town alongside the big but slow Conrad (Alex England) who’s been framed by the dastardly Francis. These bushrangers wouldn’t be bushrangers if they didn’t also have some lady friends waiting for them to stop their pillaging and plundering. Conrad’s crush Emelia (Anna Hutchison) has caught the eye of the evil trooper Francis, while Jack’s been shacking up with bar and brothel owner Mary (Zoe Ventoura).

The acting is a bit all over the shop in Wild Boys, Dorman’s quite good as Dan but McPherson isn’t really given all that much to play with when it comes to Jack. Jack’s a bit too perfect of a hero; even his beard is a little too perfectly unshaven. McPherson smirks and wisecracks through his performance but unless his character is darkened a little bit and made less of a shiny Robin Hood type he could become quite tiresome. We don’t really get to see all that much of Ventoura as Mary, but she comes off much the same way McPherson does; she seems like an awful nice lady who just happens to run a brothel. The real letdown in the cast, however, is Jeremy Sims as the villain Francis. It’s hard to see what Sims is going for with his performance but it’s so dull it threatens to derail the show any time he’s on screen. For a villain who does some fairly evil things in this first episode he’s not all that villainous. Sims resorts to just speaking every line as if he’s kind of bored, when he really needs to take a leaf out of Alan Rickman’s book. I know we’re not supposed to like the villain on a show like this, but we should at least enjoy the villain.

As I mentioned earlier Wild Boys isn’t perfect, it isn’t brilliant, and in some parts it wasn’t all that good if we’re being honest, but there were a good many things that worked. Wild Boys looks pretty great, even if at times it tended to look like Packed with a billy can, and it did have more than a couple of shots that were trying a bit too hard to look cool but on the occasion it pulled them off this was a show that doesn’t look like anything else on television. Wild Boys is not a gritty show by any means, anybody hoping for Deadwood Down Under is going to be waiting a lifetime as we live in a country incapable of that level of drama. However, by being virtually grit free Wild Boys needed to up the level of fun and there were moments where it genuinely achieved it. The scene where the boys escape from the back of the police transport coach managed to balance tension and humour, up until the moment where it strained credibility a bit too much.

Australia does not do ‘family adventure’, it does not do ‘bushrangers’ any more, television in this country just does not do what Wild Boys has attempted to do. Whatever its merits there is a part of me that unashamedly wants this series to succeed in a big way. If Wild Boys is a success my hope is that it prompts other networks to consider, not just this genre, but other big adventure series aimed at a broad audience. Doctor Who was a show that was purposefully created with as many demographics in mind as possible – it hoped to have something for everyone and while I’m not saying that Wild Boys comes close to achieving what Doctor Who has recently, I’m saying that I’d much rather see our television networks attempt this type of show than just churn out another Crownies, or Rescue: Special Ops, or Winners & Losers or any number of the tired, uninteresting garbage they’ve been spewing up lately.

There were a few elements in Wild Boys that reeked of the hands of Channel 7, most notably the character of Captain Gunpowder (David Field) who was way more wacky than the show around him. The acting across the board was pretty shaky at times, and the town of Hopetoun does look more like a back alley at Sovereign Hill than like an actual living place where actual people live but despite the niggles there was still a lot of fun to be had with this show. Wild Boys is as good as Aussie drama gets these days, and this premiere sets the show up nicely for the season to come, we can only hope they are able to not just keep this up, because that would be a letdown, but to build on this first episode and get better.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright

This review is part of Change The Channel’s episode by episode coverage of Wild Boys. The full list of episode reviews can be found under Series.