Review – Killing Time
Killing Time – TV1 – 8:30pm Wednesday – AUS
The rise of the digital channels has seen FOXTEL fight harder to keep viewer eyeballs locked on its stations. As Australians now have a free source for reruns of American sitcoms FOXTEL has to offer its viewers something more and this year they’ve increased the amount of original content they produced. This has seen a rise in the number of dramas spread across FOXTEL’s many channels. This year FOXTEL have given us shows like Small Time Gangster, Spirited, Cloudstreet and SLiDE on a variety of different stations presumably in an effort to make W seem just as indispensible as FOX8 or Movie Extra. FOXTEL’s latest drama series, the much delayed Killing Time, has set up shop on TV1. If FOXTEL was a single station it would have the strongest drama line-up of any network this year, but they spread it so thin across dozens of channels and oh so many packages that finding an original Australian drama is like looking for a treasure chest full of gold when your only directions are ‘it’s somewhere in the ocean’.
Killing Time has finally arrived on TV1 after numerous delays involving ongoing legal cases because, surprise surprise, this is yet another true crime drama. Of course, this ten episode series won’t entirely see the light of day as the final four episodes are being delayed pending legal outcomes, which is why somebody should start using their imagination to write crime dramas in future. To suggest that Killing Time is cashing in on the popularity of Underbelly would fail to give credit to series writer Ian David. Ian David wrote Blue Murder, a true crime series from 1995 that was also delayed due to ongoing court proceedings. If Killing Time is cashing in on Underbelly, and there is a Moran featured in this series as well, it seems only fair as Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities lifted huge chunks of its story directly from Blue Murder. Still, with all of these true crime series out in the world you can’t help but feel a little exhausted at the prospect of yet another show about real life criminals.
The one thing this series has going for it is David Wenham as the narcissistic, asshole of a lawyer Andrew Fraser whose clientele including bikie gangs and heroin dealers because he believes they pay better than white collar criminals. Wenham gives a really solid performance at the centre of the series; unfortunately everybody around him is playing things a little broad. None more so than Richard Cawthorne as drug dealer Dennis Allen, who spends a lot of time yelling, as do most of his family members. The first episode is set in 1985 and not only is everyone Fraser associating with a westie but they’re also in the 80s, so the loud slightly over the top 80s bogan that’s on display doesn’t gel with the realistic depiction the rest of the show is going for. It’s never so jarring as to pull you out of the moment completely but it does feel like yet another series involving westies that encourages its actors to ‘act dumber’ when ‘acting dumb’ is different to ‘being dumb’ and Killing Time hasn’t yet figured that out.
For the most part Killing Time is a well made series that doesn’t glamorize crime the way Underbelly does (there are no slow motion scenes where people throw cash into the air), and it also makes sure we understand that the person whose story we’re watching is a truly loathsome creep. The problem arises simply from the fact that watching real life crims commit real life crimes and get away with it for a little while before ending up dead or in prison is becoming a little tiring. We’ve seen the news reports, we’ve seen the 60 Minutes specials, we’ve seen the ever growing true crime section at our nation’s airports, and we’ve seen countless stories of lowlifes doing drugs and making money, why do we need to see another one, no matter how competently it’s put together? It may just be that Australians are willing to suspend disbelief if they know it’s a true story but won’t believe it could happen if somebody just made it up. Still, one of these days I’d like to watch a crime series where I can’t just go on Wikipedia to find out what happens next. There are plenty of genres on television that have been done to death but that’s when you start looking for a series that breaks the mould. Unfortunately while Killing Time is a well made true crime drama, it’s not much more than that.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright
