Review – Crownies – Episode 22

Crownies – ABC1 – 8:30pm Thursday – AUS

No matter what I’ve said about Crownies in the past at least it stayed true to itself until the bitter end. Crownies died the way it lived; as a muddled, schizophrenic, tedious, forgetful, clichéd legal drama. There should never have been any doubt that this conventional series would have a ridiculously conventional finale. We had endings: David destroying the tapes that could have proven the AG’s guilt once and for all, Tatum & Conrad breaking up, Erin leaving the DPP, and Ben being cut off from his dad’s money. We had new beginnings: Janet giving birth, Lina & Andy getting engaged, Tony taking over the DPP as David takes a much needed vacation, Tracey being forced to face life as a lawyer, and the much anticipated (read: long predicted) kiss between Richard and Tatum that was the final image we’ll probably ever see of Crownies. Anybody left doubting whether this was a serious legal drama or a dressed up soap opera need only watch the final five minutes of this series to know the truth: the birth of twins and a passionate embrace – sounds like the stuff of serious legal drama to me.

This finale was surprisingly one of the better episodes of the series; although you could blame any enjoyment I got from the episode on the knowledge that this was the last I’ll ever see of Crownies. It was nice that for its victory lap Crownies trotted out all of the problems that had plagued the series since the beginning as if to remind you they haven’t learnt a thing. You thought the soapie storylines dragged this series down? You were in luck because this episode was filled with soapie storylines. You thought the guest stars acted rings around the regular cast members? That’s why Crownies gave you Sacha Horler breaking down in tears just to show up Indiana Evans breaking down in tears. If you thought this series had an overreliance on having characters sit in front of TV screens passively watching drama unfold instead of actively participating in the drama, you got not one, but two scenes where our main characters got to look concerned while they watched characters with far more interesting lives have a conversation on tape. Just to harp on that last point – why did that happen so much? If this series was so desperate to get us in that interview room why didn’t they make a show about cops? The key to drama is, you know, drama – and not drama that takes place on a video screen in front of your main characters, but drama that takes place in real time that your characters can be a part of.

As much as this episode didn’t really bother me it still showed a surprising amount of ineptitude considering the folks responsible had produced twenty-two episodes of this thing. The episode opened with Janet and her partner Ash talking by her car, Janet’s nearly due to give birth and Ash has to go to a conference in Adelaide. “Don’t worry you’ll make it back in time,” Janet says somehow not waving a giant ‘foreshadowing’ sign above her head. Ash then offers to drive Janet’s car but Janet doesn’t allow anybody else to drive her car. Oh boy, you can imagine the surprise later in the episode when Janet’s water breaks, Ash is stuck in Adelaide and Erin is forced to drive Janet’s car. Then there was the birth scene itself which, I don’t even know what that was – was Janet mounting Erin at one point and trying to rip her face off? I’m trying to repress the memory.

Lina also got engaged early in the episode – and I specify that it happened early in the episode because the show forgot about her halfway through. Although, that shouldn’t be so surprising as most episodes Crownies seemed to forget Andrea Demetriades was even a cast member. If you think about the finale and how the show dealt with this being the final episode you have to be staggered at the level of arrogance on display. By the time this episode was in production Crownies was already on the air and already a flop in the ratings. So with the writing on the wall the least the producers could have done was to attempt to give some closure to fans of the show. Personally, there’s nothing I needed to have wrapped up, but most of the characters were given endings that just set them up for a season two that will never exist. This series was notorious for the way it just left storylines hanging in the air at the end of an episode, never bothering to tie up loose ends (two episodes ago Ben slept with that gymnast who was on the defence and that’s where that story ended – there were no repercussions and nothing was closed off). Occasionally the show would bring back a story weeks or even months later, but that was always the exception to the rule. If you go back and watch this series again (and I highly recommend you never do that) you’ll see countless cases that were started but never brought to anything resembling a conclusion. I guess if this show can’t be bothered wrapping up stories within an episode why should we expect any kind of actual ending at the ending of the show itself.

If you strip away all of the soap opera and all of the unfinished cases you can get at the core of what Crownies was trying to be. Crownies was a show that wanted to debate moral issues – most episodes it presented a moral dilemma and then had its characters debate that issue so we got to see both sides of the argument. As a concept, that’s not a bad one, in fact, that’s a show I wouldn’t mind watching. The problem was that Crownies never really figured out how to do that without falling all over itself. The only way the show ever figured out how to present these debates was to have the characters walk around going point by point through their arguments – often it felt like we were stuck in a Year 11 Legal Studies classroom listening to two kids reading from an ethics textbook. The debates these characters had were always clunky and dreadfully dry. It also never seemed to matter who the characters having the debates were because depending on the week different characters could take different sides of an issue – which stems from another problem; these debates weren’t born out of the characters they were born out of this show’s need to have debates.

Not helping Crownies case was the fact the show itself never took a stand on any of these issues – it always seemed to go out of its way to have its main characters present both sides of the argument. Never would this show just introduce an antagonist to try and provoke its lawyers on hot button issues, it would always have them debate with each other. Crownies never allowed itself to have a point of view and therefore robbed the show of a personality. Whatever you think of David E. Kelley’s legal series (and personally I think they’ve only gotten worse the older he gets) at least his shows had the guts to actually say something. Sure he often hammers home his point with a comically large anvil to the head but he has a point to make in the first place. Crownies never had anything to say beyond ‘there are two sides to every issue’ and we already knew that.

While Crownies always seemed willing to show both sides of every case that came its way it never bothered to show more than one side of its characters. We’ve spent twenty-two episodes with these people and not only haven’t any of them grown (idealistic young Erin who wasn’t sure she was cut out for the DPP when we began this thing grew up to be an idealistic young woman who wasn’t sure she was cut out for the DPP twenty-two episodes later) but Crownies never even bothered to give some of these people a second character trait. Determined Muslim Lina was … a Muslim, determined and … um… chauvinistic rich kid Ben showed us that he could also be … chauvinistic… and a rich kid… bible-thumping bitch Tracey, now there was some character growth, sure she remained stagnate for twenty-one episodes but in this episode she finally lowered her guard – talk about progress.

At the end of the day the thing that undid Crownies more than anything else was the number of episodes it had to produce. It’s abundantly clear the writers never figured out what to do with this many episodes – a shorter episode order would have forced them to focus on one long-running case with a spattering of personal stories thrown in around the edges. Imagine the power that AG rape case could have had if this show didn’t have a rape case every second episode – this series was disturbingly interested in cases involving rape and by constantly dealing with shocking cases it desensitized us to them and in turn they had to keep upping the ante. The AG rape case went from oddly quirky (he made them wear turtlenecks) to disturbing (he raped them with foreign objects) to stomach churning (he had twenty hours of video of him raping other women) – again, if this was the only cases the show covered in, say, a six episode series, this could have been hard hitting stuff, but these revelations came in between cases involved a child murderer, an exorcism gone wrong, rape with a shotgun, the ‘bolt cutter babes’, Tony seeing a ghost girl and a whole range of twisted and graphic cases that always sat awkwardly alongside the softer soapie material the other half of this show was made up of.

While this finale wasn’t the worst Crownies has been in its run it was still a jumbled pile of forgettable nonsense. Did I mention that the show ended with Richard and Tatum drunkenly kissing in a bar while Tracey and Ben watched on in disbelief/admiration? Did I mention at one point Andy called Lina ‘prosecutie’? Did I mention that when Erin drove Janet to the hospital she fumbled around in the car like she was in a slapstick movie, even doing the classic ‘turn on the windscreen wipers accidentally’ move? Did I mention Ben got to do nothing of any interest? Did I mention we didn’t see or hear from Julie or Rhys? Did I mentioned Tracey & Tatum doing shots together? Crownies was a mess of a television show when it began and it was a mess of a show when it ended. This was one of the worst dramas of the year and a low point in the history of drama on the ABC; let’s hope the network has a better 2012 and that the rumoured Crownies spin-off remains just a rumour.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad

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

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