You can feel it in the air when the season of a popular series ends. Fans of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are still wandering, bewildered, opening the fridge, forgetting what they came for. I’m disappointed when Wednesday night rolls around that I can’t stroll into Lockhart Gardner. Season five of The Good Wife was not only the best to date, but really a groundbreaker for network drama.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It’s relatively easy now for HBO, Netflix and the rest of the cable crowd to pull off flashy drama. Network TV is stuck in the wilderness of NCIS. Even Homeland devolved into a neurotic melodramatic cartoon this season. Network show runners appear not to have the independent volition enjoyed by the more marginal TV creatives. So The Good Wife is a triumph.
With the finale of Offspring (Ten, Wednesday, 8.45pm) this week, comparisons with American networks are timely. Season five was one of the best, and was dramatically more interesting than season four, which was dominated by the tear-jerking departure of Patrick. If we have seen the last of the Proudmans, it was not an unsatisfactory or untidy farewell. In spite of all the tumult, we are left in no doubt as to the trajectory of the Proudman connections. Patrick Brammall’s Leo was not just a worthy addition to the ensemble, but his maturity and confident independence is almost a metaphor for the development of the show.
In a sea of well-intentioned but inadequate local-network drama, Offspring has maintained a blinkered sensibility. OK, nobody is watching Ten. All right, House Husbands with all its cheesy high jinks, attracts attention. Offspring has an integrity that other shows have unsuccessfully tried to emulate.
Time of Our Lives (Thursday, ABC, 8.30pm) isn’t terrible. A stellar cast, including Claudia Karvan, Justine Clarke, Stephen Curry and William McInnes, does well with occasionally very good material. Yet often characters speak in the earnest tones of a serious commercial for road safety, or blood donation or drink driving with cancer. Some of this gravity might be appreciated in House Husbands (Nine, Monday, 8.40pm), a show more reminiscent of those insurance commercials where a pelican hilariously lands on your toddler’s head, resulting in a whacky bushfire. There’s something of a gender divide in House Husband acting. The women in the cast, including Julia Morris and recently the wonderful Rachel Griffiths, consistently deliver credible warm performances. The men, particularly Gary Sweet, act as if there is a Scott Joplin piano playing to accompany their every crazy move. Their side-splitting antics are a cue for the female members of the ensemble to roll their eyes and take another heavy sigh. Nobody wants to watch middle-aged men running around corners with one leg in the air.
As unrecognisable as the House Husbands are, they play like the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross in comparison to the female ensemble of Winners and Losers (Seven, Tuesday, 9pm). I’ve possibly made an incorrect assumption that this snapchat bit of trash was written by Year 8 girls, but from recent inspection I hope all the year 8 readers and their parents will accept my apology. Where is the “winner” in this scenario? Must all the losers’ dialogue be so banaAnd so we say a very fond farewell to Nina Proudman and company. If there isn’t any more, it’s been grand. And from the looks of the company Offspring keeps, it's astonishing that she was ever here at all.
