THE PAROCHINAL Fantastic Australian Television Fantasy in Bloom and Tidelands
Of the two, Tidelands is the more obviously commercial; with its beachside setting and cast of predominantly young and attractive people, it could easily be summarised as ‘Home and Away with mermaids’.
For much of Australia’s screen history, genre fare has been ghettoised. On the big screen, horror, science fiction, action and the odd pure fantasy have been largely relegated to the ‘Ozploitation’ rubric – see: Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984), Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), The Man from Hong Kong (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1975) and Frog Dreaming (Trenchard-Smith, 1985), among various others. On television, such offerings – horror aside – have tended to be aimed at children, giving us the likes of Round the Twist, Spellbinder and The Girl from Tomorrow.
Many of these projects attained some measure of critical and commercial success, but generally within their mandated cultural confines. However, recent shifts in cinema and television globally have seen these once-derided genres ascend to a position of prominence. Nowadays, the success of prestige genre series such as HBO’s Game of Thrones, combined with the box-office clout of Disney’s Marvel brand as well as its rivals and imitators, is hard to ignore. Add to that the rise of digital distribution and streaming services, and their demand for content that can be marketed and consumed across cultural borders, and the screen-production sector worldwide has had no choice but to respond.
On local shores, this has resulted in a number of notable small-screen works, including Foxtel’s The Kettering Incident and the ABC’s Cleverman. Now, two streaming services
