Oh, Lord. What a treat The Newsreader is. A person would have to be almost unimaginably flinty-hearted and lacking in taste not to enjoy this delicious Australian drama just a little bit. And because (ha!) I’m the polar opposite of both these things, every time I watch it, I feel as though I’m wrapped in a million-thread-count sheet. Obviously, it’s an enormous relief at this point to find a well-written, well-acted show that has nothing to do with crime, whether true or not – and please, let it stand as encouragement to commissioning editors everywhere. But there’s much more to its gorgeous, Poison-scented embrace than these things alone.
It manages to be so many things at once: a comedy, a love story, a pastiche, an homage, a soap. Come for the shoulder pads and the awful (but you like them really) songs by Mr Mister, Cutting Crew and Toto. Stay for the office politics, the rabid ambition and to revisit the news stories that shaped 1986: the Challenger disaster; the release from prison of Lindy “a dingo ate my baby!” Chamberlain; the meltdown at Chernobyl. If it looks great – think carefully labelled video tapes and outsize gold Trifari earrings – it sounds even better, its dialogue at once cartoony and horribly convincing (its writer is Michael Lucas). Here is the authentic din of the Eighties Aussie male, a low and unrelenting grunt that sends even the toughest woman running to her dressing room for a good blub.
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