One minute, director Shawn Seet is pulling a show-stopping helicopter shot that pans up from an overturned car to an infinite, uninhabited landscape the next, he’s filling the screen with dancing code, encryption and jpegs, as a biotech giant is speed-hacked. A ripple effect begins.Īs you might expect from an Australian story, ancient often rubs up uncomfortably against modern, lending what could have been just another Hollywood-style hacktivism cat-and-mouse show a grander thematic scope, which manages to take in indigenous land rights. Far away from the ironically transparent glass walls, two aboriginal teen sweethearts are run off the road and left for dead outside a one-truckstop town. The big conspiracy driving things along is both governmental and corporate, and the show treats those two impostors just the same in fine establishing scenes within Canberra’s stunning lakeside Parliament House, where a slick minister, played by David Wenham, and other political wonks oil the corridors of power (“I know it’s unethical – but I’ll make an exception for the fuck-knuckle who’s writing the PM’s Twitter stream”). Dan Spielman and Ashley Zukerman star as interdependent, battling brothers Ned and Jesse, respectively a soft-centred investigative journo for an online newspaper and an easily overstimulated autistic hacker who’s weaning himself off the internet (his Lego-brick USB stick quickly becomes a MacGuffin).

They’re on safer ground with this pounding, intelligent, issue-led cyber-gripper with its two strong Australian leads.

Even last year’s Jane Campion miniseries Top of the Lake, shot in New Zealand, was an international co-production whose mercenary casting of an American in the lead saw ABC pull its funding. True, BBC4 aired the Melbourne-set hit-lit adaptation The Slap in 2011, but that’s about it for grown-up small-screen drama from down under. But while Aussie cinema is in rude health – with Animal Kingdom, Snowtown, The Hunter, The Rover and The Babadook winning international recognition – the only TV we get is suburban soap. It’s set and shot in Canberra, the nation’s political seat, and Broken Hill in the New South Wales outback – locations that really ought not be so unfamiliar in a deregulated global TV market. The urge to demand our krona back was quickly quelled, as The Code, produced by ABC1 and shown here just three weeks after its Australian premiere, was as narratively vice-like, visually resplendent and geographically “other” as anything from Jutland. Once again, the action was driven by a deadly, remote incident – but, strangely, it was blisteringly sunny and everyone was speaking English (albeit uptalking Australian English?). A fter four years of slate-grey Scandinavian skies on Saturday nights on BBC4, the existential clouds unexpectedly parted at the beginning of October with a brand new thriller import in the 9pm slot.

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