Australian television drama has something of a chequered history, as anyone who’s ever sat down to watch “this season’s hot new drama” knows - half the time they find themselves dealing with a shot-on-video travesty with cardboard sets, lighting as subtle as the MCG on a Friday night and acting that makes a primary school play seem like the Lawrence Olivier Fan Club by comparison.
Of course, there are exceptions - every so often a drama series appears with high production values, a quality cast and strong, intelligent writing, with enough accessibility and relevance woven in to give it wide audience appeal. But when it comes to quality drama aimed at a younger audience, there’s not much there once you discount the obvious Neighbours and Home And Away soap-opera-fest. Ben Gannon’s excellent productions Heartbreak High and Head Start have scored good reviews and strong overseas sales, the former show running for many seasons. But sadly, few people have tuned in to watch them in Australia (and both were, to be fair, largely marketed towards teenage viewers). Surely, you think, bland soap isn’t the only formula for drama on Australian TV that can click with audiences in their 20s?
The powers that be at production company Southern Star must have wondered the same thing. Having wrapped up their hugely successful Water Rats after many seasons, they turned their attention to something different (at least as far as Australia was concerned) - a drama series about a group of twenty-somethings living in a St Kilda apartment building. It would be a series shot entirely on film, starring some of the country’s best young actors and put together by people with a background in quality, not quantity. Yet unlike Water Rats and its ilk, this one would place its focus not on the working lives and adventures of its characters, but rather on the most intimate parts of their personal lives. It would be, essentially, Melrose Place without the corn and instead made the way the Brits might have done it. Its enigmatic title would be The Secret Life Of Us, and it would go on to become one of the success stories of local - and overseas - TV in 2001.
Targeted at an under-30s audience and with particular appeal to women (thanks both to some strong female characters and some insightful writing by Judi McCrossin) Secret Life is based, essentially, on the same sort of concept on which bog-standard soapies are founded. But there are major differences. For a start, the issues and events that propel the various storylines are both more mature and more daring, with the intended audience and the timeslot allowing more to be said and shown than usual. Personal relationships are the overriding concern throughout, and here they’re given the chance to be presented in a more honest and frank way. Sure, it’s all a bit over-the-top sometimes - but after all, this is entertainment, not reality TV.
And then there’s the production itself. Rather than opt for barely-literate newcomers, the producers have cast some seriously talented actors in the lead roles - Claudia Karvan (Alex), Deborah Mailman (Kelly), Sam Johnson (Evan), Abi Tucker (Miranda), Joel Edgerton (Will), Spencer McLaren (Richie) and Sibylla Budd (Gabrielle) all breathe life into their characters and make them their own from the first episode, and all are thoroughly believable. In many ways this production takes its cues from higher-end British television, and it’s not at all surprising that the series (which was co-financed by Channel 4 in the UK) has been a success there as well - indeed, each episode in the first series screened in the UK before it premiered in Australia!
Produced in 16:9 widescreen, The Secret Life Of Us has become something of a flagship show for Channel Ten’s new digital service, but the vast majority of viewers see the standard TV version - which is quite literally panned and scanned to a more “acceptable” aspect ratio so as not to offend the public at large with those annoying black bars. So a series of DVDs of the series was always going to be a welcome proposition; for series 1, there are seven discs covering the pilot and the 20 regular episodes. Disc 1 contains:
Episodes 1 & 2: Telemovie: Introducing us to the characters, their personalities and their flaws, this debut Secret Life runs the length of a feature film and is made with all the production values of one, with superb cinematography by Ellery Ryan and a detailed yet easily digestible set of storylines that give us an idea of what’s to come. This double episode actually works well as a stand-alone drama - the few threads it leaves hanging at the end aren’t cliffhangers, and there’s a nice sense of “completeness” about it all. Screened (twice) as a two-hour (with ads) special episode in Australia, this was aired as two separate episodes in the UK, and that, unfortunately, is how it appears on this DVD, the story interrupted at a decidedly non-dramatic point for a preview of the “next” episode and a set of end credits that mention characters and songs that haven’t appeared yet! It would have been nice to have had the option on this disc to view the debut episode as a continuous feature (though the superimposition of opening credits on the second half would have made that a challenging authoring exercise!). This movie-length pilot episode was actually shot a good deal of time before the rest of the first series, something that becomes very obvious with the third episode on this disc - suddenly characters’ hairstyles change, and the photography and general “look” of the show is a little less carefully crafted.
Episode 3: The Unbelievable Truth: One of a handful of first-series episodes to borrow a title from a feature film, this kick-off of the “proper” series focuses on events set up in the pilot - most notably, Alex’s mini-affair with her upstairs neighbour, lawyer Jason (played by Damian De Montemas, he is the only major character in the series so far who’s been two-dimensional and clichéd). The thing is, Jason’s partner Gabrielle happens to also be a childhood best friend of Alex’s. Trouble is brewing.
A couple of niggling complaints about these DVD releases are in order; with 22 episodes to cover in this series, spreading them across seven DVDs is a bit harsh on fans of the show, especially when they’re premium-priced discs. And interestingly, a look at the discs reveals that each episode has been compressed to a size that would allow four episodes per disc to comfortably sit on each disc along with the extra material provided - there’s a lot of unused space on each DVD here. As it stands, fans that want to buy the complete series are up for over $200, even at discount prices - compare that with, say, Fox’s 22-episode Buffy series sets…
Secondly, it’s unlikely that those watching the show on DVD are going to need the “preview” of the following episode jammed in before the end credits (there’s also a “previously” montage at the start of episodes 2 and 3 which is almost identical on each one) - indeed, when you’re about to watch the next episode right away, the last thing you want is for crucial plot points to be spoiled without warning (what’s included here is the raw edited “ad” that TV networks later add voice-over and titles to). At the very least, these “re-cap” and “promo” sections should be given their own chapters so that those who don’t want to see them can quickly skip past them.
Provided on DVD in the 16:9 aspect ratio of its original production (and anamorphically enhanced), this disc lets Secret Life fans see the whole picture, the one that the 12 people watching digital television get to see every week. As you’d expect with a modern production made with not only digital TV but hi-def broadcast in mind, the image quality is pretty damn good - it may be a “mere” TV series, but the visual quality on offer here is often better than that of certain high-profile feature films we could mention in their DVD incarnations.
That said, the “telemovie” episodes (1 and 2) look noticeably nicer on DVD than episode 3, the difference all the more obvious when you watch them back to back. There are several probable reasons for this, but our guess at the main reason for the change in “look” are twofold: for one thing, the telemovie was transferred from film to video (before editing, of course) at Complete Post, while a different company (AAV in Melbourne) handled the telecine work for the rest of the series. And more importantly, the director of photography on the telemovie (Ellery Ryan) was undoubtedly able to be more refined with lighting and exposures when not under the pressure of a continuing-series deadline. It’s not that episode 3 looks bad, by the way - far from it. But the “telemovie” is shot with the refinement of a feature film, and it looks great on DVD.
There’s a fair bit of grain evident throughout, but colour resolution is excellent in these DVD transfers and aside from the occasional loss of fine background detail, the MPEG compression is well-handled too.
The end credit crawl of the “telemovie” episodes (they’re the exact same titles on both) is almost illegible on DVD (and looked just as bad on TV as well), probably due to poor downconversion from higher-resolution masters; the end credits of episode 3 and beyond are much easier to read, thankfully!
Though the three episodes are provided on a dual-layered disc, there is no layer change during episodes (and commendably, no “commercial break” fade-outs anywhere either). It would appear that layer one contains episodes 1 and 3, while the second layer contains episode 2.
