Secret City review all the ingredients for a first-rate Australian political thriller

A journalist, a body and a secret. With Showcase’s new six-part series, does Australia have its own House of Cards?

Political thrillers are rare on Australian television screens; networks favour tried and tested crime procedurals and family comedy-drama instead. The Code (2014) was the first show in recent memory that envisioned a local political landscape as dramatic and dangerous as Washington or 10 Downing Street are portrayed to be; mostly, our televisual takes on Canberra tend towards the satirical.

So Secret City, a new six-part series that premiered on Sunday night on Showcase, is something of an anomaly. It sets its tone from the opening frame: moody overhead shots of Canberra that are reminiscent of the titles from House Of Cards, with the constructed, intricate city mirroring the mysteries it holds.

There’s a deliberate restrained pace here; Secret City eschews explosions and gunfights in favour of a creeping sense of menace, as a handful of characters and “coincidences” become over more closely entwined. Tasked with unravelling the conspiracy is journalist Harriet Dunkley, played by Anna Torv, who proved her gift for elegant restraint in American sci-fi thriller Fringe and brings the same quality here.

Dan Wyllie plays her foil: the brutish, menacing minister of defence Mal Paxton, who Dunkley has long been trying to catch out misusing union funds. Early in the first episode, an old photo of him in handcuffs in China mysteriously appears in Harriet’s in-tray, setting her after him again.

All roads lead to China here. We’re also introduced to an Australian woman missing in the Chinese prison system after she attempted self-immolation to protest the Chinese presence in Tibet. The Australian government appears to be stuck between its loyalties to America and the Asian superpower.

Australian TV veterans round out the cast: Alex Dimitriadis as Asio officer Charles Dancer, Marcus Graham as Harriet’s colleague Andrew Griffiths, Jacki Weaver as Labor powerbroker Catriona Bailey, and Sacha Horler as PM’s chief of staff Lidie Sypek.

Unlike The Code, and many political conspiracy thrillers abroad, the portrayal of governmental inner-workings in Secret City is clearly the work of people who know their subject well – from the relationship between unions and the Australian Labor party, to the conflicts that exist between parliament and diplomacy. This is to be expected; the series is based upon the novels The Marmalade Files and The Mandarin Code, written by veteran Canberra reporters Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis, stylishly adapted by Matt Cameron, Belinda Chayko and Greg Waters.

It is interesting that such seasoned reporters veered towards a paranoid thriller, rather than the cartoonish buffoonery of Hollowmen and Utopia, or the lighter character comedy-drama of Party Tricks. Perhaps Uhlmann and Lewis harbour journalistic hunches of their own; or perhaps, after years of reporting staff disputes and policy failures, a far-reaching conspiracy seemed a lot more fun.

Government provides all the necessary fodder for great drama: characters with clear and opposing objectives; conflicts between well-meaning ideology and Machiavellian machination; the power and money required to raise the stakes above the personal to the national and international. Yet most of the scandals uncovered by our political media tend to be human: secret affairs and temper tantrums and unchallenged incompetence. There are far fewer unidentified bodies than there are unidentified Cabcharge receipts; for every Watergate, there’s a hundred Utegates or Grangegates.

Satirical comedies like Hollowmen, The Thick Of It, and Veep take these all-too-relatable mishaps to fuel their stories. The comedy comes from a thesis that what makes the gears of government spin is the point where stupidity and serendipity collide. It’s a misleadingly reassuring premise: if you don’t think your elected officials are capable of controlling themselves, you can trust they’re not controlling a secret army.

But in order to make a good political thriller, or to be a willing audience for one, you need to take the game of politics deadly seriously. There can be no secret too big, no act too depraved, no scheme too complex for the pursuit of power.

This can be a tough balance: too often shows veer from the paranoid to the hysterical, where politicians knock people off with abandon (I’m looking at you, House Of Cards), or else they rely on pressures more personal than political (Borgen, Party Animals, Party Tricks). Then of course, there’s the unabashed fantasy world of The West Wing, of which the main source of drama is grief that we will never be able to elect Josiah Bartlet.

Secret City manages to walk that line beautifully – stakes high enough for it to be gripping, set in a political world that feels all too real and believable.

Secret City airs on Sundays at 8.30pm on Showcase

This piece has been updated to reflect the work of the screenwriters

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