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Winning hearts and cases

Genre fatigue aside, there's no objecting to the ABC's new legal drama Crownies.

"COMPARED to what really goes on, we're just scratching the surface," Marta Dusseldorp says.

"It's pretty horrific what people do to each other."

Dusseldorp is talking about her role as Janet King, a Crown prosecutor in the ambitious new ABC drama series Crownies. It's a legal series, a genre of which we've seen more incarnations than Chopper Read has seen years behind bars. This one, however, claims to be different. This one is about prosecutors.

"I think audiences are used to legal dramas featuring the defence," says Lewis Fitz-Gerald, who plays King's boss, a director of public prosecutions, or DPP. "They eat it up and love it and that's great but there aren't a great many stories based on the prosecution side.

"The prosecution side is usually painted as the guys in the black hats, whereas as far as society is concerned they're the guys in the white hats going after the baddies. This is an interesting shift and I think it captures something of the Zeitgeist in that need to see justice for all."

Actually, it's not the first prosecutorial drama. Most famously, there was Law & Order. In the first half of each hour-long show, the cops collared a crim; in the second half, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office — their equivalent of the office of the DPP — would prosecute the "perp". The formula was wildly successful. When the final episode aired in the US last May, it had been running for 20 years. Equal with Gunsmoke, Law & Order ranks as the longest-running US drama series.

But yes, most legal dramas are either about the defence team or about private practitioners. From the US, we've had LA Law, Ally McBeal, The Practice and spin-off Boston Legal, Harry's Law, The Good Wife and Damages.

Meanwhile, several Australian efforts have shown considerable imagination, including Rafferty's Rules, about a magistrate with domestic woes, MDA, about the lawyers who fight for medicos, and Rake, about a hard-living, fast-quipping silk.

Prosecutors have been criminally under-represented in Australia, however. And for Dusseldorp, working on Crownies has opened up a new world.

"It's only since I've done this that when I flick through the paper and I see a story about Nick Cowdery or the DPP or a prosecutor that now I realise there is this whole undercurrent."

Dusseldorp's character is a 10-year veteran of the DPP's office. Tough and tenacious, Janet King possesses a sharp tongue and sharper mind.

Dusseldorp, by contrast, is a pensive mother of two. She's found the subject matter more confronting than she expected.

"We're dealing with child murder and rape," Dusseldorp says. "There's a line I had to say about what had happened to a child and I couldn't say it without tearing up but I knew Janet wouldn't. It was hard to shoot. Finally I had to just blurt it out; it was too painful as a mum. I'm learning to get a little bit more thick-skinned. I know it's not real but in a way it is, because it does happen."

It does, and too often. Which means there's plenty of material for the show.

"Yes," Dusseldorp says, "it's a bottomless pit of horror."

And sex. For this account of the law is also an account of the lewd, blending matters legal with matters carnal.

Crownies concentrates on five young solicitors, all of them recent law school graduates. In their mid-20s, they bear satchels crammed with qualifications and hormones and their adventures bounce between the intellectual idealism of work and the hedonistic explorations of play.

As the second-in-charge of the DPP, Janet King is less hedonistic. Her personal life, however, has its own stresses, as she struggles to conceive with her female partner: "Well, she's the senior Crown prosecutor," Dusseldorp says. "Not to give anything away, she's in a lesbian relationship and things spin out of control a bit."

On a set visit, Green Guide watched as Dusseldorp and Fitz-Gerald worked with director Lynn Hegarty. The first floor of a tile warehouse has been converted into an impressive replica of the DPP's offices. Bookshelves groan under the weight of chunky legal tomes; photocopiers mark the spots where gossip is exchanged; a large open-plan area is divided from the offices by glass walls. In one corner is a cage containing a small, pretty songbird with bright red feet. Its name is Atticus. I'm guessing it's a finch.

The detail is impressive and for Hegarty and her co-directors, the elaborate location is a blessing. Many shots are filmed through glass walls; often the camera follows characters as they talk. "You're not fighting the location, you're embracing it," Hegarty says in a break between set-ups. "This is not The West Wing but then it's not just people talking in offices. Here you can follow characters from one end of the set to the other."

According to the crew, real prosecutors from the DPP's

office were impressed by the interiors when they visited. The exteriors were filmed at the Parramatta court complex in Sydney. "It's good to be out here in the west," Fitz-Gerald says. "You're actually in the geographic heart of the city and that's not a bad thing. The welcome we receive out here is fantastic.

"We're hoping this is going to have a different look from the city."

Like the solicitors it portrays, Crownies is ambitious. The first series has 26 53-minute episodes, each one shot in just six days. What's more, the cast is a large ensemble of fresh faces. Alongside a core of Todd Lasance (Home and Away, Cloudstreet), Hamish Michael (City Homicide), Ella Scott Lynch (All Saints), Andrea Demetriades (Bell Shakespeare) and Indiana Evans (Home and Away) there is the sure hand of TV staples such as Jeanette Cronin and Peter Kowitz.

Complementing the ensemble of actors is a formidable ensemble of directors. Apart from Hegarty, who has directed Heartbreak High, Wildside, Packed to the Rafters and more, they include Tony Tilse, Chris Noonan and Cherie Nowlan. Each one has shot a block of episodes.

"That's common for one-hour and two-hour television," says Fitz-Gerald, who himself has extensive directing experience. "It has to be. It's very taxing work. They're long days and you have to be focused.

"And for the actors, there are different qualities to each director. One director might come with a real excitable energy and someone else will come with a calm energy but the fact is that the output remains the same. You can't shoot any more set-ups in a day simply by being excited about it. The experience of it is different from block to block — but not so very different or the writers/producers would be scratching their heads."

Hegarty is inspired by shows such as The Practice as well as The West Wing. "This is a behind-the-scenes aspect of the judicial system," she says. "Even though the ideas and moral problems are dense, it still has a lot of energy and that's what I liked about The West Wing. We've taken that from The West Wing in that we move everything around, we don't get bogged down in long turgid scenes where people just sit there. There is a youthfulness in this office, there are a lot of young solicitors who are hungry and questioning.

"It's about people who have a passion for the law and for justice," he says. "The storylines here tend to deal with very idealistic lawyers trying to pursue justice and good ethical outcomes but sometimes the law is a very blunt instrument.

"That said, there's also the lives and loves of the people who work here and their personal relationships — you really buy into the characters and their personal lives and their struggles at work.

"I think the HBO experience has changed people's expectations of what they're prepared to invest in. Shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos had ongoing narratives where you really invested in the characters but there wasn't an absolute sense of, 'OK, that's the end of the hour, it's all sewn up. We've solved the crime, let's move on.' Those shows ask you to take on long serial elements. This does, too, and I think that's the way interesting television is going."

For Lewis as for Dusseldorp, preparing for their roles meant spending time with Nicholas Cowdery, who until recently was the NSW director of public prosecutions.

Dusseldorp describes her meeting as a "life-changing moment", thanks to the outspoken official's gravitas and sense of justice. In one ongoing plot line, Fitz-Gerald's character also locks horns with the attorney-general, just as Cowdery did with NSW politician John Hatzistergos.

"That's a case of art imitating life," says Fitz-Gerald, whose credits include playing Meryl Streep's lawyer in Fred Schepisi's Evil Angels. Apart from everything else, Lewis is just pleased the ABC is making Crownies.

"It does feel as if the ABC has decided to get back in the drama business," he says. "I think that's a public expectation that they should be but it wasn't so long ago they made six or eight hours of drama in an entire calendar year. We need to see ourselves represented and in ways that are different, perhaps, from the ways commercial networks present drama. If you're less driven by ratings, perhaps riskier storytelling may be undertaken.

"And this [Crownies] feels good as we do it — but others will judge. Audiences will be the judge of whether we got it right."

By Sacha Molitorisz
July 7, 2011
Sydney Morning Herald

DPP lawyer drama a Crownie achievement for ABC

'DO you remember that carpenter who killed three people and stuffed them into dustbins?" one attractive young woman is saying to another, as they stride to an office printer in a busy corridor.

It just so happens they are actresses playing lawyers in the fictional world of the Department of Public Prosecutions, a frantic workplace where discussion of murders, political corruption and, especially, sexual abuse of minors, is commonplace.

It's based on the grimly real-life NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, until recently headed by the admired and feared Nicholas Cowdery. The similarly named DPP is where the much-anticipated, new ABC prime-time legal series Crownies plays out and I'm standing with director of photography Bruce Young as the performers rehearse in the cavernous, highly realistic set.

The 22-part show follows five young solicitors, dramatically highlighting the moral and ethical dilemmas that naturally grow out of the prosecution of alleged wrongdoers. The average age of the lawyers is 27 and they're a nicely mixed bunch around whom to tether a long form piece of storytelling. We're watching the quite beautiful and red-haired Ella Scott Lynch, who plays altruistic but ambitious Erin O'Shaughnessy, and stylish brunette Andrea Demetriades, who is a cracking Lina Badir in the series. She's an unorthodox fiery Australian-Palestinian who loves a bit of intrigue, and Demetriades plays her cleverly with an actorly sense of tense understatement.

Standing behind me, ready for their various entrances, is slippery ladies' man Ben McMahon, played by Todd Lasance, and Richard Stirling's oddly hapless Hamish Michael, who looks a little uncannily like a youthful Stephen Fry. And he's almost as endearing as baby-faced Michael, a chatty lawyer terrified of public speaking.

With them is another beauty in sassy, self-assured and immaculately groomed Tatum Novak, actually clever young actress Indiana Evans. And she is very, very talented. She embodies that wonderful acting paradox, managing to be both the most and the least contrived.

Their characters all lack legal experience and their lives are filled with the same aspirations and fragile relationships of other young men and women. Yet they are the first point of contact with the police who investigate sometimes terrible crimes, the ones who liaise with the victims and the sometimes aggrieved witnesses.

The cast includes experienced Jeanette Cronin as Tracey Samuels, the prickly office manager, Lewis Fitz-Gerald as David Sinclair, the state's No 1 prosecutor, and Peter Kowitz as the grizzled veteran prosecutor Tony Gillies. Completing the line-up is Marta Dusseldorp's senior advocate, Janet King, a tenacious and scary litigator, who is also rather gorgeous with chiselled good looks and a sly wit.

Like hospital shows and crime series, courtroom dramas define their own traumatic territory, and television producers love them because they accommodate events that can usually be situated in simple, affordable sets such as interview rooms, single courtrooms and hospital wards.

Much of this series is set in the free-flowing, spacious setting contained in this Auburn industrial building in Sydney's western suburbs, crammed with glass-partitioned offices and open corridors, full of shimmering reflections, where the crew are working on the 15th episode. And it's very busy.

This is a series that makes great use of what's known as the "walk-and-talk", that distinctive storytelling technique used so effectively in The West Wing by creator Aaron Sorkin and a feature of The Bill. In Crownies the characters are constantly moving as they have conversations en route, frequently joined by others, who spin off to chat to someone else, all observed by Young's roving cameras.

The technique not only emphasises how frantic the workplace is but smooths transitions from one location to another, adding visual interest to what otherwise are talking-heads sequences. "Actors and directors want a truthfulness of performance and what I do is put them in a real world so it doesn't feel like they have been plonked in a telly show," says Young as he checks camera angles. "This is a very fluid show."

And Crownies works beautifully; it's a wonderful melodrama of suspense, shading over into both courtroom drama and crime fiction. It creates an overarching narrative structure that is large enough to date many incidents and characters, as well as being a detailed discussion of the workings of a major social institution.

To do this while still maintaining the ongoing excitement and suspense is no simple task of construction. Crownies manages this skilfully, while still bringing off those coincidences and reversals that are the essence of TV melodrama. I like it a lot, and not only because I want Dusseldorp to read sections of the Criminal Act aloud to me one night.

Judging from the first feature-length episode the show is stylish, intelligent and sexy. It's also sometimes quite confronting in the manner its writers, Greg Haddrick and Kylie Needham, and director Cherie Nowlan, treat the cases of sexual abuse with which the young lawyers habitually deal.

They involve stories of wretchedness that defy common sensibilities, acts of deep, dark, destructive psychology. The legal beat for these lawyers is largely death and sexual pathology and they forge their professional reputations on it, and right from the beginning it takes a terrible toll.

The series plunges straight in as another year is ending in chambers. There's a high-profile scandal when two parliamentary cleaners accuse the Attorney General of drugging and raping them, after forcing them to wear turtleneck jumpers. Though the evidence is shaky the choice of sexual apparel appears to be a telling detail, although initially perplexing the lawyers. When the case file is leaked to the press after the wild DPP Christmas party, the five Crownies — the only ones with access to the folder — and their personal secrets are rudely spotlit.

This is the ABC's first long-form serial drama since the medical defence series MDA finished its 56 episodes in 2005. It's stronger and far more assured, produced by Screentime, the same company. It tells us a lot about how far Australian drama has travelled in the last few years and how TV production now takes a much more filmic approach to the medium; digital technology allowing the pictorial conventions of cinema to be easily appropriated.

I always thought MDA suffered from panicked writers' syndrome, an illness that afflicted TV scribes for years. They never seemed able to harness the seeming randomness of their show — like Crownies, it also employed the storytelling technique of multi-episode story arcs — and find a larger narrative voice in its assorted parts. No one seemed to own the storytelling.

This is certainly not the case in Crownies' exactly shaped feature-length first episode, much of it colourfully set against the preparations for the department's Christmas party. Each scene and every sentence of Haddrick and Needham's script is straightforward and direct; they fly to the mark, never leaving a feeling of frustration.

It's not just the way they present the procedural narrative, the generic crime show plot twists, the moves and counter-moves of dropped clues and sudden insights; it's the straight-out concreteness of their plotting, their gift for mood, drama and quizzicality.

You can tell the actors delight in saying the often clever words, especially Dusseldorp who can give the subtlest of nuances to small moments. And the far less experienced Evans, who finds humour in the most complicated legalese, which she deploys with utter credibility.

Playing with the conflicts between different personal values and the ambiguity of personal motives and legal principles, the series really is a morality play. At its centre is the problem of a lawyer's moral relationship to their code of justice and to society, and the way that in time it becomes increasingly more complex and ambiguous. As Kowitz's Gillies tells the altruistic and emotionally volatile O'Shaughnessy, "The truth of it is, despite five centuries of common law, truth and justice rarely intersect." Gillies is like a rottweiler in a world increasingly full of politically correct pussycats.

You sense that as the series develops we will find more and more examples of that paradox so central to crime fiction in general: the way characters feel they must act outside the law, supposedly, to more fully uphold it. The journey should have us wondering in cop-show expectation, to quote The Wire's David Simon, "whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all".

Finding themselves immersed in a world of violence, corruption and sometimes social anarchy, the struggle for the Crownies will be to not only survive but to impose something of their own sense of rightness and order on that world. It should be an engrossing journey.

By Graeme Blundell
July 09, 2011
The Australian

Fresh faces raise the bar

Aunty delivers a cast-iron hit to atone for some of its previous offerings.

Series one. Episode one. A new locally produced drama probably has about 120 seconds of wiggle room to be embraced or rejected. The credits. The cast. The credentials. These are all factors. But those first moments of action or dialogue can win or lose a critic and, much more importantly, an audience, in spite of the fact that hundreds of people have worked for two or five years to bring this crucial moment to the screen.

Crownies, a new ABC drama about a young bunch of crown prosecutors, their shocking cases and even more shocking personal lives, sounds like another limp attempt to recapture the glory of This Life or North Square or Party Animals. But we never make those shows. We make Bed of Roses and Blue Heelers.

The first few moments of Crownies (ABC1, Thursday, 8.30pm) aren't encouraging. This critic cares less about locally produced crime drama than nearly any genre. And ABC resistance is high. I consider East of Everything a booster shot.

Recent ABC product has not inspired confidence. British Friday-night crime, don't care so much. And unfortunately, as a result of watching more TV than most readers, I'm likely to jump to conclusions. So here's the weird thing. Something inexplicable happened with my advance DVD of Crownies. The plan to watch 20 minutes evaporated. Three hours disappeared, just like that. Six hours would have been gobbled just as quickly.

Crownies ticks those impossible, invisible magical boxes of casting, connection, character, charisma and care about watching more. The unlikely mix of known and formidable forces with fresh faces pays off. The language of the office, the look of the stationery, the too attractive but useful-for-our-purposes cast, in its underwear, is terrific. These look like future stars.

Todd Lasance, Ella Scott Lynch, Hamish Michael, Andrea Demetriades and Indiana Evans each breathe life into characters we've never seen before. These new faces should grab audience loyalty and fascination instantly.

Perennial hard workers Jeanette Cronin, Marta Dusseldorp, Lewis Fitz-Gerald and Peter Kowitz are all at their best. They bring nuance and heft to their wonderfully written characters. Co-producer-writer Jane Allen's background as a lawyer is evident and input from former DPP prosecutor Hilary Bonney may well account for the fresh smell of authenticity. No doubt our lawyer friends will point out some pitfalls but these should not get in the way of celebrating a rollicking good new local drama.

By Ruth Ritchie
July 9, 2011
Sydney Morning Herald