love my way
I have just finished viewing the first lot of a contemporary Oz drama series called Love My Way and a couple of observations about the production are probably in order.
I think it is a pretty good effort all round, certainly after my initial reservations I found the series rather compelling, the characters did manage to develop some extra dimensions and the plot lines became just a little more sophisticated. Overall the craft value is quite high, it is well shot on some rather good locations, costume and set work is very consistent and the look and feel of the series suits the material extremely well. My gripes initially with the series were the simplicity of some of the characters and the dialog seemed overly stilted. In a way there is nothing really new about this, a lot of Oz drama tends to simple idiosyncratic stories which seem to rely of the audience filling in the blanks with personal experience.
The other thing I found somewhat annoying early in the series was the rather blatant audience targeting. I’m not 30 something anymore, so it was hard to relate to a lot of the characters. Understandably, given the Foxtel heritage, this series established pretty early on that the only lives that really mattered were the rather comfortably well off foursome who had a variety of popular careers/lives in place. No one was really poor, unwell, middle aged or even particularly ugly. The proximity to the surf was another Sydney’ism that I found tiring, but it became less invasive over the life of the series. The problem is that these rather visually convenient props are not the daily bread and butter for a lot of Australians, but they do continue to feed into the mainstream stereotypes.
But the series improved. The acting became more intense and I found myself rather taken by some of the scenarios. However it was the episode that won an AFI award that really rescued the series for me. The story was extremely well directed, the acting was certainly a cut above anything that had gone before and the series suddenly developed some real depth. Again, it was a comfortable, albeit tragic middle class scenario, but the humanity of the situation rescued what could have been a disaster.
I have to say overall, the series, within its limitations is as good as any that has recently graced the small screen here in Oz. It is good to see Foxtel getting into local drama. Unfortunately it is hard to see this series or any other from this source traveling into more adventurous territory. TV drama tends to like winning and known formulas like Blue Heelers, Neighbours and SeaChange, formulas that revolve around pretty middle of the road type personalities and conventional or stereotypical environments. The more left of centre material winds up in comedy or in film which, whilst a fact of life, is still a mark of how conservative TV producers really are.
The day might come when a series finally makes it to air about a bunch of socially disfunctional human beings who don’t have all the middle class trapping and have to deal with all the problems of living in our world in whatever way they can, but I am not holding my breath for it. Love my Way is not that series.