Offspring - Celebrating the Meaningful Moments

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.

----------------------------------
Offspring – TV Drama 2010-2017 (7 series) Network 10 Australia // DVD, iTunes and maybe still Netflix

Often amusing, often moving, totally addictive drama series.


Nina Proudman is a 30 something single woman who treasures life, whether it is through her work as an obstetrician at a maternity hospital, or just life as it is lived with her whole crazy family.

The writers find endlessly creative ways of showing us what Nina is thinking, which they have to do because she internalises her insecurities. Sometimes her internal world is pretty mundane, but often it is hilarious.




Although she is a competent obstetrician, when she is within cooee of a bloke she fancies, Nina turns into an inarticulate, blithering idiot, partly because she sometimes can’t distinguish between reality and the truckloads of fantasy-world-images and conversations in her head.

Asher Keddie has said one thing she liked about playing the part of Nina was that Nina is brave. Nina needs to be brave – while she internalises her insecurities, her sister Billie externalises hers, and it can be ouchy to watch when Billie lashes out. Billie is, at times, seriously toxic.

“Your family know you longer than anyone else,” says Nina. Personally, I don’t think that’s any reason to keep forgiving excessively bad behaviour that no one is prepared to change. And if I would not be likely to forgive it as a family member, how likely am I to forgive it as a viewer?

At times, it seems to me, some of the Proudman family betray trust or confidences a little too easily. I don’t know if that’s normal, I have no idea. And if manipulative behaviour is normal or reasonable, that still shouldn't make it okay, should it? And lying just seems odd to me. I know I've told one or two lies in 60 plus years, but not many cos I've a shit memory and a transparent face which means I'm a crap liar so I'm basically honest. The way people lie on this show is almost an Olympic sport, and one or two other things they do make me cringe - but maybe that's just the early episodes and it just takes some getting used to. In spite of all that I love to death almost everything about Offspring. Yes, the good bits are so good they more than make up for the annoying bits, which is really saying something.

With shows like this there is eventually a character or storyline that resonates at a visceral level - with me it is Patrick's father who reminds me there is no male equivalent of "the c word". He has an attachment disorder, but as I always say: there are two types of people with a mental illness, those who are arseholes, and those who are not. Patrick's father is in the first category. Why don't people believe us when we say they exist? Most importantly, why don't the people we are supposed to be able to count on believe us when we say they exist? (Mercifully, the character only makes a brief appearance.)

Rewatching Offspring and I'm only halfway through episode 3 and Billie is just a total knob but I'm already weeping snot and the next minute Nina notices something odd and I'm grinning madly cos life is just about the little moments -- and good drama is about the writers who think to share little moments with us.

Offspring is not just a drama it’s a comedy drama. Sure, sometimes a storyline demands tissues but more often – especially once the writers hit their stride in season 2 – I found myself laughing like a drain through entire episodes, not just because they are funny but sometimes because they are brave, or creative or surprising.

Scripts are decidedly apolitical but (family dysfunction aside) the show’s values are excellent. It’s clever, it’s intelligent, and occasionally someone even sneaks a moment or two of something surreal that is pure gold on to the screen.

I have no frame of reference for judging whether the “sister” bond between Nina and Billie makes sense; at first Billie just strikes me as inordinately self-absorbed at times, though over the full seven series the two sisters both end up supporting and hurting each other in extreme ways in equal measure.

Deborah Mailman continues to be a brilliant actor. Until Love My Way I’d never seen Asher Keddie before, and here she actually has a chance to do something interesting. Asher not only surprises with her comic range, sometimes she astonishes in other ways; – there is one scene where Nina expresses a feeling of shame at having said something awful and her ears actually burn scarlet. How does she do that? Billie is not always a sympathetic character but Kat Stewart is mind bogglingly good in the role.

A great bonus is that Billie’s boyfriend Mick (Eddie Perfect) is a singer/songwriter (in later seasons he is joined by Clare Bowditch) providing some “live music”, and personal songs that reflect the storylines and characters.

“Deb [Oswald] said that she conceived Offspring as the opposite of those shows where there's a dead prostitute lying in a dumpster in the beginning of the episode. This is a show that's affirming of all the things that make life great: food, sex, love, family, babies, dogs. The things that make life meaningful are our relationships to other people, those tiny moments when you have a connection with another human being. Offspring is a celebration of that.”

 

M Rating – The characters of Offspring never get completely naked while they are on our screens, but it is quite clear what is happening when sperm donations are being made or people are sexing. The language is perfectly frank, though never gratuitously crude. Brave standards for a free-to-air soap.

Note re Subtitles/ Dialogue: Some seasons of the DVDs have no subtitles, while some do.

On the Netflix version, the dialogue is sometimes censored and in other episodes not censored at all, which is weirdly inconsistent.
The subtitles for the witty exchange between Nina and Patrick shown above “You have a problem/ Fuck you / Could be Tourette’s” is missing the “Fuck you” which not only kills the joke but consequently no longer even makes sense. English subtitles on Netflix are not prepared by a human who knows much English at all so often the subtitles are wrong. With Offspring, this is a bigger tragedy than usual because the added gap between English English and Australian English not only makes some of the subtitles utter nonsense but kills a lot of really great humour.

Bingeability: - Extremely high. Offspring doesn’t generate a desperate need to know what happens next, but from the second season I cared enough about the characters and had such great laughs that it was always a joy to just keep watching.

AFTER YOU'VE FINISHED BINGEING OFFSPRING (when you no longer need worry about spoilers) you get to search YouTube for one of those parodies... "Hitler finds out about... Offspring".

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One of the characters I really like and which doesn’t often rate a mention in reviews is Inner Melbourne. It’s an area where I spent many of my early years (before it was gentrified). If you don’t know Melbourne but want to do some armchair travelling with Google Maps, you’ll find a list of Offspring sites at http://www.theworldswaiting.com/2014/05/offspring-tour-of-fitzroy-melbourne.html

Other "location" stuff:
*Mick's Place is at 101 Kerr St Fitzroy
*The church spires often visible from the back balcony of the maternity hospital are St Patrick's Cathedral
*01x11 Westgarth Cinema, 89 High St Northcote is used in several episodes
*01x13 The Grandstand is at the Brunswick St Oval, the original home of the Fitzroy Football club, one of the first Australian Rules Football Clubs.
*Edinburgh Gardens are used in many episodes, and even incorporate, in one corner, the Brunswick St Oval. In 01x13 when the family gathers for a picnic you can see a band rotunda.
*02x02 When Mick is running to take his sample to a lab he talks to Billie on the phone from the corner of Nicholson St and Gertrude Street Fitzroy. The red Brick building to his left is the old Cable Tram Depot. The gardens directly ahead of Mick are the Carlton Gardens, and there is a tiny cream-coloured speck of the Exhibition Building showing. These gardens and the Exhibition Buildings feature in a later season.
*02x04 The liquor store where Mick goes to find his brother is Piedimonte's Best St Fitzroy (near Scotchmer St)
*02x06 The Nunnery backpack hostel where Jimmy and Tammy stay is at 116 Nicholson St Fitzroy
*02x06 The Marriage Registry Office is located in the Old Treasury Buildings in Spring St Melbourne
*02x08 Jimmy goes to Federation Square at the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets Melbourne
*03x01 Cubbie St Adventure Playground Fitzroy
*03x05 Roller Coaster is at Luna Park in St Kilda
*03x11 The Moorabbin Bowl (since demolished)
*04x04 Lawn Tennis Courts 11 Nicholson St Carlton
*05x08 Exhibition Building
*06x01 Billie & Jimmy are sitting at the cnr of Gertrude and Smith Sts Fitzroy
Later everyone goes to the Fitzroy Town Hall, 201 Napier St

Get Krack!n's Ikonik

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.

--------------------------------
Get Krack!n TV Comedy Series Australia 2 Seasons 2017 ABC TV, DVD, iTunes

Iconic, almost subversive.

Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney take a swipe at morning lifestyle television.


To be fair, I really, really love about 5% of the men and women I meet and I just tolerate about 90%, while the remaining 5% do my head in… And the 5% that do my head in all seem to be on morning television or talkback radio.

As if most Australian TV isn’t absolute crap – real lowest common denominator stuff relieved only by the tedium of ads for rubbish nobody in their right mind could possibly want or consider paying for – all over the country, people get up early and for some reason turn on their TVs and let morons tell them what to think or do.

Get Krackin's two Kates first became popular with their web-based pretend cooking series The Katering Show. This latest ABC series has never a dull moment – it’s “packed like a colon after a long haul flight”.

Get Krack!n is crude AF so be warned - if you don’t like bad language or are in any way sensitive, stay away. It’s not for the faint hearted. The last episode of season 2 features a segment on how to clean a dick properly so naturally we see one – then pan to a picture of a bottle of quick lime. Ouch.

The crawl at the bottom of the screen throughout each episode shows the time like morning TV usually does, and also provides constant snarky headlines letting us know how the world really ticks. These are as much fun as any of the guest, advertiser, infomercial or other segments.

(The show is ostensibly broadcast to the US, at 3.00 a.m. Australian EST in time for the mid-morning market in the USA.)

As some of the sample headlines shown here suggest, Get Krack!n is decidedly anti-hate and at times subversive. The show – much like Australia itself – is predominantly white, but is actively anti-racist. One or two episodes or segments are duds, but for the most part Get Krack!n is brilliant.

Here's a great trick - For Disability Day, we have two AUSLAN interpreters in the bottom left of our screen and I can only speak two words of AUSLAN. The word "dickhead" appears just often enough to confirm what I suspect, which is that what the interpreters are talking about sometimes has little to do with what's happening elsewhere on the set. It's possibly healthy for me to feel excluded occasionally.


Disability Day Episode asks "What is diversity and..." 

The crawl message "What is diversity and how can white people monetize it?" probably deserves an honourable mention. Get Krack!n doesn't take this any further, but as hate speech is a real problem and I live in a country built on denial and devoid of leadership, let me provide you with this message from Jay Smooth:

https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/996799108525514753?lang=en

Now, after that word from your sponsor (Maude) back to the show!

Episode 02x08 of Get Krack!n is a special treat that went viral – featuring Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui as hosts, it ends with a savage but long overdue denunciation of Australia’s Systemic Racism.

(For outsiders, Sunrise is an early morning breakfast show on the 7 network that regularly hosts extreme right wing politicians, and is hosted by people with typically racist white political views.)

IT'S ACTUALLY A GIF - PLEASE KLIK

Although I was able to get subtitles while streaming the show from the ABC online, and can usually get subtitles when I buy ABC series on disc, this is the first ABC production I’ve bought through iTunes and I’m disappointed there are no subtitles with it.

MA 15+ cos the language is crude AF, though the content is refreshingly inoffensive from my POV.

Orphan Black - Poking At Things With Sticks

Warning

This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.

 

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Orphan Black  TV Sci Fi Drama Series, Canada, 5 Series 2013-2017 BBC America and Temple St Productions, DVD

Sets an almost impossibly high standard for entertaining, intelligent drama.

A street-wise hustler is pulled into a compelling conspiracy after witnessing the suicide of a girl who looks just like her.


The very first thing that happens in the pilot episode is that Sarah Manning arrives in Toronto by train.

There she notices a woman who is distressed, at the other end of the railway platform. Sarah was an orphan, so she is shocked to see the woman at the other end of the train platform looks exactly like herself. She is even more shocked when the woman jumps in front of a train, committing suicide.

Possibly because Sarah is a hustler and an opportunist, but perhaps also because she is curious, Sarah grabs the woman’s handbag from the station platform, taking her ID and house keys. She has no idea what a can of worms she is about to open.


If you like hustles, cons or stings, this show should draw you in straight away. This show would also appeal instantly if you like mysteries or puzzles because, like the streetwise hustler Sarah, you will be trying to work out just what is going on and you will be doing it at the same pace as Sarah, from the very beginning, one bit of information at a time.
Orphan Black begins as great drama. As we get to know the characters, the drama is balanced by great comic moments until the show becomes a full blown dramedy. A brilliant dramedy.

The underlying conspiracy story of Orphan Black is based on real gene science, so it is technically science fiction, but the story is set in the same world we live in – it’s gene science meets a contemporary police procedural and family drama. The problems the characters face – aside from cloning /corporate conspiracy/ government conspiracy related story problems – are day to day problems in a contemporary setting.

Some of the important characters look identical because although they are not twins or triplets or quads, they are clones. This means they have the same DNA but, like identical twins or other multiples, don’t all look exactly alike. They only look the same at first glance and do, in fact, have different personalities as well as physical differences. (There is nothing inherently creepy about clones unless the clones themselves have creepy personalities.)
Because the story is about clones and because of the timing and nature of the movement that generated the cloning, the clones are white, but the larger world in which the story is told is racially blended and “non-white” people / females occupy positions of power where this would not be historically ridiculous.

Race, gender and sexuality are mostly treated as the non-issues they would be in any Canadian made drama.

Suspension of disbelief
All fiction requires that we buy some sort of lie. Yes, this series is built on real gene science but, NO, there was no company cloning humans when these characters were “born” (that I know of…).
There is much talk in this show of things like gene therapy, gene sequencing and other technical blah blah blah which apparently is all quite “plausible” – the only thing the show’s producers will concede is they stretched the truth about fingerprints: - for dramatic purposes it was convenient to hold that people with the same DNA could have the same fingerprints, but this is not quite true. This lie helps the story, so let’s just roll with it – there are fascinating ideas to explore, and there are some wonderful characters to meet.
The characters are well drawn and complex. Before the first episode is over Sarah has already dragged her foster brother Felix back into her own drama all over again, and he is not only emotionally hurt but at risk because of her.

Although dysfunction would normally put me off, there’s not enough of it to over-ride my love of a good hustle. Besides, I’ve already decided I like Sarah as a person, and I’ve already fallen for Felix.
Before the pilot episode is over, I’m fascinated to meet a third clone and realise I’ve forgotten several female characters are all played by the same actress and I’ve already accepted them as separate characters and can’t wait to find out where this is all going next.

For a while I was confused about why so many strangers in the story were identical, but that was okay because Sarah was confused too. This is not confusion caused by poor story-telling – the confusion IS the story itself; the puzzle is more interesting than a jigsaw or crossword. Right til the end of series 5, to be honest, I wondered if the writers weren’t sometimes making stuff up as they went along, but the truth is I’m a slow and plodding thinker. When I watched the show a second time through from start to finish it all started to make sense and I realised the clues I needed had been in the script all along. All writing contains some mistakes, but the mistakes here are the equivalent of typos – there are no holes in the storylines.
The humour is incredibly rich – occasionally situational or general but mostly character driven. The casting, from the most casual extra up, never disappoints.

 

I suspect at first the showrunners did not realise what they had in the characters Alison and Donnie, but Tatiana Maslany and Kristian Bruun acting together eventually make any comic couple who have ever appeared on screen before seem dull and untalented.
Among the themes that made Orphan Black interesting for me and/or friends were gene science, the moral questions associated with eugenics, stories of government/corporate conspiracy, religion vs science, psychology and questions of nature vs nurture – all interwoven with a challenging puzzle and awesome, incredibly creative and intelligent humour.

My only criticism is that in season 1, a supposedly intelligent, well educated, modern French woman has an intellectual and sexual relationship with a man who is a manipulative, sexist and condescending twat, and I find it very hard to buy. He even encourages her to pimp herself out, and it seems a bit of a stretch. In later seasons, her personality seems to grow and become more acceptable. Other people think the character works right from the start.

Accents
A few people like to complain about accents in this show. It might be worth remembering that while there once was a time when accents in an English street or council area might not change for generations, that is no longer the case. As an Australian baby boomer who grew up listening almost exclusively, at first, to BBC radio and TV shows, absorbing RP and English regional accents, I think the English accents on Orphan Black are fine from actors who otherwise deliver so very much. The character of Sarah Manning is, in theory, born in an era after accents in English streets and council areas were definitely influenced by population changes due to international and internal migration, changes in employment and a breakdown in the traditional class system as well as UK membership of the EEU and a massive shift in international media. Sarah was born in Wales, spent the first 7 or so years of her life moving from one foster home to another, was raised by an Irish traveller living at first in London and then migrating to Canada – if she spoke with what anyone thought of as a “correct” or specific English accent something would definitely be wrong.
As an Australian I could say complaints that Sarah sounds Australian are ludicrous – but to be fair, I can no longer swear I know what all Australians sound like because the world is changing. I know what my own generation sounds like, and I know what regional accents once sounded like, but electronic media and the influence of international film and TV is incalculable. To be honest our voices and accents often change depending on who were talking with and the situation. I think we need to stop being too rigid and inflexible or precious about what actors give us, or we will end up unable to enjoy anything.

MA 15+ Rating: Orphan Black contains the usual dope, violence and sex with an occasional rude word that we see in this category, but it also contains exceptional stuff that might be triggering if you are in a vulnerable state: I can cope with it, but it was all unexpected first time round so if you don’t mind spoilers, perhaps a warning might be all you need. It’s such a good series it’s worth considering watching it if you can, knowing you are prepared. Anything appearing during a specific scene could be repeated during a recap at the beginning of any random future episode.
Most of the exceptional stuff is idea driven – for example, one soldier has his skull opened and brain exposed as part of an experiment. The idea of it is fairly gross, even though we know it’s not real, and even though we know that touching brain tissue never actually causes physical pain. In season four, a biological “advance” is introduced into the bodies of a few characters that consists of a “mechanical” robot the size of a small maggot. It acts a bit like a computer chip, but the idea freaks people out, and the maggot bot contains a defence mechanism.
One character who had an abusive childhood cuts herself in early episodes – it’s not overly gross to watch, but it happens, and her back has scars in the shape of angel’s wings. Some of the fights show people doing rather brutal things that shocked me at first but made me laugh on second viewing.
Often characters we care about are in situations that seem quite threatening but we eventually find they are safe after all. Further, most of the time if something awful is coming you will get plenty of warning from the situation and the music and so on in time to look away.
Definitely Look Away Warnings Episode 0309 13:40-15:05 Mrs S sings while Ferdinand gives Terry a brutal beating Episode 0309 20:10 – 21:40 Mrs S finds Terry beaten. Episode 0502 33:00-35:50 Ferdinand kills MK.

Bingeability Rating – 10 out 10. That’s right: the writing is not perfect, but even despite that, it is still so good I’ll give this show 10 out of 10. Orphan Black moved me to tears, lots of times. It also made me roar with laughter, lots of times. Orphan Black is definitely on my Desert Island List – if I can’t take my “black orphans” with me, I’m going down with the ship. Lots of these characters will be my best friends forever.