AustLit

'Inspired by true events, Stingers reveals the shadowy and ambiguous world of undercover cops — people with covert lives and constantly changing identities. They are police who defeat crime from within the criminal world — always without a badge and frequently without protection. The series follows the lives of the operatives as they befriend and betray those on the other side of the law. For these select few, it is a deadly way of life.The undercover cops of Stingers are a unique breed. They must juggle their own lives — love, laughter, family and humanity — with the tension of the criminal personas they adopt in their passion for justice.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 7/6/2013)

A drama series set in a sports academy. The various stories target issues of interest to teens. The young athletes' loves, disappointments, families, schools, and rivalries are seen in sharp contrast to the tremendous pressures and unique demands of the international sporting world.

'Fast-paced series spin-off of the hit feature film. Filmed at an abandoned school in Sydney's Maroubra, this program was about an ethnically diverse group of students attending Hartley High School.'

Source: National Film and Sound Archive record.

A television series ostensibly based on Arthur Upfield's series of detective novels, and stemming from a telemovie aired two years earlier.

After protests from Indigenous groups about the casting of a white actor as a descendant of Detective Napoleon Bonaparte, the production was altered to make the character a white man who had once lived with Indigenous Australians. As such, it bears little real connection to Upfield's novels.

The series was not a success, and was cancelled after the first thirteen episodes.

'Two struggling Australian movie makers, Chris Brookes (David Roberts) and Alex Gower (Alan Fletcher), score a success with a production called Downtime.

'Hollywood is interested, and for a while the future looks rosy for the Aussie battlers. But of course the Americans, in the shape of studio head Steve Schafler (Nicholas Hammond) and his inevitably beautiful and seductive assistant, Terri Neilson (Terri Garber), want to bend the film to suit US audiences.

'There lies the substance of the drama. Alex, who has a girlfriend back home, sticks by the principles of his art. Chris, footloose and with an eye for Terri, decides to throw in his lot with the Hollywood dream factory.'

Source:

'Croc Dundee, but No Laughs', Canberra Times, 29 March 1993, p.10 [television supplement].

An attempt to re-invoke the popularity that police procedurals had enjoyed a decade earlier, Special Squad was the most expensive program produced in Australia up to 1985 (at $150,000 per episode), yet received such lukewarm ratings that Channel Ten chose not to commission a second series.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

it was good to watch, with expert stunt work and special effects. With well-paced narratives, intelligently and nicely worked out situations and plenty of emphasis on the villains and victims, Special Squad was just as watchable and entertaining as Homicide had been in its last series.

According to Moran, the failure of Special Squad lay both in its difference from and its similarity to Homicide. The novelty (of Australian accents and Australian locations) that had helped make Homicide so successful was no longer in play, and 'the sight of tough men (on both sides of the law) made the program [Special Squad] seem very old-fashioned. In addition, the plethora of other Australian dramas on air at the time gave viewers more than enough alternatives.'