AustLit

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, City West was 'the first multilingual drama series produced in Australia. With some dialogue in English, the series variously had different dramatic characters speaking Greek, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Russian subtitled in English.'

The program was set in a legal aid office (part of a migrant community centre) in the western suburbs of Sydney, and focused strongly on the real difficulties facing migrants living in the outer suburbs, including, according to Moran, 'unscrupulous car dealers, illegal social security operations, industrial disputes among migrant workers and the problems facing newly arrived migrants in adjusting to their new homeland.'

The desire for a multi-ethnic cast caused some problems for the producers. Moran says, 'Faced with the relative lack of ethnic actors and actresses in the mainstream film and television industry, the producers went to different ethnic theatre groups to find migrants to populate different episodes.'