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)

'Set in a newspaper, MERCURY looks at the lives of journalists and their relationships with the paper and each other.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'It's a story about justice...and the corruption of justice. JANUS is about the lawyers, police, judges and magistrates who work with a very imperfect system. The focus of our story will be the new Director of Public Prosecutions Officer, taking over the handling of all Committals for trial - the first sweeping changes recommended by the Janus Taskforce Committee.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/5/2013)

'A hard-edged, gritty drama about the tense and claustrophobic world of a Major Crime Task Force set up to solve an urban terrorist bombing, a Task Force which brings together a crew of idiosyncratic, competitive characters over a knife edged maximum stressed two months. PHOENIX is no traditional cop shop or crime story. Its characters are not clean, super hero cops, just real police whose attitudes can be shocking and whose humour is grim and black.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/5/2013)

'Witnessing two fleeing bank robbers reinforces Megan's belief that money will be the answer in solving the Police Club bombing as those responsible would've needed lots of it to carry out the job. Megan turns her attention to looking into various armed robberies which leads her to the rape squad. Jock is concerned she's wasting time follow unrelated leads but allows her to press on.

'Megan questions a woman about her violent assault believing her attackers are connected to the bombing. The woman is able to provide a description from which a composite image of one of her attackers in created. This new suspect quickly becomes the key focus of the investigation despite Jock's superior's dismissal of the new information's importance.

'Meanwhile, detonators recovered during a police raid are confirmed to be of the same batch as that used in the bombing. The Major Crime squad sets up a sting to go after the intended buyer who turns out to be a legitimate quary owner buying stolen detonators.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 11/6/2013)

'They're women of action, they're women of the '90s, they're intelligent, highly trained and resourceful. But in the police force they call them "skirts".'

Source: Screen Australia

'In 1910 the Australian Government passed a law requiring all boys aged between 14 and 17 years of age to register for compulsory military training. Will Barnes is a 14-year-old conscientious objector who refuses to register. He is sentenced to three months training at Fort Queenscliff, where he meets a lot of opposition, but also wins his share of admirers for sticking to his beliefs.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive (http://www.australiantelevision.net/more_winners.html). Sighted: 10/11/2011

'Drama series set in and around an Australian embassy in the fictional Islamic country of Ragaan, where day to day diplomacy is the stuff of danger and news headlines rather than privilege and cocktails.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 10/4/2014)

American revival of the 1966 television program, but filmed in Australia (largely in Queensland), and making extensive use of Australian directors and script-writers: eight of the twenty-two writers and five of the nine directors are Australian. As with the earlier version (and the later film incarnations), the program made extensive use of high-tech gadgetry that often crossed the line from science into science fiction.

Mini series based on the 1953 defection of Vladimir Petrov, a minor KGB agent at the USSR's Canberra embassy, and the snatching of his wife Eva, by Australian officials, from a Russian-bound plane at Darwin. The mini-series also covers the political fallout from the Royal Commission set up to examine Petrov's claims and ASIO's treatment of the situation.

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

The Petrov Affair is very much part of a Laborist view of Australian politics in the twentieth century. Important political movements, which might form the dramatic highlights of a conservative history -- such as Menzies' downfall at the hands of Earle Paige, the formation of the Liberal Party, the electoral triumph of 1949 and the Suez crisis -- are instead ignored in favour of a chain of narratives that sets the Labor Party and its leaders, warts and all, on centre stage.

Moran also notes that the Nine Network was cautious in its treatment of the mini-series: 'It lay on the shelf for some time after production and was finally aired without fanfare over two consecutive nights in an out of ratings period.'

'Bill and his crew sail up the Murray in the paddle-steamer "Mystery". They hope to save their mate the Bunyip from an unjust law, in a rollicking adventure by boat, balloon and train.'

Source: National Library of Australia

'A mixture of animation, documentary footage plus bringing to life the famous Australian comic strip character Bluey and Curly to depict Australia's involvement in the Pacific during World War II. Was it the only war Australia was silly enough to fight?'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 31/1/2014)

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.'

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.'