There is a special place on the Australian TV landscape for Jack Irish (somewhere in a dark corner, near a liquor cabinet) – the down-in-the-mouth private investigator and debt collector whose whiskey-infused existence is spent unravelling criminal schemes and listening to shady men deliver warnings such as “tread carefully”.
The endearing gumshoe is a sort of bad-arse bizarro Tintin or long-lost Australian descendant of Humphrey Bogart, played with understated noirish charm by Guy Pearce.
A sad and dramatic origins story – the death of his wife – sent the character spiralling several rungs down the social ladder. When Irish was practising as a criminal lawyer in the first telemovie, she was killed by a disgruntled client who opted to murder-suicide rather than pay his legal bills (“You’re listening now, Jack!”).
Irish did a reverse Bruce Wayne: instead of dedicating his life to fighting injustice, he reached for the bottle and said to hell with everything. Everything, that is, except for bargain-basement detective work and shaking people down for money, the collection of which provides the only reason he didn’t say to hell with those two things as well.
For three telemovies a stubbly wrong-side-of-the-bed Pearce has peeled the onion of numerous stinky criminal plots, from schemes spanning government-toppling conspiracies to one involving copping a slug in the gut from Vince Colosimo in once-again-they-hired-me-to-play-a-drug-dealer mode.
The first break in realism in ABC TV’s new six-part series occurs when Shane Jacobson, dining on schnitzel and beer in a strip club, leaves both his meal and his drink unfinished.
Grotesquely un-Australian, of course, but also out of character. Jacobson’s dodgy cop and confidante of sorts, Barry Tregear, is a little like a true blue The Smoking Man incarnate, albeit not as high up on the conspiratorial food chain. He warns of cover-ups while scarfing hot chips and casually inquiring about the availability of indigestion-relief tablets (“wouldn’t have a Quick-Eze, would ya?”).
The bulkier format also means instead of audiences waiting an hour-and-a-half for an explosive finale (last time it was a fireball caused by a car driven into a light aircraft carrying the aforementioned Colosimo), they now have to wait a month-and-a-half. Director Kieran Darcy-Smith seems to be conscious of this, culminating at least the first two episodes (which form the extent of this review) with cliffhangers.
The protagonist’s on-again-off-again romantic relationship with journalist Linda Hillier (Marta Dusseldrop, best known for starring in – and as – Janet King) is on again. But Hillier has decided to move to Manila in the Philippines to pursue big stories. “Asia is the new Middle East,” she says. You know her relocation is going to be inextricably woven into the home-ground plot at some point.
A well-paying stranger hires Jack to track down the whereabouts of his lost brother. When the mopey private dick succeeds, things get hairy; there’s a murder and Jackyboy is implicated. There’s also another missing person tinkering around the edges of the narrative.
She is the troubled Tina (Brooke Satchwell), introduced in a moment of terror-struck commuting at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station. Tina is in trouble with the wrong crowd (precisely why is clearly something to be teased out over time) and her sister Sarah (Claudia Karvan) thinks Jack can help.
There’s more humour than in previous instalments, mostly involving Jack’s indignation towards something or other. He is appalled, for example, that his local watering hole – part of the show from the start, as are its three adorable elderly bar flies – has introduced Chinese tapas (“It’s two different countries, it’s actually two different continents!”).
It might be too much to suggest the pointier bits of earlier episodes have been smoothed over, but the new series so far has no dialogue comparable to the previous grittiness of lines such as “he’s a shifty little poof” and “things that prop up like pricks at a pyjama party”.
Nor has there been a great deal made yet of co-star Aaron Pedersen, who was always one of the highlights. His character is the kind of tough-as-nails bloke capable of extracting information from suspects by strapping them into a convertible then operating an excavator to dump gunk on their face. Maybe they’re saving Pedersen for later.
The Netflix model is to give reviewers full access to an entire series, which ABC TV might want to take note of. If Jack Irish has a kick-arse ending or spectacularly ratchets up tension as it moves along, it would be nice to let people know about it – likewise if the ballooned format begins to wane. Still, the show feels in capable hands and its long-suffering protagonist is as appealing as ever.
- Jack Irish is on ABC TV on Thursday nights from 8.30pm on 11 February
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