It's the golden age of television drama. So why has the ABC gone MIA?

Since diving into the ABC’s drama offerings for 2018, I’ve thought often of the words of Sandra Levy, the former ABC director of television, more than 10 years ago: “I think the future for ABC television is very bleak.”

We speak a lot now about the golden age of television. But as longform, serialised storytelling has emerged as a global point of cultural interest, the ABC has stepped away from drama as a staple of its programming. How ironic that in a period of intense global creativity and demand, the predicament of Australian drama is that it’s missing in action on the ABC.

For decades, drama was the mainstay of ABC television. During my own childhood in the late 1990s, SeaChange dominated the drama landscape. From inside the dark neoliberal drift of the Howard years, Deborah Cox and Andrew Knight’s comedic drama offered a glimpse of a different set of values – Sigrid Thornton’s highly strung lawyer ditching her corporate career for a more humble job as a local judge in a beachside town in Victoria.

SeaChange was preceded by grittier fare, much of it in the crime genre: Fallen Angels, Police Rescue and Wildside. At the culmination of this period – 1998-99 – the ABC broadcast 157 hours of locally made drama. Last financial year, the figure for new fiction was a grim 70 hours.


Source: theguardian