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Keywords: Crime Drama

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How 'Slow Horses' became the show of the moment

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 12 September 2024

    Slow Horses is one of those dramas that are even better than the books they’re based on. The TV series is blessed by having Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the grisly spy-genius with a preternatural instinct for sniffing out hidden agendas. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    TV cops and cop-outs

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 29 August 2024

    With contemporary crime dramas increasingly suffused with a sense of grim fatalism, The Rookie stands out for its optimism, a refreshing throwback to the days when crime series used to be about the mostly goodies chasing the mostly baddies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stephanie Alexander and the family table

    • Claire Heaney
    • 02 August 2024

    When Stephanie Alexander released the immensely popular The Cook’s Companion in 1996, she became a literal household name. The reason for her success lies perhaps in the knowledge that the true essence of cooking lies not in perfection, but in the act of coming together.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    All the deadly women

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 12 July 2024

    Are women truly the villains that modern crime dramas portray them to be? Despite the sensationalised 'evil woman' trope, real-life statistics tell a different story. It’s a cruel irony that the way to really victimise a woman is to tell her that she is the perp when she really is overwhelmingly more likely to be the victim of violent crime.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Please, not Bridgerton again

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 May 2024

    What can you say when faced by another season of Bridgerton – that posing, poncing, irony-defying travesty of all history, literature and human relationships? Bridgerton took the Barbara Cartland romance/mild erotica ethos and dumbed it down to fifty shades of fluorescent polyester.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Forgiveness and duty collide in Time

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 13 April 2023

    Prisons are settings to which TV and film writers return regularly. It’s because ‘the joint’ gives them an environment in which they can enact the dramatic principle of the crucible easily: tension between duelling inmate protagonists and antagonists is heightened quickly to boiling point because no one can simply walk away.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Dogging the man in the iron mask

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 November 2022
    3 Comments

    In Justice in Kelly Country, author Lachlan Strahan writes on the life of his great-great-grandfather, a policeman whose career stretched over thirty years. When a significant part of that story is intermeshed with such a fiercely contested story as Ned Kelly’s, telling it introduces the further complexities of the writer’s sympathies and judgments.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Seeking meaning behind the monsters in Dahmer

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 27 October 2022
    1 Comment

    At the end of the third episode of the Netflix biopic Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, as the ‘Watch Next Episode’ timer ran down, I turned it off and haven’t returned. At time of writing, Dahmer was the number three-ranked show on Netflix Australia. Why are viewers willing to watch? And against the scale of such horror, can there be any redemption?

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  • RELIGION

    Pope answers policies that suffocate hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 30 September 2019
    10 Comments

    The Pope's speech was newsworthy because in Australia sentences to a lifetime in prison without parole are becoming less contentious and more used. His approach to prisoners and their criminal behaviour is in such strong contrast to strands of Australian culture in which exclusion and the denial of hope are an instinctive response.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Truths for Trump on South African farmers

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 28 August 2018
    2 Comments

    In the 17 years since, farm murders have dropped dramatically. At face value, this is a triumph in the fight against violent crime, and a resounding riposte to people like President Donald Trump and our own Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott, who have seized on the issue in order to sow racial hatred among their own constituents.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Mexico 'narco-graves' mark a national crisis

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 31 May 2018
    7 Comments

    In Mexico, every two hours a person vanishes. Most likely they are executed and thrown into narco-fosas, the term given to the thousands of clandestine graves used by narco-organised crime to bury their victims. Most of the victims are young. More than 46,000 young people were killed between 2007 and 2016.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On romping racists and far-left extremists

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 25 January 2018
    4 Comments

    The antecedents of Right-White Nationalism have, over three decades, entered mainstream Australian discourse. In Romper Stomper, it is represented by far-right group Patriot Blue, and a TV shock jock resembling those that Peter Dutton speaks to. But Romper Stomper doesn't pretend violence is the monopoly of the right.

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