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Let’s put ourselves for a moment in the shoes of the archetypal series viewer: exhausted by a hard day’s work, incapable of any intellectual effort, he prefers to collapse in his convertible rather than open a book, or pick up a musical instrument to make a pigeon pastille. The archetype is prey to two contradictory needs: we must reassure it and at the same time disorient it, change its mind without it having to think too much.
These days Netflix offers an ideal product, six spectacular episodes filled with adventures already seen a thousand times, rejuvenated by an almost new setting and distribution.
With its stubborn patriarch ruling thousands of square miles covered by tens of thousands of cattle, its rebellious natives, and its unscrupulous mining magnates, Territory could pass for a sticker yellow stoneTaylor Sheridan’s contemporary western that made Kevin Costner a star again. Except that this family and pastoral drama spills the blood of the righteous and the wicked at the antipodes.
Family figures
The series takes its title from the Northern Territory, that immense Australian expanse far from the cities. This move operates as a rejuvenation (for Northern Hemisphere viewers, in any case) of the tried (or hackneyed) dramaturgy of a melodramatic setting. The light, the landscapes, the wildlife, the accents (it is certain that British and American audiences will need subtitles to understand the Australian cowboys and their accent), the customs, everything is different, and it is enough to get us caught up.
Colin Lawson (Robert Taylor) runs Marianne Station, a ranch “big as Belgium”. The old man is attacked from all sides. Their rivals want their ruin, the mining companies their subsoil, the natives recover their rights to their lands. But nothing threatens Marianne Station more than clashes between Colin Lawson’s descendants. We will find familiar characters such as the unloved youngest son (Michael Dorman) and his wife devoured by ambition (Anna Torv, magnificent actress seen in mind hunter AND Profession: reporter), or the prodigal grandson pulled from the sewer to receive the keys to the kingdom.
classical dramaturgy
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