Mercury
(Australian telefilms)
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: B- Telefilms: B-
If you
liked Lou Grant, you might want to
check out the Australian series of telefilms from the Mercury series. The title
refers to the name of the newspaper also seeking the truth, with an editor
played by an actor every bit as good as Ed Asner was: Geoffrey Rush.
This does
take place many years later, in the mid-1990s, and the three shows here are
actually TV movie length of about 90 minutes.
That would fit a two-hour slot. Ironically,
many hit TV shows of the past did return as a series of telefilms, but not Lou Grant. Obviously, the idea had to resurface
somewhere. Like its U.S. counterpart, the stories deal
with scandals, cover-ups and murders. It
is every bit as good as Lou Grant,
if overly long versus that shows hour-long episodes. The three telefilms here are:
Without Fear or Favour
Publish and Be Damned
Dark Horse
Each one
has a different director, and they are all taped in the PAL format. The picture quality is not bad, but it is a
touch hazy. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
has good Pro Logic surrounds. There are
also a healthy amount of extras, including much text on the Pulitzer Prize,
some more on Rush, and two documentaries.
DVD 1 has Bylines, an hour-long
program from 1986 that shows a major Australian newspaper in action, behind the
scenes. Rupert Murdoch is mentioned a
few times, a competitor to its focus, The Sydney Morning Herald. DVD 2 offers a very old, black and white
program entitled Today It’s News. It has some jumpcuts that lose words of
audio, and is from 1954, though not clearly marked as so. This was originally ten minutes long, give or
take a few seconds from the jumpcuts.
The main
programs also fall into the usual formulas that accompany such a series, but it
gives us a look at a country and its television we do not get to see very often
in the United States.
It also feels more real than “reality” TV, because the people making it
care about what they are producing. Rush
is in good form with his cast and there should be more than enough of an
audience for these shows in North America.
- Nicholas Sheffo
