Mr. and Mrs. Murder: Season 1 (2013)

As the Australian free-to-air market has contracted, television series have had to either slavishly copy American models or aggressively market themselves as Australian to stay in business. In effect, the Australian audience has become an international audience with an Australian bent, which perhaps explains why there’s so much resistance on the part of media conglomerates to opening up Australia to the full availablity of streaming options available elsewhere. Against that backdrop, a series like Mr. and Mrs Murder is wonderfully refreshing – if doomed to failure – since it’s Australian in the daggiest, silliest, low-key kind of way, suffused with the backwater mentality that characterised Channels 7 and 9 in the 1990s and still characterises their digital offshoots today. If the Australian television market is going to pretend we still live in a pre-digital era, they might as well offer us television that genuinely recalls that era, and Mr. and Mrs. Murder feels historical in the best way, often unfolding against the kinds of heritage houses and refurbished heritage precincts that pose the most logistical problems for integrating the very digital technology that the series itself so studiously avoids - quite a remarkable decision for a contemporary forensic procedural. This is procedural in the old-fashioned, embodied sense, with Sean Micalllef and Kat Stewart playing Charlie and Nicole Buchanan, a husband-wife team of crime scene cleaners who inevitably end up solving the cases they’re call in to mop up. Amongst a cast of characters includes their niece Jess (Lucy Honigman), their friend Peter (Jonny Pavlovsky) and a very cranky Superintendent – played by Roz Hammond in a nice touch for fans of The Micallef Program – Charlie and Nicole’s exploits take us, week by week, through a series of what inceasingly feel like quintessential Melbourne spaces, gritty and glitzy at the same time, and characterised by the drastic juxtapositions of colonial and contemporary architecture so peculiar to Australia’s southern metropolis. Not only does that urban regionalism date this as an older kind of Australian program – remember when shows shot in Sydney felt utterly different from shows shot in Melbourne? – but it also gives the series an incredible cosiness, with Charlie and Nicole usually forced to inhabit the crime scenes they clean in some way, while always kept at a somewhat quizzical distance by their hosts in the process. Checking in each week, then, is a bit like checking into a hotel – and the first episode takes place in a hotel – while the low-level, low-key eccentricity of the series makes it feel like an older kind of holiday television experience, or at least late-week or weekend viewing, distinctions that apply less and less in a deregulated television timescape. On the one hand, that provides Kat Stewart with much more room to manoeuvre than the yummy-mummy Melbourne of Offspring, but it also ends up being the best televehicle for Micallef’s madcap genius since The Micallef Program. Since that watershed moment in Australian television, various shows have tried to tap into the manic fringe of Micallef’s persona, but Mr. and Mrs. Murder is the first to really nail the way his comedy depends on inhabiting normality with an awryness so fleeting that you can’t quite tell if he’s playing it for laughs or not. Just as the best moments on The Micallef Program were when he appeared serious and sarcastic at the same time – and bemused guests in the process – so Mr. and Mrs. Murder recalls his appearance on SeaChange in the utter indiscernibility of how much he actually believes in the role. With another actor or role, that might just feel snarky, but the series paints the playful performativity of Charlie and Nicole’s relationship so well that it ends up just feeling like Micallef playing himself. And more importantly, it feels like Micallef enjoying playing himself – for perhaps the first time in years – lending a wonderful and quite modest joy to this little gem of a series.