Stan’s eight-part Australian drama The Commons is based in “the not-so-distant future” – a familiar turn of phrase to describe story worlds similar to our own in many respects but strikingly different in others. It is set in a climate crisis-devastated Sydney, where the air is a sickly shade of orange and extreme weather conditions pose all sorts of problems – making the show’s arrival uncomfortably well-timed, perhaps, given the 2019 bushfires and increased discourse about the relationship between extreme weather and global heating.
The first episode opens with a dream sequence in which a heavily pregnant protagonist, Eadie (Joanne Froggatt from Downton Abbey), runs desperately through an empty hospital and into a beautiful garden. There her water breaks, bats fall from the sky and her pregnant belly suddenly disappears; she clutches the ground and howls in pain.
The director, Jeffrey Walker, and the writer, Shelley Birse (also the show’s creator), use this moment to establish the protagonist’s complicated feelings towards having a baby – she is desperate to have one, as we soon discover – as well as hinting at some of the surreal properties of this not-so-distant environment. The garden is a significant, bittersweet location going forward: a place of tranquility and refuge for the characters, and a reminder of things that have been lost for the audience.
With its lush greens and brightly coloured plants, it reminded me of Bruce Dern’s space garden in the classic 1972 film Silent Running and the lovely greenhouse in Claire Denis’s cerebral Robbert Pattinson-led sci-fi High Life. But The Commons’ garden is different in that it merges nature and artifice. When we get a better look at it later we see that plants are combined with digital scaffolding: a huge wall of television screens, projecting footage of a waterfall, which is Baudrillardian conceit: the natural world as a simulation and vice versa.
Eadie, a neuropsychologist, takes one of her patients here for treatment. He is Ben (Damon “he’s everywhere at the moment” Herriman), a distressed “Border Authority officer” grappling with traumatic experiences working in what seems to be, in effect, a border control unit dealing with the movement of climate refugees within Australia. Eadie is supposed to be a gifted neuropsychologist, though her techniques seemed a little hokey to me – involving putting headsets on patients and plonking them on to a black leather chair in front of a large dome-like circular screen that projects visions from inside their heads.
With a budget of about $25m (Stan’s most expensive production so far), The Commons engages in a constant process of world-building – or maybe “world-altering” is a better way to describe it – examining what the writers’ (Birse, Matt Ford, Michael Miller and Matt Cameron) envisioned changes to society will mean for our day-to-day lives. One close-up shot early on homes in on a drop of acid rain falling from the sky and into the eyeball of Eadie’s 13-year-old daughter-in-law (Inez Currò), whose face turns swollen and red.
In this world, rain acidity predictions are a normal part of weather forecasts. Other unsettlingly plausible daily occurrences include drones whizzing around the streets checking on people using facial recognition systems.
There are several key narrative threads, including a subplot involving the spread of diseases (such as Chagas disease), which are prospering in a dramatically hotter climate. This thread involves Eadie’s husband, Lloyd (David Lyons), and his best friend, Shay (Ryan Corr), who are lab rats finding ways to combat the diseases.
Eadie’s desire to have a child – having been unable to conceive one with Lloyd – is the show’s emotional core, with all roads leading back to that intro dream sequence. I found it odd that Birse doesn’t explore the ethics of having a baby in an intensely overpopulated, damaged and diseased-riddled world (the BirthStrike movement is populated by climate-conscious women in our own reality who refuse to have babies).
Maybe that comes later; this review only encompasses the first two episodes. This limited view of the series makes it hard to review with any authority, given that The Commons is clearly still configuring its core elements at this point in the narrative.
I won’t be surprised if Birse and the directors (Walker, Rowan Woods and Jennifer Leacey) reach some thrilling dramatic conclusions. Nor will it surprise me if they ultimately fall short; if the show’s intention to provide a complex, multi-threaded narrative proves too great an ambition and the film-makers bit off more than they could chew. All the performances so far are solid but unexceptional, the humans of secondary importance to the circumstances of this future world.
I’ll keep watching, that’s for sure. There’s something compelling about this not-so-distant place: a down under tomorrowland eerily plausible and yet slightly wacky, peppered with small and large creations that make you stop and wonder where indeed society is heading and how our lives will change in coming years.
By contemplating big, meaty subjects – such as the continued effects of the climate crisis – within a distinctively Australian context, with plenty of recognisable (CGI-enhanced shots) of Sydney, we are forced to contemplate how our own communities and cities might look going forward. We cannot react along the lines of “out of sight out of mind” and consider catastrophe only in relation to far-flung places. Despite the “distant” in that regularly used turn of phrase, the “not-so-distant” future, the drama here feels unsettlingly immediate.
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