Foyles War, Sex and the City & Oz

This article first appeared in the Age on May 8, 2004

It was a delight to see that Foyle's War (ABC, Sunday, 8.30pm) has made it into Sunday nights top ten shows because it really is one of the best things on at the moment. Foyle's War - which is set on the South Coast of England in WW2 - inhabits the moral vacuum that occurs in war time. From crimes like looting houses that have been bombed, to siphoning off petrol for sale when fuel is scarce, to the murder of those who stand in the way of ruthless business men, it looks beyond the comfortable notions of 'good' and 'evil' and asks us to look at the truth. The Nazis are still the bad guys - but that isn't to say they are Germans, and it isn't to say that there is good and evil in both government ideologies and the small day-to-day decisions people make. Foyle is played by the wonderful Michael Kitchen whose impenetrable gaze lull's wrongdoers into thinking he's a push over - but the audience is never so complacent.

I wish Monday nights were such a predictable pleasure. Imagine my horror when, at the end of a particularly good episode of Sex and the City last week there was a voice over saying 'Returning Soon'. That's like being told 'I promise I'll call'. Channel 9, what are you doing? There are only 10 episodes of Sex to go before it's all over. America's seen them -why can't we? No wonder so many people are turning to DVD.

As one critic has put it: 'After the leisurely estrogen soak that is Sex and the City, Oz feels like a cold testosterone plunge.' But there is one thing Sex and the City shares with Oz (10.00pm, Monday, SBS) and that's a strong narrator. We are use to Carrie's sometimes pithy, sometimes banal pronouncements, typed into her powerbook. Oz is framed by Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau, who you'll know as the gorgeous pilot from the last two Matrix movies) who gives us the dirt from a wheel chair in Emerald City, an experimental unit of the Oswald Maximum Security Prison. While our Manhattan girls may well find what they wish for at the end of the yellow brick road, the men of Em City are unlikely to have any dreams come true. At least one occupant of this prison will die each episode. Last week that meant being burnt alive, this week it's mutilation.

I say none of this to put you off Oz. It's very good television, the first ongoing series produced by HBO, the stable that has bought us The Soprano's, Carrie and her friends and Six Feet Under. The cast is terrific: Ernie Hudson (Miss Congeniality), Terry Kinney (The Firm), Eamonn Walker (Shopping) and Edie Falco (The Sopranos). I can only assume the reason we are getting this series some seven years after it began was the violence scared the channels off. This seems strange because while violence is the currency these men trade in, the same could be said of The Sopranos (Channel 9, Tuesday, 10.30pm) - and the violence on that show is often more sudden, unexpected and shocking. Either way I just wish one of these heavy dudes would go and speak to the programmers at Channel 9.

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