EvaUnit02 on 28/6/2010 at 07:52
Are series 1 & 3 of the crime show, Underbelly, worth watching?
I've only seen Underbelly 2: A Tale of Two Cities (The Mr. Asia Story) and was pretty disappointed. Despite being dramatisations of true events, the entire series felt like pretty formulaic TV fare.
Immersion issues I can overlook (like how the Aussie guy playing Terry Clark kept slipping between a Kiwi and an Oz accent), but the strict following of traditional writing structure I couldn't.
Muzman on 28/6/2010 at 10:53
The first one's not too bad. I mean, it wishes like hell it was The Shield or NYPD Blue or even The Wire for the even handed points of view. But it's rubbish by comparison, really. Most things are though (It's interesting to watch actually, with the same amount of running time and as many if not more characters, The Wire is silky smooth. Shows like Underbelly remind you just how hard that is to achieve).
It really ramps up the sensation and titilation to a fairly needless degree, but I'd say it's pretty decent in the end. It covers a lot of the weirder angles to the story, spends some time with some of the stranger characters like Benji and that insane lawyer chick, and the feeling we all had about Carl and Roberta Williams ('these people are drug kingpins? ...the fuck?") is the angle it takes and it does it well.
The cops are fairly crap though and I get the feeling the show doesn't care about them that much or knows what to do with them. They tell the story, but I think the makers would prefer they weren't really in it and they could do Australia's Goodfellas (the fact that it's true and recent would put some constraints on their desire to make crime porn. Plus the cops fucked up an awful lot so they're tiptoing around plenty there as well)
Of course they're too late. 'Australia's Goodfellas' was Blue Murder (which I heartily recommend).
I've only seen a little bit of 2, and it doesn't seem as good so far and people tell me 3 is altogether pretty crappy. So 1 sounds like the best of them. Despite their best efforts to mess it up, the weird turns of the real story keep it on track.
Zygoptera on 29/6/2010 at 02:26
It is ironic that the Williams' were almost completely unbelievable despite them being real people, if it weren't true you'd think the writers had been sampling the merchandise. It also won't help that the guy playing Carl is now in a beer advert, polevaulting into walls.
Apart from that I found it rather 'jumpy' structurally like it was leaping from interesting bit to interesting bit, and perhaps as a consequence hard to follow in parts, but since it wasn't at any stage a must watch I may simply have not been giving it enough attention. Probably worth watching if free, not worth buying would be my rating.
Not watching S3.
