2 out of 5

Created by: Lara Radulovich, David Hannam, Reg Watson (original concept)

Covers season 1

‘Wentworth’ is not a bad show.  It’s got onea’ them easy premiseless premises – women in prison – where you can keep slathering on plots for seasons as long as you remember to keep some character on to which a viewer can latch.   …Which might explain why its roots are the 600+ episode Aussie soap ‘Prisoner,’ of which Wenty is a reimagining, porting over some character names but apparently modernizing the whole shebang.  I haven’t seen any of ‘Prisoner’ (and that’s quite a leap of viewing to invest in…), so shan’t be commenting on any comparison, but it’s thus assumable that’s you don’t need one to appreciate the other; ‘Wentworth’ fully stand on its own.

So our narrational anchor is Bea, the innocent thrust into the relative hell of prison after being accused of the attempted murder of her husband.  Our first episode is the prison intro, which requires rolling out the shocks and/or violence as much as whatever airing network will allow, so for Australian cable, that means a prisoner / guard blowjob on the ride over (not shown, but an effectively rattling intro even before we’re inside Wentworth’s – the name of the prison, if that hasn’t been guessed – walls), then a ‘lesbians are having sex in my bed’ discovery (no nudity but plenty of skin and licking), and finally, a riot, ’cause why not.  Yes, ‘Wentworth’ is still soapy, and it will continue to roll out the dramatics over the course of each episode.  Which, not being a woman and not having been in an Aussie prison, I can’t say how accurate the level of cattiness is or the messy favorite-playin’ politics of prison administration, but it’s all spaced out well enough and kept at the same level of hysterics, so it never feels out of place.  However – and this is a big part of my two stars – the show wants to be taken seriously: these are heavy characters, each with something messy in their past, and the shit they get up to in prison certainly adds up to bad news – and yet almost every episode is shot like some action movie showdown, with slow-mo sequences to highlight someone’s swagger or quick-cut editing to spice up yard walks.  It adds a level of amateurishness to the whole affair, especially in an age where most TV dramas of similar emotional heft are shot more (generally) artistically noawadays, and slots ‘Wentworth’ into the quick-cut slow-mo crowd of serialized soap operas that are on at prime time on major networks.  So it makes it hard to take it as seriously as it might be intended.  Am I spoiled by the flushness of American and UK TV?  Perhaps, but because there are moments in the show that seemed to score the tone, it seems like this has nothing to do with Australians being behind the times and rather that that’s just how the show was envisioned.  Perhaps it’s a throwback to ‘Prisoner’ in some way, but from my outsider’s perspective, the shooting style just didn’t sync well.

The first half of the season explores several inmates’ pasts through flashbacks, and I appreciate that these were generally kept to the point.  We know a tragedy or shock is coming, so no need to build up to it – a character sees something that triggers the memory, and a few minutes later, we get the gist.  The latter half of the season is dedicated to a brewing power struggle between the old (battle ax ‘Jacs’) and the new (super tattooed lesbian Frankie) and the coming-into-her-own Bea, who doesn’t quite pledge allegiance to either side.  And the whole thing is peppered by little gaspy plot twists about who did what when where and so on and so on.  You only have ten episodes, so I can understand a rapid-fire pace, but… the miscalculations with these dramas are represented are the other big dent in the ratings.  By the end of the first episode we get the death of a big player in the prison, and the second episode has a character affected by that death going into a wonderful landslide of drugs and regret.  But we don’t know the character who died, and we don’t know why character two’s relationship to character one is important beyond what we’re told… meaning we don’t really care.  There’s no attachment.  This method can work by keeping the bipolar character antics in the background until we’ve come to understand them a bit, and fine, you can always give a series a bit of leeway with a first episode as its trying to capture our attention, but ‘Wentworth’ kept this sensibility a goin’ for most of the episodes, only finally dropping it to set us up for season 2 over the course of the last couple episodes, which were overall the most solid.

Last complaint: I have my expectations of what prison is.  It’s surely ill-informed by media, but I just never really believed in Wentworth.  There’s no indication of the passage of time, and frightening prison happenings like yard stabbings and rape and beatdowns just seem to happen and then hey its back to handing out metal cutlery at lunches supervised by one guard or all the gals sitting around sewing and watching TV.  Yes, it’s a different country, or maybe you could argue that this isn’t like maximum security or whatever, and one of the shows’ subplots is regarding the low staffing of the prison, but we pretty much only see our core roster of guards – 2 males, 2 females, 1 warden – and there’s no fucking way they’re overseeing an entire prison.  Which is why we’ll get background guards when its convenient, but the production on this was questionable that I would wonder if we were in a different prison when suddenly those backgrounders popped up.  And these ladies are murderers, the lot of ’em, and some of them have apparently been in there for YEARS, but good luck getting that context.  Someone let slip that five months had passed between episodes but for all we knew, it’d been a day.  And someone was in there for over a decade, but, meh, we all arrived a week before Bea and will be getting out in a week.  The… drudgery, the pointlessness of prison life, it just wasn’t there.

So it’s a show with a lot of potential and, I think, respectable intentions.  But that it fails pretty big time on major parts of televisionry makes it hard to side with it as quality drama.  It does pick up right towards the end, and, for better or worse, cliffhanger aside, the rumblings of interesting undercurrents are enough to get me to tune back in.  The curse of fucking television.  It’s easy enough to watch, and despite my general misogyny, I’m very pro women-driven media, especially if it doesn’t play straight for a single gender for its audience, which Wentworth definitely does not.  With just a touch a smoothing it out here and there, it can become a Good show, and then it’s only a few more steps to becoming Even Better.