Michael Idato
The Age (Green Guide)
May 28, 2009
THE growth of big-budget cinema-style television has permanently changed audience expectations, says Sea Patrol executive producer Hal McElroy. To succeed now, television dramas need to keep pace with TV screens, a technological realm with one rule of thumb: bigger is better.
“The bar is constantly being raised,” McElroy says. “Every single episode has to be better than the last one, and season to season there should be a noticeable improvement. If you think you can roll around in clover and everything is fine, you’re dead, and if you stand still, you’re going backwards. We impose a high expectation on ourselves, just as the audience does.”
If Underbelly is The Godfather for the small screen, then Sea Patrol is Top Gun on the water. Filmed over 87 days, on location at Mission Beach and Cairns, and a studio on the Gold Coast, it is a 750-scene, 13-hour feature film. It has high-speed boat chases, tension-soaked stand-offs and movie-style showdowns.
“To do that, you have to have money, time and confidence,” says McElroy. “The budget for series three has increased, it has given us a little more time to do things, but the key word is confidence.
“With two series under our belt, we are better and smarter with our storytelling, so the process is more fluid.
“Like a football team when they train and train and train, they play better football. The actors would tell you they’re more relaxed, more confident, they know where they’re going, and that plays out across everything – directing, writing, production.”
Like the two series which precede it, Sea Patrol: Red Gold is set aboard the (fictional) Royal Australian Navy patrol boat HMAS Hammersley. It stars Ian Stenlake as the boat’s commanding officer (Lieutenant-Commander Mike Flynn), Lisa McCune as his executive officer (Lieutenant Kate McGregor), and an ensemble of actors as the boat’s navy crew.
The first series dealt with the death of a marine biologist on the fictional Bright Island and the threat of a marine-borne toxin, while the second, subtitled The Coup, involved an insurgency on the fictional Samaru Islands. The third, Red Gold, shifts the action to the Indian Ocean, the theft of “red gold” coral and a web of murder, piracy and eco-terrorism.
McElroy says the biggest challenge for the writing is serving both the 13-episode story arc (a byproduct of the show’s funding as a miniseries) and the individual episodes.
“You’re juggling two things, and sometimes the juggle is in conflict, between the need to pay off the miniseries story or continue it in some fashion, and at the same time deliver a satisfying episode which has conclusion to it. There is a bit of a battle in the cutting room,” he says.
McElroy has high praise for the show’s ensemble – Saskia Burmeister (Nav), John Batchelor (Charge), Jeremy Lindsay Taylor (Buffer), Josh Lyons (ET), Matthew Holmes (Swain), Kristian Schmid (RO), Jay Ryan (Spider), Kirsty Lee Allan (Bomber), and new addition Nikolai Nikolaeff (2Dads).
“Every single member of the cast gets at least two episodes where they’re principal in the story, so these guys all know they will get a chance to shine,” McElroy says. “They’re like a football team; they’re all playing hard and passing the ball and trying to get it over the line. There is a reward for all of them to perform, and at the same time an obligation to step up, and a willingness to contribute to the whole.”
For one, however, this was a final journey. In the explosive first episode, a member of the Hammersley’s crew was killed, delivering an emotional wallop to the crew’s strong sense of family. Co-producer Di McElroy, realising the dramatic potential for the story, answered actor David Lyons’ request (he played ET) to be let go for another project, with these words: “We’ll let you go, as long as you let us kill you.”
The longevity of any Australian drama is a challenging issue, dependant partly on domestic ratings, but now also on revenue from international sales. At close to $1million per episode, Sea Patrol is the most expensive weekly drama ever made in Australia, and its performance is closely watched by the network’s statisticians and its accountants.
“Overseas sale is never easy with an Australian program because we forget that everywhere else in the world we’re foreign, and in Europe we’re dubbed,” says McElroy.
That said, he adds, a deal has just been finalised to sell the series to Germany and Italy. It has already been sold to Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the UK and several other countries.
“It’s action adventure, which is very expensive to make, and generally speaking American dramas have moved away from it because it’s so expensive, so that gives us a point of difference in the market,” says McElroy.
“We’re on the sea, which we know is elemental, and when people think of Australia they think of blue water, so there is a very positive association. It has a lot to offer the market.”
McElroy is confident the series will return for a fourth outing, though nothing official has been announced from Nine’s head office. The production team is developing scripts for a possible fourth series, which is usual to cover the contingency.
If it proceeds, McElroy says, most of the discussion has leaned towards 16 episodes without the over-arching miniseries plot. Everything, he says, depends on its ratings performance across the third season.
“We’re hoping to get 1.5million people, which is where we finished up last year, and in the current market that’s a hell of a number,” he says.
Sea Patrol airs on Mondays at 8.30pm on Nine.
SIX weeks sailing the cerulean seas of far north Queensland.
Sea Patrol: Red Gold, Nine, 8.30pm
It’s November 2008, and TVFIX has trekked all the way up to Cairns in Far North Queensland to scope out the set of Sea Patrol, with a mission to find out what really goes on behind the scenes of one of Australia’s top dramas.