Thursday, October 09, 2003
CrashBurn begins to fire
Originally published in The Age Green Guide, Thursday 9 October 2003.
I have to admit, after five weeks of Crashburn I was lost. I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t the flashbacks or the ‘He Says/She Says’ storytelling technique. Maybe ‘She’ had the best of it; ‘His’ half was often used merely to set up a joke that would be paid off by ‘Her’ later in the episode. But the format was fine. I had a handle on that. I just didn’t know what was meant to be going on. I had no idea what Crashburn was trying to do.
Was it meant to focus solely on the relationship between Ben (Aaron Blabey) and Rosie (Catherine McClements)? That would be an ambitious project, but achievable, so long as the other characters weren’t butting in all the time with frivolous side-stories that only distracted from the main event. Or was it an ensemble piece? Because that was fine too, as long as I got a bit more of the other characters occasionally, instead of them popping up with those peripheral, low-impact stories that brought no real character insight.
But I felt that Crashburn was floating somewhere in between, tossing up little more than a series of vignettes about relationships, peppered with amusing characters, but with little depth. As poignant as these moments often were, they just weren’t enough to hold me over the length of a television series.
For example, Emily (Veronica Sywak), the receptionist at the marriage counselling centre attended grimly by Ben and Rosie, was almost criminally unprofessional and so outrageously indiscreet that she had to have another agenda. Surely the professional staff couldn’t continue to employ a receptionist who gave new clients her own personal assessment of their relative culpability before their first session. And despite Emily’s brief and rather unpleasant encounters with a patient who had become violently obsessed with her, it appeared that her function was little more than to provide that Australian drama staple: ‘quirkiness’. My alarm bells were ringing.
Similarly, I wasn’t clear on Richard (Richard Piper) and Candice (Liz Burch). It was beginning to look like they were the comic relief, providing a chaotic contrast to Ben and Rosie’s more mature (but perhaps less honest) approach to marital reconciliation. I was content with this. Frankly, I enjoyed Richard’s increasingly ridiculous attempts to reclaim something, anything, from the marital home that Candice stubbornly guarded. I laughed, but as for the characters, I didn’t really care about them.
Even Lewis (the fabulously-named Orpheus Pledger), the seven-year old son of Ben and Rosie, who I expected to be a key character given that it was his parents’ separation, did little more than look forlorn in the background, or happy when it would provide appropriate irony.
The thing is, I really wanted Crashburn to be good. Australian television drama is in such a precarious and underfunded state that the last thing it needs is another failure. So I persisted. But by week five, like every other television writer out there, I was preparing witty word-plays on the show’s title for a piece that would declare the show floundering.
Silly me. I should have known that creators and principal writers Deb Cox and Andrew Knight were old hands; experienced enough to avoid all the traps that I thought would be Crashburn’s downfall. It just took them a while. Episode 6, ‘Erzeren’s Groin’ (written by Knight and Cox and directed by Roger Hodgman) finally brought it all together. It collected the disparate elements and directionless characters and linked them in a definite thematic direction. Simply, it all fell into place.
And I realised what Crashburn was getting at. It wasn’t just examining Ben and Rosie; it was examining everyone. Everything. Men. Women. Romance. Sex. Love. ‘Erzeren’s Groin’ looked at the inevitable waning of physical desire in long-term relationship. We saw this from the perspective of several characters as they reassessed, rethought, and reworked the way they related physically to their partners. Candice had to confront the reality that her husband may not be attracted to her anymore; Abby’s (Sacha Horler) pragmatic approach to marriage began to feel a little hollow; Adam, Ben’s cousin (Grant Piro) grappled with the battle between his attraction to a work colleague and the comfort of his domestic situation (wonderfully signified by his anti-teeth-grinding mouthguard); and I finally understood what Emily was trying to do.
‘Erzeren’s Groin’ set me straight about Crashburn. It is more than just a character study, it is a series doing its darndest to find some answers to one of the biggest human questions ever. How on earth do you hang onto love? Anyone can fall in it; that’s easy television fodder (let’s face it, we all like a good TV romance – Laura and Diver Dan anyone?). Crashburn, however, is striving for the answers to human emotions much bigger, much deeper, and much more important than mere lust and excitement. The size of Cox and Knight’s canvas is daunting. But six weeks in, Crashburn is starting to make a real go of it.