Australia, like much of the world, is experiencing a renaissance of violence, both direct and structural, against minorities, and the reception of Cleverman’s critique is important. The show’s ratings are modest and steadily declining in spite of good reviews: this might be symptomatic of a nation’s refusal to talk about its own racism and xenophobia, but it also reflects the need for real talk.

The majority of critics have seen The Americans as a show about relationships and marriage, a view reinforced by the show's creator, Joe Weisberg. But to me, regardless of the creator’s intentions, it’s a text about eighties politics and the decline of the traditional left in the US.

At its best, procedural crime fiction takes a scalpel to the myths and fallacies that have grown up around history, revealing the activities of previously marginalised characters within it.

When I told people I’d started working in the live department of a closed captioning company, they’d ask what the job actually involved. Then they’d say something like, ‘Some of those captions are terrible. The other day I was watching the footy at the pub, and I saw one that said [insert egregiously unintelligible sentence here].’ Having grown up with several deaf and hearing-impaired family members of varying ages and interests, I was accustomed to watching television with the captions on – so I was also accustomed to their often dismal standard. Sometimes they’re incomprehensible. Sometimes they’re delayed. Sometimes they obscure important graphic information on the screen. Sometimes they’re absent.

Was it an hour, this premiere episode? It felt unending, progressively folding in on itself like an origami of self-seriousness. True Detective season two's premiere is stodgy and heavy-handed to the point of oafishness. It plays something like an end-of-times prophecy for slow crime; the whole thing is so done that any genuine new entry to the genre feels like a satire. True Detective is its own comedy sketch.

The political decisions to ignore places like Mt Druitt, in favour of Potts Point, by keeping policies like super tax concessions and negative gearing, and avoiding inheritance or land taxes, are an insult to the idea that poverty is an individual problem.

I am not ordinarily interested in behind-the-scenes accounts and authorial meta-analyses, and studiously avoid for instance the director’s commentary tracks on DVDs, but lately the convergence of Gilligan’s show-after-the-show, and of the torrent of viewer commentary and critique on the web became an irresistible spectacle, every bit as absorbing as the show proper.

Elizabeth Kadetsky continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York […]

art + soul Hetti Perkins Pan Macmillan The first thing you notice about this book is that it is beautiful. The sleeve on the cover balances a contemporary Aboriginal painting across the top, with a lovely landscape shot along the bottom; standing in between is Hetti and the title. This beauty is continued throughout the […]

Two books came lovingly wrapped to the breakfast table on Father’s Day. The first was Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and the other was Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. At first glance the two books appear to have very little in common. I am a fan of the […]

A lot of ink, chemical and virtual, has been devoted to commentary on the HBO television drama series The Wire and rightly so because it is, without doubt, a unique and compelling production. For those of you who are not familiar with the show, the DVD boxed collection of all sixty episodes is available at […]