Gather ’round, friends, and I’ll tell you a scary story. It’s a tale of political intrigue, in which right-wing politicians in a Western nation (culturally, if not geographically) conspire with the intelligence apparatus of authoritarians abroad to undermine democratic institutions and maneuver themselves into power. This story has it all: International hackers, compromising video of illicit liaisons between politicians and secret foreign spies, deep-state chicanery, romantic relationships between reporters and intelligence agents, false-flag terrorist attacks, a trans woman risking her life to expose abuses by the military-intelligence apparatus of which she’s a part, honeytraps, rampant xenophobia and racism, indefinite detention, allegations of fake news, attacks on the press, oppression of dissent…

Wait, you say you’ve heard this one before? And you haven’t watched Secret City, the Australian political thriller from Summer 2016 now playing in Summer 2018 in an American Netflix account near you?

In one of the most remarkable cases of art not imitating life but anticipating it, Secret City‘s short, sweet six-episode first season plays like a prophecy about the next two years of life in these United States, issued by a Canberra Cassandra who won’t be heard until it’s too late. And after the events that unfolded between America and Russia this week, it feels more relevant than ever — just swap a few proper nouns and serve hot.

I wrote a few pieces I’m proud of last week. First up, a few words on Secret City, the new-to-Netflix Australian political thriller from 2016…that just so happens to be basically America in 2018.

It’s an enormously tantalizing note to end on. Yet I can’t help but wish it really was the end. I know that political thrillers tend to be endlessly iterative, and detectives and spies are as franchiseable as superheroes. But Secret City already started stumbling over itself here in the end, and now we know it’s done so without the satisfaction of a self-contained story to compensate for it.

No one’s going to complain about seeing more Anna Torv, a natural-born leading actor for this sort of story, that’s for sure. There’s a throwaway moment in this episode, when she has a tension-breaking laugh about her cop pal Bremmer’s target-shooting prowess in which she jokes she’ll safe as long as all their attackers are made of paper, that’s as human and incisive as anything you’re likely to see in a genre work this year. But Torv, and Harry, deserved a conclusion as well-drawn and decisive as Harry herself. I wish they’d gotten it.

I reviewed the season finale of Secret City for Decider. It tripped up in the end, which is a shame.

Filmed in 2016, Secret City is a dystopian vision of a future for Australia that has already come to pass in America. That’s what I can’t get over, watching the fifth and penultimate episode of the show’s first season (“Ghosts in the Machine”). I mean, it’s uncanny. Right-wing influence peddlers collude with authoritarian foreign governments to consolidate power. They use fear of non-white foreign hordes to drum up xenophobic fever. They take advantage of the previously existing, already unaccountable security and surveillance apparatus — left intact by a left-wing government in order to look tough — to consolidate power even further. Like I said in my previous review, all you need to do is change a few nationalities around, and this thing isn’t a drama, it’s a documentary.

[…]

In the end, I think the point Secret City is trying to make as it closes in on its final hour is that politics as warped as those being practiced here is pulp. If politics is the art of the possible, as the saying goes, and it’s possible to detain a journalist without a warrant and disappear her into a Kafkaesque nightmare only the lawyers of the country’s top newspaper can get her out of — and only just in time, since legislation has been passed to prevent this — well then, there’s really no limit to what politics can be, right? Compromised cabinet members, clandestine meetings, rampant corruption, flagrant human rights abuses, crackdowns on dissidents: Anything goes. Are a few bodice-ripping hookups and pitched gun battles really that outlandish in a political landscape that seems torn from a fever dream?

I reviewed episode five of Secret City for Decider. There’s some sex stuff in this one, too!

The contrast between actors Dan Wyllie as Mal and Sam Fraser as his son Dylan works well, too. Dylan’s as estranged from his dad as you’d expect the quasi-failson of a wealthy government official who sent him to boarding school hundreds of miles away to be. That this gets reflected in their physicality — Dylan is tall, lean, pale, thin-lipped, with bass in his voice; Mal feels napoleonic in dimensions and demeanor, with a big mouth, convex eyes, and a raspy tenor — is very smart casting indeed. So when they do bridge the gap, as when Dylan quietly insists on coming to work with his dad and Mal acquiesces, or when Mal gently ribs Dylan about his conspiracy-theorist, Walter White wannabe friends, or when Mal employs Dylan for a little surreptitious surveillance of one of the right-wing generals calling the shots in the government now that Mal himself has been marginalized, you feel it in a way you wouldn’t if they looked like two peas in a pod.

[…]

The thing I keep thinking about while watching this show now is this: Secret City would be great for an American remake, with the governments of Russia or Israel or Saudi Arabia or any of the other foreign powers aiming firehoses of dirty money at the current regime standing in for China. But reality has clearly outpaced television. Secret City, a drama when it aired in 2016, feels more like a documentary from a slightly alternate reality in 2018.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Netflix’s Secret City for Decider. This is why I love doing episodic reviews: You can zoom in on details, which is where the stuff of art really is, and then you can cut back to the big picture.

Please click through to see a whole lot of lovely shot compositions that the Decider team captured and gif’d for me, too.

If there’s one thing Secret City has gotten right, it’s showing how hard we can cling to our preferred versions of the people we love. That’s an unusual statement to make regarding a cloak-and-dagger thriller about the menace of China Rising, but it’s true nonetheless. Episode 3 of Secret City finds its emotional center in the mourning for Kim Gordon, the slain spy who was once married to main character Harriet Dunkley, and it provides ample opportunity for writer Belinda Chayko and director Emma Freeman to demonstrate this maxim.

I reviewed the third episode of Secret City — featuring some really beautiful shot compositions, a magnetic performance by Anna Torv, and misgendering as a sign of villainy — for Decider.

I do have one concern, though, and upon thinking about it it’s a pretty major one: What is this for? Don’t get me wrong: Anna Torv and Damon Herriman (a cis male actor cast as a trans woman, he steers clear from the showy pitfalls such performers often leap into, even when the material all but frogmarches him in) are both magnificent in this segment, and if anything it’s a shame they won’t be given a chance to repeat this performance together. Yet I’m sitting here watching these characters in terror and pain because, what, there’s some opaque shenanigans and skullduggery going on in a pissing contest between Australia and China, involving a bunch of unlikable bureaucrats we’re treating like fun antiheroes and flat-affect spies who can best be described as “sinister Asians”?

The stories of spycraft that have really mattered to me — The Americans, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Joseph Conrad’s relatively obscure but beautifully bleak novel Under Western Eyes — wedded their characters’ zealous, often murderous and amoral patriotism to a sense of colossal waste. It’s impossible to walk away from those stories feeling like you’ve watched an edge-of-your-seat thriller and nothing else, not when they’re based on the idea that espionage is a soul-destroying, life-destroying business. Unless and until Secret City gets serious not just about the deaths of people like Kim, but the whole fraudulent and poisonous enterprise for which such people died, it’s not a city I really want to live in.

I reviewed the second episode of Secret City, which is maybe a bit too good for its own good in terms of wedding well-made characters to a potboiler, for Decider.

“Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad” is a genre of prestige — or at least prestige-adjacent — television I’ve avoided until now. So too is its auxiliary wing, “American Version of Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad.” Secret City, the new crime drama from Netflix, is a little bit of both. Set in Canberra, Australia, the country where it originally aired in 2016, it’s one of the many many foreign shows branded with the American streaming-media behemoth’s familiar red N. Its star, Fringe‘s Anna Torv, also co-headlines the David Fincher serial-killer series Mindhunter, a hit for the network (as far as anyone knows; Netflix is infamously opaque about such things). Despite predating Mindhunter, this gives Secret City the feel of a side project, a place Torv can use her native accent and look less like Carrie Coon while still dealing with the same basic matters of investigation, intrigue, and murder most foul. If Mindhunter is her Parliament-Funkadelic, Secret City is Bootsy’s Rubber Band.

I reviewed the first episode of Secret City on Netflix for Decider. Based on one episode out of a total of six, it’s a so-so show with a strong lead and at least one interesting supporting character.