Some TV shows begin so frustratingly, so obviously setting off on the wrong foot, that I feel inclined to press pause, look towards the heavens and cry out “why, whhhyy, WHHHYYYY?” The perils of lazy voiceovers and the temptation for screenwriters to tell rather than show are familiar topics for critics and teachers to kvetch about. And yet kvetch I will, given the slab of misty-eyed narration that kicks off Stan’s new series Year Of: a well-acted but unfocused and only intermittently interesting portrait of young Sydneysiders attending the fictitious Jubilee high.
This same school is featured in the beloved series Bump, making Year Of a rare Australian spin-off series. The first episode starts with shots of Sydney’s city centre at night, capturing a busy intersection, a food delivery person on a bike, a train whizzing by and buildings including the Sydney Tower Eye reaching into the skyline.
“There are things that happen that no one else knows about,” begins Mo (Samuel El Rahi) in a soliloquy that’s both too contrived and too casual, too on-the-nose but also kind of confusing. He continues: “Everyone’s got something like that. A story, you know, buzzing inside, that’s now a part of your DNA.”
In Mo’s case, the story that’s sloshing around his insides is “so weird,” with “so many laughs” and “so much of everything.” As the footage rolls forward, showing the city waking up, Mo explains that sometimes “it [presumably he means the story] nudges”, “taps on my chest from the inside” and “brings you back to everyone who went through it”. Because “we’re bound forever with that”.
I’ve rewatched this opening scene a couple of times and I think I know what he’s talking about. The only narration in the entire first season (this review encapsulates the first eight episodes), it feels tacked on at the eleventh hour.
This opening – the verbal equivalent of a cheesy friendship bracelet – is also antithetical to the kind of experience the creators, Dan Edwards and Jessica Tuckwell, seem to have intended: a streetside drama told unpretentiously with realistic, at times almost vérité vibes. The show recovers but extends itself too far too quickly, introducing lots of characters in brief, broad strokes: more than 10 in as many minutes. In introductory scenes we watch Mo and Tully (Samson Alston) lug a blue couch down a street and up a flight of stairs – blue couches, coincidentally, being a bit of a thing in the zeitgeist lately. They’re helping a new teacher Bowie (Christian Byers) – Oly’s brother from Bump, the only returning character – who’s also being assisted by the deputy principal, Eddie (Ray Chong Nee).
We then cursorily meet Tully’s mother, Lucinda (Danielle Cormack) and father, Alan (Matt Nable) before we’re whisked into the company of students and besties Priya (Tharanya Tharan), Kate (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) and Maya (Isabella Graiche), who are getting ready for a big night out and soon to meet George (Samuel Dawson), who’s hanging out in a park and speaking to his boyfriend Brendan (Nicholas Cradock), having organised a big party at Brendan’s house. At said party there’s drinking, pingers, surprisingly excellent lighting and the gettin’ of jiggy. But the night ends in devastation when one of the aforementioned characters is killed in a tragic accident.
Different people react to the death in different ways, with the second episode in particular taking a funereal tone as the cast is pushed into tough dramatic spaces. The rest of the series explores tensions and insecurities within the friendship group, frictions between the kids and adults, various escapades and nights out, potential romances, and other issues pertinent to their lives. The writers periodically divert to the adults, making it a multi-generational narrative. But, with each episode clocking in at about 30 minutes, there isn’t a lot of room for a cast this large; the show might have fared better if it’d maintained focus on the students, who are obviously real stars.
The young actors commendably rise to the occasion (and the adults are good too), but the structure shortchanges them, often not giving individual scenes the chance to breathe. At first I found it a little difficult to keep track of who was who and the traits distinguishing them; later, after having come to know these characters better, their plotlines felt increasingly vague and drifting. Compare this approach to the opening of Bump, which guides us via a clear protagonist, Nathalie Morris’ Oly, while simultaneously launching an interesting dramatic scenario (a school student giving birth, who doesn’t even know she’s pregnant) and introducing important people in her life.
The dialogue in Year Of is impressively naturalistic, striking me as a more authentic picture of how youth speak than the Heartbreak High remake. In that show the actors have a more performative style; their characters seem to know they’re being watched. Year Of takes more of a “window to the world” approach, encouraging us to disappear into the characters’ lives. Except for that opening narration, which sticks out like a sore thumb.
All episode of Year Of are available now on Stan
