Scrublands: Season 1 – TV Review

tldrmoviereviews

Nov 17

TL;DR – This is a solid mystery that does not outstay its welcome. It hits hard at the start but does lose some energy throughout.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the Stan service that viewed this series.

Warning – Contains scenes that may cause distress.

Scrublands Review –

If there is one setting that Australian literature loves to explore, it is a small town. They litter the continent, becoming part of a country's tapestry, but can also be insular places full of secrets. This juxtaposition creates the tension that can be mined for drama, which we see today.

So to set the scene, one Sunday morning, Father Byron Swift (Jay Ryan) was greeting his parishioners at the end of a service when he dips back into the church only to return with a rifle and murders five people in front of the screaming masses fleeing the carnage. One year later, journalist Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold) arrives at Riverside to discover why a man of the cloth became a mass murderer. But no one in town is talking, are they just upset about the torture porn, or is there something more going on. We will be looking at the series as a whole from here, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.