EASY TIGER AND RONDE’S ‘TERRITORY’ RELEASES ON NETFLIX RINGING IN HIGH STAR REVIEWS
Upon the release of ‘Territory’ on Netflix, Easy Tiger and Ronde are thrilled at the great response amongst audiences to our gritty drama. The Guardian’s Luke Buckmaster provided a four-star review of the show… ‘The high-concept premise of this rollicking Aussie drama from creators Ben Davies and Timothy Lee is “Succession in the outback”. Or for those partial to cowboy hats and Kevin Costner: “Yellowstone, in Australia”.
Director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) brings power jostling and fraught family dynamics to the Top End in Territory, the majesty of the landscape perhaps suggesting that all the human conflict bubbling away on the surface makes a teeny imprint in the ancient scheme of things.
Not that it doesn’t resonate: the stakes feel intensely personal and high at Marianne Station, the world’s (fictitious) largest cattle station. Its future is thrown into doubt when heir apparent Daniel (Jake Ryan) is killed off in a way rarely seen on screens – by dingo! Daniel is attacked by a group of ravenous canines in a scene that reminded me of a moment from Joe Carnahan’s great film The Grey, when Liam Neeson straps broken glass to his fists and prepares to bash a bunch of wolves.
Poor Daniel is tough but not Liam Neeson tough, and is reduced to kibble. His death sparks a “who’s next in line?” conundrum for the Lawson family, who own the station. Grumpy patriarch Colin (Robert Taylor) – the Logan Roy character – doesn’t like his options, which include his alcoholic son Graham (Michael Dorman); Graham’s wife, Emily (Anna Torv), who is related to a rival business family; and their children Marshall (Sam Corlett) and Susie (Philippa Northeast). Everybody wants the top job apart from Marshall, a free spirit more interested in adventure than power and inheritance…
All the Lawsons are headstrong and a bit dangerous; part of the dramatic intrigue comes from not knowing what they’re capable of. The cast very effectively capture this. Torv has a steely and sorrowful glint in her eyes; the look of someone who is prepared to fight but would prefer not to. Dorman is powerful and yet vulnerable as Graham, who makes bold moves while battling the demon drink. Corlett brings spunk and attitude as a young man still finding himself, and Northeast very persuasively inhabits Susie, who is tougher to read – calmer than the rest of her family and playing the long game.
The supporting cast impress too – particularly Clarence Ryan, playing Nolan Brannock, an Indigenous station owner and cattleman caught up in politics and brouhahas. Ryan has real fire in his belly and a dynamic presence, raising the voltage. Hamilton Morris has a small role as Indigenous elder Uncle Bryce, but geez it’s good to see him: it’s Morris’s first screen appearance since his stunning performance in 2017’s Sweet Country, in which he played a farmhand pursued across rugged terrain by Bryan Brown’s police sergeant.’
Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian
23rd of October, 2024
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Karl Quinn wrote about Territory’s success…
‘The Australian-made Territory has become the second-most-watched TV series globally on Netflix in its second week, climbing from its debut last week at No.3 and making a second-season commission almost inevitable.
The outback succession drama – jokingly described by its director Greg “Wolf Creek ” McLean as “Dallas with dingoes” in a recent interview with this masthead – clocked up 6.3 million views of its six episodes in its second week on the platform, adding to the 6.4 million in its first week.
The most-watched show in the past seven days was Tyler Perry’s drama, Beauty in Black, with 8.7 million views of its eight episodes.
Likened to Succession, Game of Thrones and, above all, Yellowstone – for its combination of family drama, warring cattle-ranching clans and the majesty of its landscapes – Territory has received mostly favourable reviews from critics and audiences alike.
It currently has a ranking of 7 out of 10 on IMDb, a critic score of 7.1 on Metacritic and 85 per cent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes…
Real cattle station Tipperary (renamed Marianne in the show) and World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park feature prominently, while some other locations – including the Bull Bar, in which pool, fisticuffs and gunfights are on the menu – were created in a studio in South Australia.
“It’s Yellowstone set in the rugged outback of northern Australia,” one typical fan review says on IMDb. “The best character … is the scenery, which is every bit as stunning as you’d expect.”
Another says: “Amazing cast … amazing locations, incredible cinematography.”
Even the less favourable reviews highlight the scenery. “Looks beautiful, fantastic to see the top end of Australia shot so glamorously.”
That will be music to the ears of director McLean, who admits he was inspired by Australia’s most successful movie.
“I still think Crocodile Dundee is one of the greatest things Australia’s ever produced, and what that movie did for the Australian character internationally – I’d love this show to do a similar thing,” he told this masthead.
Though battles over intergenerational wealth and the conflicting interests of pastoralists, miners and traditional owners are at the core of the story, Netflix clearly recognised the importance of locations, particularly to foreign audiences. In its pre-release marketing, the trailer sought to position the show as both familiar and exotic.
“Imagine the family drama of your favourite prime-time soap, but set in a region so rough and remote that nearly everything can kill you,” the trailer urged viewers on its Tudum website last month.
With the show cracking the top 10 in more than 70 countries, including the United States, UK, Canada, Spain and Mexico (but, intriguingly, not India or Japan), it seems plenty of people have been willing to do just that.’
Karl Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald
6th of November, 2024
The Hollywood Reporter writes…
‘The Netflix algorithm will attempt to lure you into watching Territory for its familiarity. The six-part drama is almost explicitly an Aussie version of Yellowstone, or else a modern-day version of Australia, with none of those pesky Baz Luhrmann aesthetic trappings. Heck, you might as well call it Amazon’s Open Range without the huge hole at the center of the story.
It’s a series positively overflowing with recognizable faces from American television freed to use variations on their native accents, including leads from Fringe (Anna Torv), Longmire (Robert Taylor), The CW’s awful Beauty & the Beast (Jay Ryan) and Patriot (Michael Dorman).
As such, I guess you could enjoy Territory for all of the reasons it feels like countless other pieces of entertainment you’ve enjoyed. But me, I stuck with Territory for the handful of ways it’s distinctive — like the combination of Australian slang and cattle ranching jargon that’s practically a foreign language, the gorgeous photography of the country’s Northern Territory and, yes, the number of recognizable actors who get to wear chaps and and talk about obscure facets of international real estate law. Those aren’t necessarily big promises of originality and flair, but they’re the limited promises on which this constantly watchable drama delivers.
Standing in for the Yellowstone‘s Duttons as ranching royalty are the Lawsons, owners and operators of Marianne Station — the world’s largest cattle operation, occupying terrain the size of Belgium. A paragon of abusive toxic masculinity, aging patriarch Colin (Taylor) has passed the station along to youngest son Daniel (Jake Ryan), in part because eldest son Graham (Dorman) is an erratic alcoholic and in part because Graham married Emily (Torv), part of a neighboring clan known for stealing and rebranding Lawson cattle.
Colin, stuck in the past, ran Marianne into the ground, but Daniel has been trying to innovate. Except that in the opening moments of the premiere, Daniel is eaten by dingos, or something comparably Australian, creating a vast power vacuum that involves Graham, Emily, Emily’s glowering ex (Jay Ryan’s Campbell), inevitably nefarious mining billionaire Sandra (Sara Wiseman), the local Indigenous community (fronted by Clarence Ryan’s Nolan, a low-level rancher) and more.
Things get soapier and more complicated when Graham and Emily’s daughter Susie (Philippa Northeast) returns from university with big ideas about the station’s future and starts flirting with Sandra’s son Lachie (Joe Klocek), while Marshall (Sam Corlett), Graham’s black sheep son from a previous marriage, turns up with scruffy and possibly scheming ruffians Rich (Sam Delich) and Sharnie (Kylah Day).
Created by Ben Davies and Timothy Lee, Territory is boldly and unapologetically meat-and-potatoes television, in which everybody is gruff, sweaty and coated in a fine layer of dust, as if to reenforce the connection between these characters and the Top End.
If that isn’t enough, the dialogue is bursting with references to “family” and “the land” and “legacy.” The machinations are rudimentary, the love triangles perfunctory and the cliffhangers mostly predictable (though at least one shocker I fully expected the show to squirm away from managed to stick). But the commitment to every genre trope is fully sincere. The pretty people kiss, the bulls stampede and even if you don’t know a duster (of the jacket variety) from a muster (a roundup of some sort), the road across this rough terrain has been so reliably paved that the journey is almost too smooth.
I think Territory does better than Yellowstone in its attempts at weaving the Native perspective into the storytelling. No matter how complex the regional concepts of land ownership might be, however, there’s little doubt that when it comes to the fight between attractive white people saying “Mine! Mine! Mine!” and the Traditional Owners (not an expression I previously knew) saying “Um, excuse me?” the narrative’s heart lies with the Lawsons — even if its mind may know better.
One could make fun of director Greg McLean for an overreliance on soaring drone shots of the Outback, all impeccably framed at dawn or in the gloaming. But nobody here wants to redefine the visual language of cinema, nor push boundaries for violence (lots of drunken punching and occasional shooting) or sex (steamy smooching is all). The goal is just to make your jaw drop a little more at each vista or bovine throng, and it works. Setting some sort of televisual record for using the word “escarpment” and depicting vast escarpments, Territory would look superb streamed on your Apple Watch — though I’d advice viewing on a bigger screen if you want to see the impressive cragginess of the older actors’ faces or revel in the angular cheekbones of the younger stars.
Given the amount of death and betrayal and intense business maneuvering required by the plot, it’s no surprise that the primary emotions evoked by most of the cast are “intensity” and “fatigue,” but they all do it reasonably well. Graham’s drunkenness gives Dorman the opportunity to play volatile, while Emily’s family upbringing lets Torv shade her character with enigmatic potential. Delich and Dan Wyllie, as Emily’s proudly cow-thieving brother Hank, are in a wilder, more flamboyant show than everybody else. Day and Corlett are in a swoonier one than everybody else. Ryan, Hamilton Morris and Tuuli Narkle, representing the Indigenous side, are in a more serious-mined and occasionally more provocative series than everybody else, one that makes an effort at more spiritual and historical nuance than Territory really has room for.
The show has a lot to pack into a small amount of time. Heard the expression “All hat and no cattle”? The cattle in Territory may not have a lot of genetic diversity — it’s a plot point! — and the hats may look a bit worn around the edges. But whatever you’re looking for, this series has a lot of it.
Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter
23rd of October, 2024
Original article here