Firebite ★★★★
AMC+, on demand
From its opening frame, Firebite leans deeply into the rich browns and ochres of the dry outback landscape. If this was a gritty American cable drama like Deadwood or even Carnivale, you’d know you were deep in the wild west by the sepia palette alone. But in Australia’s stark and arid wilderness you’re heading into a space with a longer, richer and far more mysterious history.
Rob Collins as Tyson and Shantae Barnes-Cowan as Shanika in Firebite.Credit:Ian Routledge/AMC+
Created by Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher, Firebite is a rollicking comedy-horror set in a remote mining town in the middle of South Australia, and follows two Indigenous vampire hunters, Tyson (Rob Collins) and Shanika (Shantae Barnes-Cowan), who are tracking the last colony of bloodsuckers.
The series is built on the premise that after the white miners stripped the land of opals, the tunnels they left behind became a safe haven for vampires who had travelled to Australia on the First Fleet. As a consequence, the “bloodhunters”, a line of Van Helsing-style trackers, continue to dedicate themselves to killing the undead in the shadows. Tyson and Shanika, meanwhile, are pursuing a slightly rougher line in pest control.
Australian TV networks, and to some extent Australian program makers, have a peculiar discomfort with telling genre stories. We’ve turned ourselves into a market that seems to have no difficulty plucking police, doctor and lawyer dramas out of thin air, but wrestles with the idea that Australia’s culture could produce its own Game of Thrones or True Blood. That it took an American network (the one that makes The Walking Dead, no less) to make this speaks volumes.
Firebite is more True Blood than Game of Thrones, obviously, but also benefits from past cable masterworks like Deadwood and Carnivale, with their sharp and bold story points, and natural ease with building an internal mythology. That last word – mythology – can be intimidating to both network executives and audiences, but it needn’t be. The best genre shows of all time – Twin Peaks and Dark Shadows – were both built on mountains of the stuff.
This is also the kind of thing that New Zealand has been doing brilliantly for years, from more recent examples such as Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s wildly eccentric What We Do In The Shadows, since elevated by a beautifully US-produced sequel, all the way back to Peter Jackson’s forgotten masterpiece of schlock, Bad Taste. Of course, Firebite benefits enormously from having a real budget, but all of the homages to the cinematic horror fringe are here.
There is also a powerful message about colonisation (and the introduction of smallpox to Australia by the First Fleet), exploitation of the land and the importance of family ties, though those story notes are not too laboriously hammered into the script. The difference between having something to say and preaching is barely a half-step, but Firebite treads elegantly onto the perfect spot.
Firebite is wonderfully Indigenous. It’s gritty and intriguing, fresh and wholly unpredictable. It’s also very droll. Getting that right is a tough tightwire act, where the risk of either taking things too seriously, or not seriously enough, lays in wait at every turn. But Thornton and Fletcher’s writing and Thornton’s direction doesn’t slip.
Firebite is also a magnificent exercise in jumping out of the creative window into the unknown and landing on your feet. It isn’t surprising that it works – it totally does – it’s just surprising that more Australian producers are not this adventurous. If television has taught us anything in the so-called golden “streaming” age, it is that almost anything, if carefully nurtured, can be a successfully played wild card.
AMC+ is available in Australia via Apple TV and Amazon Prime.
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