Mercado on TV: There is some great programming to celebrate NAIDOC Week. The all-Indigenous Big Mob Brekky is back for another week (Monday on NITV), the wonderful Jack Charles is on Who Do You Think You Are? (Tuesday on SBS) and two incredible documentaries, fresh from cinemas, come to TV with Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra (Tuesday on ABC) and My Name Is Gulpilil (Sunday July 11 on ABC).
It has been a long road for First Nations people getting onto Australian screens. For the first 50 years, the only ones seen on a regular basis were Bob Maza in Bellbird (1969, ABC), Justine Saunders in Number 96 (1976, Ten), Kylie Belling in The Flying Doctors (1986, Nine), Ernie Dingo on The Great Outdoors (1989, Seven), Stan Grant on Real Life (1994, Seven), Aaron Pedersen on Australian Gladiators (1995, Seven) and Deborah Mailman in The Secret Life Of Us (2001, Ten).
Meanwhile, the Arthur Upfield novels about Aboriginal Australian Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte were turned into two TV series for Seven. Bony (1971) starred NZ actor James Laurenson in blackface and Boney (1993) cast Cameron Daddo and changed the character to only being “brought up by Aborigines”.
NAIDOC 2021 Artwork designed by Gubbi Gubbi artist Maggie Jean Douglas (Maggie Jean Douglas)
Thankfully, today we finally have the ABC using Indigenous place names alongside their English names, and First Nations reporters appear on all morning TV shows, with the exception of Seven. Oh well, at least Home and Away finally has a new Indigenous detective called Amy Peters, played by Lisa Flanagan.
Rolling Stone once called Gossip Girl (2007) the hottest show on TV, because it had a “profound impact” on fashion and retail. Here’s betting the new reboot of Gossip Girl (Thursday on Fox 8) has already lined up contra fashion deals in the hope of striking gold again.
Does TV really need another teen school sex and drugs series, given we now have Euphoria, Generation, Sex Education etc? The answer is probably no, but streaming services like HBO Max need content, and a lazy reboot is a safer bet than a new brand. So that means more Frasier for Paramount+, more Clueless for Peacock and more Heartbreak High for Netflix Australia.
There is some interesting news for Nine now that America’s 2020/21 TV season has ended. Queen Latifah’s reboot of The Equaliser was the biggest new show of the year, and is expected to overtake NCIS as the number one drama in the US, while Christopher Meloni’s new Law & Order: Organised Crime smashed SVU (10) in the ratings. Let’s see if Nine can get similar results here.
Top photo: Shahni Wellington and Ryan Liddle return to morning television with all-Indigenous show, Big Mob Brekky Source: NITV
Next week – new series The White Lotus (Binge), Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes (Binge) and Time (BBC First).
See other Mercado on TV columns here.