Glitch : A series co-produced by Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Netflix

Why did Glitch not show up in any of the best of Netflix lists? Glitch, an ABC show, picked and co-produced by Netflix from its second season onwards is one of the highly bingeable shows on Netflix (US.) I accidentally stumbled on it after watching a zombie series (Dead Set, UK) on fast forward and was looking into more 'shows like this.' In a way it is a zombie show without blood, guts and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. No spoilers, check it out for yourself.

If you have been looking for glitch-in-the-matrix, afterlife or paranormal TV shows, Glitch is it. There are three seasons and six episodes per season. With each episode an hour length, you can probably finish watching the entire three seasons over a weekend if you put your mind to it LOL like I did. There is no fourth season or AFAIK nothing is in the works yet.

Glitch takes place in a fictional town of Yoorana, in Victoria, Australia. A set of people come back from the dead, rising out of their graves in perfect physical shape. They are helped by a police officer and a doctor who first discover them. All characters have a back story and their story lines mature as the series progresses. As viewer I felt invested in the characters though all the actors were totally new to me. Brilliant casting, great acting and a solid story / screenplay bring to us the vision of creators Tony Ayres and Louise Fox and director Emma Freeman.

One of the things that made me like Glitch, especially the first two seasons, (the final one was a washout though,) is it is very un-American. There is no hint of Hollywood anywhere, it is feels like an Australian original. Although in reality, it is not. It supposedly got its inspiration from Les Revenants, a French TV show and a cancelled (after season 1) American TV show, The Returned. I am pretty sure the American show would have been too much plastic for me, call it my confirmation bias. Also I prefer the sunnier Australian outback to the dark French mountain towns. 

While the seasons 1 and 2 were gripping and had good production value for a series produced on a tight budget as Glitch was, the season 3 was below par. It was as if the creators of the show couldn't figure out how to bring the series to a culmination. New characters were introduced, then had their stories abruptly cut short. There were a lot of loose threads with explanations lacking and a very anti-climatic ending. I thought the characters deserved more. It was as if there was only enough money to somehow finish the third season and no more. Therefore they had to set a fire, annihilate everything and bring the series to a close once and for all.

Still, it is worth a watch. Because it is not very often that we come across paranormal or tales about glitches without eerie sound effects, cheesy story and production design and ghosts who are not dressed in white.

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Netflix's show Stateless and some companion thoughts and figures

.....As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).

from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's poem Think of Others, translated from Arabic.

There are 80 million refugees or displaced people in the world right now. The crisis of displaced people was the largest and the most immediate human crisis we had to deal in the 2000s before Covid19 took center-stage. There have been hard-hitting documentaries on the refugee crisis like Fire at Sea, Island of Hungry Ghosts and Lost Boys of Sudan but not many feature films or TV shows.

Stateless - the Australian TV drama series, co-created by Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayres, and Elise McCredle for Australian Broadcasting Corporation is one of the first of its kind. It brings us a fictionalized, inspired-by-true-stories documentation of refugees and asylum seekers at Australia's immigration detention centers (at a particular one called Baxter at Port Augusta) in the mid-aughts.

Making a successful pitch for a TV drama series on displaced people is not an easy task. Sometimes the producers have to depend on the generosity of a Hollywood celebrity to be able to get their series off the ground. Thank you, Cate Blanchett, for giving life-breath to Stateless, acquired by Netflix and now streaming to your living room. Ms. Blanchett is an UNHCR ambassador and she joined the project as an executive producer to secure funding.

One commonality of all the displaced people in the 21st century is, they are not usually white. Most of the displaced people are from Asia, Africa or S. America. In a saner and brighter yesterday, they were regular people doing regular jobs - teachers, engineers, factory workers in their home countries before some political turmoil, mob lords or war decimated their way of life and their children's futures. Forced to flee their homes, their journeys to a better life is often chock-full of unbelievable hardship. These are not the people who have the luxury to 'Netflix and chill' (meme meaning not intended), so a show about them has to be tailored to the people who will make up the audience.

The producers had to make sure that there was something in the TV show that appealed to the white audience - who form the majority of viewership for streaming content in the western world. Stateless opens with a white woman running across the prickly dry Australian outback. She is what the producer Tony Ayers calls a Trojan Horse. The producers made a strategic and deliberate choice to enter into the story with a middle class white Australian woman for the sake of audience (white) who could easily relate to someone like themselves. The character on the run is Sophie Werner (played by an excellent Yvonne Strahovski), a flight attendant. The character is loosely modeled on a real-life person, Cornelia Rau - a white Australian flight attendant who was mistakenly detained for 10 months at Baxter immigration detention facility.

The fact that Stateless got to be made is commendable. It introduces some of Australia's finest immigrant acting talent to a global audience. Fayssal Bazzi, a first-gen Australian immigrant of Lebanese descent plays one of the major roles as an Afghan school teacher who with his family of two daughters and wife tries to seek asylum in Australia. Iranian-Australian actor Phoenix Raei,  Egyptian-Australian actor Helana Sawires and newcomer Afghan-Australian actor Soraya Heidari play some of the important characters in the show. Asher Keddie and Jai Courtney along with Cate Blanchett and Dominic West in brief but impactful roles make up the rest of the cast.

Stateless will make you think of others. Maybe it will even make you cry for them and despair at your helplessness to even light a candle of hope. If you are looking for a companion piece for this drama series there is Immigration Nation, a docu-series on Netflix which is a look into U.S's immigration enforcement and the treatment of asylum seekers at ICE detention centers.

Or you if you want to stay on Down Under and want to see where Australian government went from Baxter (closed in 2008), you can watch the Island of Hungry Ghosts, available on Amazon Prime (US.) It is a documentary about a local trauma counselor and asylum seekers housed at Christmas Island facility. Post 2010 Australia has been moving most of its immigration detention operations to its own offshore Guantanamos for housing asylum seekers and boat people away from mainland. In purgatories like Nauru, Christmas Island and Manus Island even the children are showing signs of giving up on life and exhibiting suicidal behavior.

I leave you with an UNHCR infographic - click here or on the image to open in a new tab. Food for thought or to discard.

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