For my money, there are two truly untouchable Australian TV shows: Love My Way and Mr Inbetween. But while the former has found a revered place in Australian pop cultural history, it feels as though Mr Inbetween is still waiting to get its due. Even as it’s been written up in publications like the New York Times and found a cult audience abroad, viewers at home have been slower to hear the good word.
Like Two Hands or Gettin’ Square before it, Mr Inbetween carries on the great Australian tradition of the crime comedy. Over three seasons – the last airing in 2021 – the show follows Ray Shoesmith (played by co-creator Scott Ryan): a hitman juggling his eventful line of work with fatherhood, a new romance and caring for his ailing older brother. It would be a little over simplistic to describe Ray as having a heart of gold – it’s more that he operates to his own moral compass, one where killing people is OK but huntsman spiders are not, because “you gotta draw the line somewhere”. But he’s an entirely lovable character despite the body count, someone you absolutely root for.
In classic Australiana fashion there are plenty of scenes with hapless crims who mess up jobs out of sheer stupidity, or the ocker underworld figure who takes meetings inside a strip club and fights with his misso about how much toilet paper she goes through. But the show evolves past those tropes as it goes along, and by the end of season three you’ll be choking back the tears as much as you are laughing.
The scenes that stick in my memory are the moving ones: the subtle meditations on grief and love lost; the way little decisions can set us on unalterable paths; or the fact that you can’t go back, there are no do-overs and we must carry the things we’ve done with us for ever. It slowly becomes a show that changes you, one that is not afraid to evolve past its comedic premise and take a risk on going dark, deep and sometimes devastating. There are no fairytales in Mr Inbetween’s world, and it is a better show for that honesty.
The story of how Mr Inbetween came to be is as special as the show itself. Back in the early 2000s, Scott Ryan was a film school student who wrote, directed and starred in an 80-minute mockumentary called The Magician – about a hitman called Ray – with a budget of about $3,000. The film-maker Nash Edgerton saw an early cut and urged Ryan to fine-tune the film and give it a limited cinematic release, which it got in 2005. (Good luck finding it now, though – The Magician isn’t on any streaming service and the DVDs go for about $100 a pop on eBay.)
The pair wanted to turn The Magician into a TV show but, after years of struggling, Ryan gave up on the dream, moved to Echuca and started driving taxis. Then, 13 years after The Magician first hit screens, the US cable network FX rang and said it wanted to make the show. This time, it actually happened. Ryan has never acted professionally before or after, but he is flawless as Ray.
If you have not yet seen the 26 episodes that Ryan and Edgerton were eventually able to make, a bounty awaits you. But a warning: to love Mr Inbetween is to feel a little bit frustrated. Not about the show – it’s incredible. But about how rare it feels, and what that says about the state of the Australian television industry.
I’m reminded of a 2015 remark from Love My Way co-creator John Edwards, quoted by Clem Bastow in a piece on that show’s enduring impact. “My view of the present state of the drama production industry is that we have run ourselves into a stagnant billabong: less production, same writers over and over, inflating costs for no apparent quality gain, shrinking audiences and increasingly reliant on subsidy.” Mr Inbetween feels like a case study in how good Australian TV can be when we throw out the by-the-numbers colouring book, fund it properly and bring in new voices.
I have no doubt that, in time, Mr Inbetween will come to be viewed as one of Australia’s greatest TV shows. But don’t wait until that happens to watch it.
Mr Inbetween is streaming on Binge and Foxtel Now. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
