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Author: Alexa Scarlata, Research Fellow, Media & Communications, RMIT University
Original article: https://theconversation.com/disney-dials-up-the-australiana-in-star-studded-drama-last-days-of-the-space-age-but-does-it-deliver-239619
Disney+ will add their latest Australian original to their catalogue today. The brief seems to have been to “amp up the Australianness” – and boy is it a cacophony.
Last Days of the Space Age is a vibrant, lush look at an incredible moment in Australia’s recent history. It’s promising to see Disney finally pour some money into a series with high production values and a focus on Australian voices, but the execution itself leaves much to be desired.
A delayed promise
The November 2019 launch of Disney+ in Australia was loud. In the weeks leading to its arrival, Disney ran an elaborate public transport ad campaign and hosted numerous pop-up events around the country.
The week of the launch, it hijacked entire prime time ad spots on local commercial broadcasters, with a revolving directory of its seemingly never-ending library. Ash Barty and Rove McManus featured heavily in this early marketing.
Disney’s aim was clear: it had gone on a local hiring blitz because Australia was an important market to the business and the company intended to produce new content here.
Since then, Disney+ has proved extremely popular. It recently surpassed Prime Video as the second most-used subscription streaming platform in Australia (after Netflix), with 28% of adults using the service in the first half of 2023.
However, much as we saw with Netflix, Disney’s early promises to produce Australian content didn’t immediately come to fruition – and it took nearly three years to announce a slate of local content commissions and acquisitions.
It has now released a couple of documentaries (Matildas: The World At Our Feet and Shipwreck Hunters Australia). Two scripted series – The Clearing (a thriller about a female-led cult) and The Artful Dodger (an Oliver Twist sequel set in 1850s Australia) – also came out last year, but arguably flew under the radar.
Everything, everywhere, all at once
Last Days of the Space Age is set in Perth in 1979. It follows three families and multiple generations grappling with the oddest confluence of true events: a strike at the local power company, the arrival of Miss Universe pageant contestants from around the world, and a crashing US space station, Skylab.
Joel Pratley/Disney+
It’s an incredible and exciting premise. But perhaps there were some concerns there wasn’t enough going on already?
Why else are we also taken along on a feminist surfing odyssey reminiscent of Puberty Blues, a Vietnamese refugee’s quest to find her lost son in Malaysia, and one character’s journey coming to terms with their participation in the UK government’s atomic bomb testing 20 years earlier?
Last Days features deaths, defections and deb balls – all in eight short episodes. As a result, we get but a glimpse of Eileen Wilberforce (Deborah Mailman) battling to be accepted by her horrendous neighbours. And I’m left desperate to know more about Svetlana’s (Ines English) and Yvgeny’s (Jacek Koman) backstory in the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, by including as many plot points as possible, the fantastical events experienced in Western Australia 45 years ago struggle to breathe.
That said, the upside is that, unlike Disney+’s previous local productions, the show feels like it is first and foremost meant for Australian viewers.
Joel Pratley/Disney+
A brilliant cast from home and away
The show’s cast is enormous and terrific. Disney does that now seemingly necessary thing where it fronts a show with established and recognisable international talent. It has thrown Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen and the incredible Linh-Dan Pham from The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) into the show’s mix to appeal to viewers around the world.
But it has also lured Aussie exports Jesse Spencer and Radha Mitchell home. Thomas Weatherall is captivating and moves well beyond his performance in Heartbreak High, while the sisterly dynamic between newcomers Emily Grant and Mackenzie Mazur rings true. All the while, Mailman is perhaps the best thing about the show.
Joel Pratley/Disney+
The series sounds comforting to the Australian ear, refusing to convert or explain references for international audiences. The writing team, which worked on Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Heights and Hungry Ghosts, have created a world that is both familiar and full of humour.
Given the particular 1979 events on which the show is centred, it’s unlikely we’ll see a second season of Last Days.
So what does this mean for future Disney+ commissions in Australia then? Disney has been tightlipped about what it’s going to invest in next.
It will be interesting to see whether the reception of Last Days of the Space Age inspires more local storytelling. If the series crash-lands (sorry, I had to), it might be bad news for more distinctly Australian commissions from the streamer.
Joel Pratley/Disney+