Crime series are a mainstay of Australian television but these days, getting a new series off the ground means following some very strict rules.
20 Jan 2026 10:53 Screen Hub
Anna Torv as Tig Pollard in Dustfall. Photo: Vince Valitutti / Soapbox Productions.
Everywhere you look, Australian television is struggling. Well, almost everywhere: there’s one genre that’s managed to hang on while the others battle to survive. We speak, of course, of crime.
Or to be more specific, crime that involves a mystery; the days of Underbelly are sadly far behind us (sorry Run). The ABC and the streaming services do still make the occasional dramedy or topical take on social issues, but the glue that holds them together? Yeah, it’s crime.
Which provides an opportunity for people looking to get a toehold on our television screens. But you can forget about dusting off that autobiographical blog post about the time you put a bunch of fancy bananas through the scanner at Coles and said they were the cheap ones. When you’re talking Australian crime drama, there are some very strict rules you need to follow if you’re going to get your foot in the door.
Fortunately, we’ve put together a guide.
How to make an Australian crime series – quick links
Step one: the setting
Treasure and Dirt. Image: ABC.
You have two choices: scenic coastal small town, or scenic outback small town. Don’t get too attached, because your final choice will almost certainly come down to wherever offers you the most (or any) funding. Ever wondered why multiple crime series have been set in Tasmania in recent years? Mystery solved.
As for why your murder mystery is going to be set in a small town, and not any of the major cities where most Australians actually live and murder each other, the reason is simple. The overseas markets you’ll be trying to sell your series to already have big cities and they’re not interested in the Australian version. The desert or the coast, that’s what they like to see, and if you can pick up some funding from a tourism body to promote those areas, every little bit counts.
Step two: the lead
Somewhat surprisingly considering Australia has multiple networks aimed directly at older viewers, forget about a Vera-style older or quirkier hero. Our murder detectives are all (relatively) young, good looking, and – this is the important part – haunted by something in their past that has brought them back to the small town they once called home.
If your story doesn’t begin with your lead arriving wearing a concerned expression because they’re not sure how the locals are going to react to seeing them back in the small town they once called home, you should pack up and go home (to the small town you once called… you get the idea) because your story isn’t going anywhere (let alone the small town you… I’ll stop now).
Sure, sometimes there’s room to mix it up a little. Maybe your lead is a fish-out-of-water type who’s been paired with a local who knows where the bodies are buried? Whatever. Australian crime series are lean mean storytelling machines and everything that doesn’t drive the plot forward (unless it’s long lingering shots of the scenery sponsored by the local tourism body) falls by the wayside.
You need a lead with a past because pre-established relationships are a storytelling shortcut that a crime series can’t survive without. Even if you’ve got six hour-length episodes, you don’t have time for your hero to slowly figure out who’s who and what’s what. And they can’t be welcomed back with open arms, because where’s the drama in that? They left town years ago under a cloud, now they’re back and nobody’s happy to see them. Case closed
Step three: the locals
Steve Bisley, Madeleine Sami and Kate Box in Deadloch Season 2. Image: Prime.
They’re not always stock characters, but they are just pieces to be moved around the board. Get ready to meet the old flame, the bungling or inexperienced local cop (because if they knew what they were doing, we wouldn’t need the lead), the old folks with ‘A Past’ who may or may not have Alzheimer’s, the angry blokes down the pub, the sleazy rich dude who owns the town, his bozo henchmen, the bitchy wine mums, the kids on bikes who maybe saw something, and some broad Aussie cliches the writers have a grudge against.
Fortunately, decent casting can disguise a lot of these flaws. What you really want is some quality local actors – preferably comedians, as they’re great at doing a lot with a little – to play these roles, because then your scenic small town might feel like a place where people actually live, and not just a cardboard backdrop for a couple of murders and a bunch of lectures disguised as conversation.
Step four: the crime
It’s either a murder or a disappearance that might as well be a murder, depending on whether the murder victim is interesting enough to bring back later. But that still gives you plenty of leeway to mess around… okay, you only really have one of two ways to mess around: either the murder was personal, or it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Personal is when it turns out the victim was killed for relatively mundane reasons. Sometimes, if you’re feeling especially bold, you can even make it an accident. It doesn’t really matter, because along the way there’s going to be a whole bunch of other crimes and shonky business brought to the surface – so much so that it’ll feel like just maybe the murder was little more than an excuse to take the viewer on a journey through the lives of a bunch of sordid and petty people.
Tip of the iceberg is when the victim was killed for big deal reasons, which usually means they were involved in some kind of criminal big deal. Maybe they were a troublemaker, maybe they were involved and wanted to escape, maybe they stumbled onto something they shouldn’t have. It doesn’t really matter, because along the way there’s going to be a whole bunch of other crimes and shonky business brought to the surface – so much so that it’ll feel like just maybe the murder was little more than an excuse to take the viewer on a journey through the lives of a bunch of sordid and petty people.
Step five: the plot
So if all the crimes are the same kind of crime, what makes one crime series different from another? That’s where the plot comes in – and this time you really do get a choice.
Behind door number one is the traditional murder mystery. This is a murder that’s an actual mystery – the audience is given enough clues to (in theory) figure out who the killer is before the big reveal at the end. These are seen as a little old fashioned these days, but they’re still an audience favourite, especially when they’re done well.
The Death in Paradise series is a good example, including the local version, Return to Paradise – which, by the way, is set in a scenic costal small town and features a lead who returned with a cloud over her head. Thing is, they’re a bit tricky to drag out over multiple episodes, so they’re almost always a series with a string of stand-alone episodes, which are difficult to write without spending money on writers.
Behind door number two is pretty much everything else, which usually operates on what we’ll call ‘Law & Order logic’. That’s because if you watched the opening of any given episode of classic Law & Order, wandered away for 15 minutes, then came back, you’d have no idea what was going on.
Every single scene would introduce some new twist or clue or character, then follow that with another twist or new character, and after 20 minutes what started out as someone being stabbed in a hotel lobby would involve the mayor’s son building a tax avoiding sex robot based on Eva Braun.
So in an Australian crime series, once the lead has returned to town to investigate a murder, all bets are off: suspects will come and go, clues will fizzle out or reveal completely new crimes, three episodes in they’ll be fighting bikies on a fishing boat and by week five they’re in an abandoned mine filled with Second World War explosives set to explode and destroy the town unless someone sits on the detonator… for the rest of their life.
The idea is to create a story that doesn’t slow down and never looks back – the kind of thing that’ll keep viewers hooked no matter what. The big problem is that if the home viewer does gets time to think, they might start to wonder why a series that was initially about a dead girl found behind a party house is now about quality control in the wood chipping industry.
The good news is, so long as you plant a few seeds early on so it doesn’t feel like you’re making it up as you go along, things usually work out. The bad news is, you’ve probably created an unholy mess nobody is going to remember five minutes after the final episode ends. Welcome to Australian television!