When you think you’ve seen everything on television, along comes 2024 with new insights into our world and engaging ways to represent it. Here are our highlights from almost 6,500 recordings added to EduTV this year.
New movies
Barbie and Oppenheimer took their time getting to TV, but were promptly acquired for students of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Or fans of the classics can find feminism in the Emily Brontë biopic and moral torment in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Warwick Thornton and Lee Tamahori critiqued Christianity and colonialism in The New Boy and The Convert. Meanwhile Alice Walker’s The Color Purple got a musical adaptation and a much-loved Paul Kelly song was somehow turned into a feature film in time for Christmas: How to Make Gravy.
New factual series
This year the ABC gave new life to music competitions and celebrity interviews, with Elly-May Barnes’ Headliners and Leigh Sales’ The Assembly creating space for musicians living with disability and neurodiverse journalism students. SBS brought us globetrotting family and colonial histories with Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey and Marc Fennell’s Stuff the British Stole. Ray Martin investigated refreshing perspectives on death in The Last Goodbye.
Michael Mosley and Brian Cox found still more Wonders of the Human Body and Solar System for us to explore. Namila Benson’s The Art Of examined Australia’s arts scene in usefully themed episodes. Former Coalition PMs shared frank assessments of former Coalition PMs in Nemesis. And if you’ve ever wanted to see how a panel of everyday Australians evaluates a criminal case, The Jury: Death on the Staircase makes you the fly on the wall.
New drama and comedy series
In other legal matters, Mr Bates vs The Post Office dramatised a miscarriage of justice, Fisk returned for a third season in the same brown suit, and The Penguin was given a more menacing style. Plum confronted the nexus of chronic traumatic encephalopathy and masculinity in football. And then there’s Austin. While it’s unlikely to change the world, Austin does a very nice job of showing how everyone fits into it.
