The Survivors on Netflix: Tony Ayres on the deeper pain in Australian drama

If Tony Ayres were to make the TV adaptation of The Slap today, he would probably start the show differently.

“It would start with the slap at a barbecue, and then in super slow motion, the kid gets slapped, and then cut to six hours earlier,” he told The Nightly.

How the 2011 series actually started was with a character waking up, yawning, doing a few push-ups and then trying to decide whether to masturbate. As it was an ease-in to his day, it was also a leisurely runway for the story.

“I don’t think you could do that today.

“Storytelling has changed in the era of Peak TV. There is much more pressure on episode one and also the first few minutes of episode one, and there is much more of the demand that we put the proposition of the show on the table straight away,” he explained.

Ayres’ latest series, The Survivors, opens with a storm. The dark clouds, violent rain and ferocious waves give way to a shot of a teenage kid in peril, struggling to stay afloat, then the thrilling entrance of a speed boat to the rescue only for that vessel to flip and capsize. Cut to a funeral scene.

It’s very dramatic.

“I feel like I miss the slower entry into a story but I also understand the need to play your strongest card first in a TV series,” Ayres added.

Those opening shots might be very action-heavy, but the core of The Survivors, Netflix’s latest original Australian series, is about the things you can’t always see — or don’t want to see. The storm was just the hook.

The six-part show is adapted from Jane Harper’s novel, and is set in a small town in Tasmania that has been scarred by the deaths of the two young men on that boat. Years later, the teen boy, Kieran (Charlie Vickers), is now an adult with a child of his own, returning home with his partner Mia (Yerin Ha).

Rather than a warm welcome, he’s faced with the resentment of his mum, Verity (Robyn Malcolm), who holds him responsible for the death of his brother Finn, who was on that boat.

Kieran’s presence in town stirs up raw emotions, but when a young woman, Bronte (Shannon Berry), is found killed on the beach, that’s when those wounds really open.

At the same time the young men died in the storm all those years ago, another one of the town’s kids, Gabby, vanished, but her disappearance was chalked up to misadventure. Her body was never found and her mother, Trish (Catherine McClements), was never able to close that book.

The Survivors is a murder mystery – who killed Bronte, did someone kill Gabby – but what it’s really interested in is grief and loss. What does moving on look like for a mother, for a father, for a community?

The Survivors, produced by Ayres’ company and backed by Matchbox Pictures and Universal International Studios, cobbled together locations in Tasmania including the striking Eaglehawk Neck plus studios in Melbourne to create a distinctly Australian, almost suburban, feel.

When Ayres was first approached to work on the show, he wasn’t convinced there was enough in Harper’s book to stretch it to a six-part series. He thought it was more likely suited for a movie.

“(But) as I was reading it, it occurred to me that so much of this story is about the loss of mothers and the anger of women being treated in a recurringly degraded way, in a kind of structural way.

“That there was something really significant to say about Australian society right now.”

Vickers and Ha are billed as the leads – they’re both ascending stars in international productions, The Rings of Power for Vickers and Bridgerton for Ha but it is an ensemble effort, and three standout performances come from the women playing the mothers of dead children, McClements, Malcolm and Lucy Bell, who portrays Bronte’s mum.

“I was interested in all of those three women, all grieving, and it felt like we were trying to make an antipodean seaside version of (Euripides’) The Trojan Women.

“We wanted to elevate the scale of their tragedy into a kind of Greek tragedy because of what they were feeling and what they were living with, and also the anger that was underlying that felt like epic emotions, which worked well in that landscape.”

There is a reluctance in the town to really reckon with their grief, because confronting it head on would mean having to be honest about certain things, instead of crafting narratives they can live with.

Such as the father of one of the dead men, played by Martin Sacks, and it’s his life’s mission to turn his son into a hero.

“Ultimately, his son was drowned in a terrible tragedy and, in some ways, a meaningless accident,” Ayres explained. “He’s trying to make meaning out of something that is meaningless, and that’s both alarming and also weirdly poignant as well, our need to create heroes out of tragedies.

“Without ever being explicit about it, one of the things that we were talking about in the writers room was the analogue of this being the Anzac myth, how we as a nation turn these tragic losses in war into a kind of act of heroism.

“That’s the human instinct, that’s how we understand, that’s how we communicate with each other, we create meaning.”

It’s telling ourselves a story, and a dramatic hook doesn’t hurt to lure someone in deeper doesn’t hurt.

The Survivors is on Netflix from June 6