A few wishful references to the contrary, the 1950s Australian drama A Place to Call Home won’t make heartbroken fans forget Downton Abbey.
But it’s worth watching all on its own, a dense but never impenetrable tale of love, loss, war, peace, treachery, redemption and class struggle on an upper crust Australian estate.
Okay, it’s a soap opera. But it’s also about being gay in a repressive society and the poisonous legacy of anti-Semitism that didn’t die with the Third Reich and, you know, stuff like that.
Season 3 of A Place to Call Home, which drops Tuesday on Acorn TV (acorn.tv), starts with the most flagrant do-over since the dream season of Dallas three decades ago.
The first four and a half minutes of Season 3 are a rewrite of the last four and a half minutes of Season 2.
That’s not a gimmick. The producers had expected Season 2 would be the last, so they scrapped their original cliffhanger ending and quickly wrote a scene that wrapped things up.
Then the show got renewed, so Season 3 dusts off the original cliffhanger ending and goes from there.
That leaves our heroine Sarah, played by the wonderful Marta Dusseldorp, caught even more impossibly between her husband Rene (Ben Winspear, right, with Dusseldorp) and the dashing George Bligh (Brett Climo), star of the high-tone Bligh family.
Sarah used to be engaged to George, and they’re still quite in love. But they were unable to marry, and now she works as a nurse in the employment of the Bligh family, which doesn’t exactly help her put George in the past.
She’s also genuinely devoted to Rene, who suffers serious PTSD from his experiences in the war. Since she spent time in a concentration camp, she has both understanding and empathy.
Both George and Rene start Season 3 in bad situations. Sarah must try to help them both while nursing an awkward secret that will affect everyone.
And that’s only the start of the drama at Ash Park, where the Bligh family holds court.
Matriarch Elizabeth Bligh (Noni Hazlehurst), who was initially suspicious of Sarah but has since become more sympathetic, had gone to Sydney to try to make herself a better person. That plan gets cut short by George’s crisis, which in turn brings Elizabeth’s imperious side right back up to the surface again.
Olivia Bligh (Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood) brings a new baby home and tries to pretend everything is normal, even though nothing is even close to normal, or even legal, with either the baby or her husband James (David Berry).
Rebellious Bligh daughter Anna (Abby Earl), who traded way down the social ladder to marry dashing Italian Gino (Aldo Mignone), discovers that she may not have thought that one all the way through.
Whatever sketchy things are happening all over the family, they’re often magnified by the well-moneyed Regina (Jenni Baird, left), who has her eyes on George and whose social attitudes seem to have come straight from the Third Reich playbook.
So Sarah and the other essentially good people must make their way through minefields just to carry on day-to-day, while at the same time navigating the treacherous passage into the better world that the Allied victory in the war had been promising.
It’s possible to join A Place to Call Home at the start of Season 3, though it would be better to watch the first two and know all the backstories.
One thing we do know for sure: The third season won’t end with the same sort of whipsaw as the second, since a fourth season will follow.
That’s great news, mate.