Janet King seems to live in a state of perpetual exasperation. As played by Marta Dusseldorp, she wears it well.
She’s been wearing it for a while in Janet King, an Australian crime drama that makes its U.S. debut Monday on Acorn TV.
King is a crown prosecutor who seems to land complex, troubling cases – and a good thing that is. If she were only prosecuting parking ticket scofflaws, why would we care?
As we join this story, she’s prosecuting Steven Blakely (John Howard), a prominent police official accused of illegally assisting in his terminally ill wife’s suicide.
That would be dramatic enough. Then Blakely turns out to have angered another family over his handling of a different matter. So when he disappears, there are plenty of possibilities.
King finds herself stuck between unknowns, at the same time a new rival inside the prosecutor’s office, Owen Mitchell (Damian Walshe-Howling with Dusseldorp, left) launches an end run power play designed to undercut King’s hard-won stature as the office’s go-to person.
Mitchell is working on a high-profile sex case that threatens to intersect with the Blakely case. If it does that, it could drag the whole legal and political system into a potentially sordid quagmire.
King’s status isn’t only jeopardized by the ambitious Mitchell. She also deals with a certain level of ongoing uncertainty because she’s female and she’s a lesbian.
Janet King doesn’t make a big marquee thing out of King’s gender preference. But it judiciously and credibly acknowledges the fact that some men would see it as a point of vulnerability.
We see some of King’s home life and it seems to be loving, but hectic and therefore sometimes tense. Janet just had twins and her partner Ashleigh (Aimee Pedersen, with Dusseldorp, below) put her own career on hold to stay at home with them.
The lesbian storyline is mostly notable for how closely the Janet-Ashleigh relationship parallels every well-crafted relationship between two people of any gender. It’s neither caricatured nor idealized.
Dusseldorp gets a good measure of credit for making that notion work. Her King has flaws, both as a professional and in her private life. She’s aware of them and she works to mitigate them, as most people do.
We admire her, but in some ways we respect her more than we like her. She’s often cool and distant, clearly trying not to tie herself up emotionally with the victims she is, in effect, defending by putting away perpetrators.
As a character who seems basically decent if a bit elusive, King isn’t entirely different from Sarah Adams, the 1950s woman Dusseldorp plays on another first-rate Australian series, A Place To Call Home, which is also available through Acorn.
This season of Janet King runs eight episodes. Acorn unveils the first two on Monday and then another each Monday through April 25.