East West 101: Ending with a bang
One of the most acclaimed TV series of recent years, East West 101, is trying to expand its audience and become a mainstream hit with its third and final season.
The jewel in the SBS drama crown is a series about a major crime squad investigating crime in multicultural Sydney. “When we first started East West 101 we were living in a post 9/11 world, so it was very much about fear of Islam. The second season was about boat people and attitudes towards illegal immigration and what lengths governments and people would go to deal with that. Season three is about how the war goes on in Afghanistan and the effects of combat on service men and civilians and how that is reflected in Australia,” explained producer Kris Wyld.
“The series questions, what makes a hero? Is there even such a thing as a hero,” added Steve Knapman.
The first season was a two-year research and development process. It was originally conceived as a one-off project, so while second series was comparatively quicker to make, the challenge was to find the angle that would drive the story. This time around, the creators have taken their time to work on the new storylines, working with researcher Mandy McCarthy and a team of detective consultants.
“By the third season you develop a quick way of approaching things. There’s a lot of collective discussion on scripts, compared to commercial networks where you just have to turn them out really fast. In comparison to other shows, we spend an enormous amount of time and energy talking to consultants and specialists to make sure that we have a level of ferocity and authenticity, that we get the tone of the story and the details right.”
According to Knapman, the third series felt “like a glove that fits” for cast and crew: “People have been away on other shows and they realised two things when they come back to East West 101. One, they’ve forgotten how hard this show is and two, they’ve forgotten how much they loved it because it’s something special, deeper and more complex and interesting to work on.”
The fact that the show airs on SBS has its pros and cons. While it’s unthinkable that the creators would’ve been able to produce the exact same award-winning show for a commercial broadcaster, it also means that the audience for it is much smaller, and the marketing resources are limited.
“When you work with SBS you know they hold an average 5-6 percent for the audience. When we did the first season, we doubled the audience share and became the network’s top rating show. The second season was disappointing; there was a little bit of complacency about the need to bring people to the show again. The show is good enough to deserve more; our mission is to get 10–15 percent of the audience on the nights that we go on air.”
It doesn’t hurt that Don Hany reached a new level of fame with Ten’s Offspring last year, so the East West 101 team hope that popularity will be carried across to their show.
“To increase the audience share we need to get people who don’t watch SBS to come to the network. There’s a rather stereotypical notion of what SBS is for people who don’t watch it,” said Wyld.
REALITY-BASED ACTION
The day Encore visited the set, the team was shooting the second scene of the series: a heist which took place at Park Road, in the public area of Sydney’s Fox Studios complex. A group of criminals blew up the back door of a security van and escaped, to the frustration of Callas (Daniela Farinacci).
“We had to build a van almost from scratch so we could blow it up. There’s an enormous number of guns being fired and cars being shot at,” said production designer Tim Ferrier. “We had to try and make this one bigger and yeah, that’s expensive.”
A budget 30 percent higher to create seven episodes with big action scenes and a world that stretches beyond Sydney (with NSW sand dunes standing in for the deserts of Afghanistan), all contained within a 10-week shoot.
Returning director Peter Andrikidis believes the team is pushing the envelope more than ever before. “To make the work anywhere near the standard that people expect these days from Hollywood movies with bigger budgets, you have to shake the camera a lot more and do a lot of things on an Olympic budget,” he said.
The series was shot entirely on location, with about 90 moves (often as many as three in the same day) in and around Sydney. The Parramatta building that hosted the police station for two series was unavailable, so the team had to move to the CBD, near Central Station. Ferrier believes the series has always had a “Western Sydney” feel that avoids any kind of greenery.
“It was very hot in the first series because we were shooting through summer, and that’s something we tried to keep throughout all the seasons: hot, sort of sweaty and a bit grimy,” he explained. “We’re keeping the colours on costumes and locations in the Australian army camouflage palette, which is sort of pale greys and khakis, and desert colours.
East West 101was shot on three Sony F23s, three Panasonic handhelds, as well as surveillance cameras. “We’re keeping it pretty ‘cutty’, and we’re also doing that Bourne look and feel. You have to make the camera part of the action; you’re using it as if it was covering the news, as a documentary filmmaker would shoot a war.”
For Andrikidis, the relevance of East West 101 is its multi-ethnic cast, which separates it from other police series: “It is the west; I live there and we are representing that true Australia on this show. It’s great for an audience to see a truly a multicultural cast as opposed to the usual suspects you see in the commercial land. That’s why I love this show, because I’m working with a whole bunch of new people.”
East West 101– Season 3 starts April 20 on SBS One.
