Hello friends! I’d like to take a break from our regularly scheduled NON STOP STAR WARS BLOGGING to bring your attention to something a little different:
Tomorrow, When The War Began.
If you’re an Australian, you’ve almost certainly familiar with it. But this post is for those of you who aren’t! So hey, here are some reasons to check it out:
1) Based on a series of YA books written in the early 90s, these books were “female teen protagonist has to deal with shitty moral dilemmas” before the Hunger Games made it cool. Like, two decades before. (Also, way better written.) The books treat teenagers as intelligent, resourceful and mature individuals who are also still young and trying their best and still trying to figure out who they are amongst a war-torn backdrop and sometimes fuck up.
2) The gender ratio of the main cast is 4 girls to 3 guys! I can’t speak for the TV show yet because only the first ep has aired, but sometimes this ups and downs throughout the books as some people split off from the main cast and new people come in, but worry not. You will never have any shortage of excellent female characters who are strong and brave in a variety of different ways.
3) Speaking of characters who join later, one of the characters who joins the main cast in a later book has a disability, and the narrative never fails to treat them respectfully as a character and detail the ways they’ve come up with different coping mechanisms that are sometimes totally ingenious. Guys, I really want the show to last long enough to get to that character.
4) Main cast of the TV series is 3 poc to 4 white ppl, which isn’t ZOMG THE BEST RATIO EVER but still doin’ better than quite a few other network shows out there I could name, cough.
5) It’s an original Australian production and IT’S ACTUALLY GOOD? Like, seriously you guys. If you’re not Australian you might not understand how rare and important this is, but really good Australian TV shows with good acting and writing and cinematography is really fucking rare. So I want to support the shit out of this show. The director has said he plans for it to be a three or four season show. I want him to get greenlit for every single one of those seasons. This is often pretty hard in Australia, because our population is really fucking small despite being the sixth largest country in the world by landmass. So original Australian productions, unless they become a nation-wide sensation or do well overseas, often struggle monetarily.
I want to support the shit out of this show, you guys. These books were my childhood, and I’m so happy to see a television adaptation with bucketloads of promise so far. Only the first episode has aired so far, and if you’re an Australia, you can watch it legally for free on the ABC’s website, here. If you’re familiar with the books, I will say that there are some minor changes from the books, but for the most part I think they’re good ones.
(On that note– yo! Hit me up if you wanna discuss the first episode! Personally, I really loved it, and it went way above and beyond what I expected for an Austrailan production. Well acted and directed, the dialogue flowed naturally and there was a lot more showing than telling. They did a good job selling me on the various complicated teenage relationships within the group, and those last 20 minutes of the episode were as chilling and tense as I remember it being when I first read the books all those years ago.)
If you’re not Australian: it’s still too early for there to be any announcement as to whether this show will make it overseas or not, so there currently isn’t any legal way for you to watch it nor any news as to whether there will ever be. I’m not going to tell you to go out and illegally download the show, but– hey, you know how this shit gets brought to your country? By having people get hype about it. What you decide that means is up to you. I’m sure that if you want to watch it, you’ll seek it out on your own terms, regardless of what I say one way or another. So yeah. Spread the word, whatever that means to you. Help it to do well.
I really want it to do well. This show is a love story to my childhood and the Australian countryside, and it’s near and dear to my heart. Give it a go!
Thanks for reading if you made it this far, and feel free to hit me up any time if you wanna discuss the show or ask any further questions!