Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dead Lucky’ On Sundance Now, An Australian Cop Drama With Rachel Griffiths

You may not have seen Rachel Griffiths since she was in Six Feet Under or maybe Brothers & Sisters, but she’s had an active film and TV career, especially in her native Australia. She stars in a new Sydney-based cop thriller, Dead Lucky, on Sundance Now. Read on to see if this stands up with her previous work.

DEAD LUCKY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In an oversaturated shot, a young man peers on the floor of a convenience store and sees the owner lying dead with a gunshot wound to his chest.

The Gist: We go back to the day before that discovery was made, and we see the man, an Iranian medical student named Mani (Mojean Aria) swimming with his girlfriend, a Chinese musician named Bo-Lin (Xana Tang), right before she runs to an audition at the Sydney Opera House. He goes to work in a convenience store, and gets robbed at gunpoint; the robber had a distinctive tattoo and the penchant for blowing cigarette smoke in his victims’ faces.

On the case is Detective Sargent Grace Gibbs (Rachel Griffiths), a brash investigator who hates process and procedure. She knows the MO of the person who robbed this store; she’s pretty sure it’s the work of Corby Baxter (Ian Meadows), who has robbed and killed convenience store clerks in seemingly random fashion. He’s also killed a cop, running over her uniformed partner Lincoln Tassoni (Lincoln Younes) during the last robbery he committed. The dead cop’s wife Anna (Anna Samson) is also on the force, but is passed over for a promotion because she’s still “processing” his death.

The cop’s best friend, Charlie Fung (Yoson An) is promoted, and assigned to Gibbs for training. He’s not happy with how Lincoln wanted to call for backup but the hotheaded Gibbs didn’t. But Gibbs tells him to keep his “little opinions” to himself.

As they investigate, Mani struggles to come to terms with being left alive at the end of the traumatic robbery, knowing what he knows about this perp’s history. He gets fired by his racist boss for not wanting to use a gun, but when her meek husband calls back to make amends, Mani comes back to the store and makes his grisly discovery.

Our Take: Dead Lucky was created by Aussie producers Ellie Beaumont and Drew Proffitt, and it’s a well-acted, well-plotted series. The first episode does a fine job of showing us the stories of the main characters, their motivations for catching Baxter, and the pressures they’re under. Mani might get deported; Bo-Lin’s parents don’t know about her Iranian boyfriend; Charlie’s parents are not happy with him being a cop; Gibbs is dealing with her ex’s new girlfriend interfering in how she mothers her daughter, and she’s ordered to go to anger management counseling at work.

That being said, there’s nothing about the show that’s unique or intriguing. It’s a pretty standard-grade cop drama with a season-long storyline that examines how chasing this killer affects everyone involved. So it comes down to whether the acting is good and the characters are worthwhile to follow. And in this case, Beaumont and Proffitt have done a good job. Is some if it cliche? Sure. Griffith’s intense, rules-flouting detective is a character we’ve seen a million times, But we also see the pain she’s suffered with the loss of her partner, and that’s what’s going to drive the action going forward.

Sex and Skin: We see Mani and Bo-Lin sleeping together in an ad hoc bedroom with sheets for walls. They live with a group of people from various places, and this is pretty much all he can afford, given the fact that the Hodges underpaid him.

Parting Shot: When Gibbs and Fung come to the convenience store and see Tony Hodge (Simon Burke) dead, they find Manu outside. He says, “I think I did this.” Meanwhile, Baxter drives off through the night.

Sleeper Star: Samson does a good job as Lincoln’s grieving wife Anna, who is determined to do her job despite her husband’s killer on the loose.

Most Pilot-y Line: Pretty much anything Erica Hodge (Justine Clarke) says to Mani is dripping with racism, like when she assumes he knows how to handle a gun because he’s Iranian.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The acting sells it for us. Also, it’s only four parts, so the story should be well-paced.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Dead Lucky on Sundance Now