Binge-watching Australian television is the best!

I keep telling my husband we should move to Australia so we can just sit down all day to watch TV. Their programming is wonderful, rather like ours used to be.

Since John became disabled, we spend lots of time looking for something we can watch on television. We’ve binge-watched all kinds of programs, starting with Breaking Bad. Since then, we’ve watched Madmen, Longmire, House of Cards, Ozark, and probably many others that fail to come to mind at the moment. This is such a great way to watch television.

As a baby boomer, I grew up with television. It is part of who I am and therefore, part of my comfort zone. I fondly remember the days when there was a moral to the story, happy endings were believable and hopeful, and commercials didn’t interrupt the on-screen drama, practically in mid-sentence. Characters were always important to me. Back in the day, there was no such thing as violence, and sex; Lucy and Ricky never even slept in the same bed.

My first experience with Australian television was probably last year when a friend recommended McLeod's Daughters. She knew I was a fan of Heartland, a Canadian-based family now in its 11th season. I started watching it on Netflix and was hooked from the first day. For me, it is the horses that first attracted me, not to mention the characters, and story line. Heartland remains a favorite of mine.

It must have been the horses. I’ve always loved them, even though sadly, I have had very little interaction with them in my life. I’ve sketched them, painted them, and admired them as they graze in nearby fields. I’ve even ridden them a time or two. I always enjoy them on television and in movies. I’m drawn to them and have seen every horse-movie on Netflix-even the really hokey ones.

There is a similar theme in McLeod’s Daughters, which is about the daughters of the late Jack MacLeod who operate his ranch in Australia. From the first episode, I absolutely fell in love with this series. By the time I finished all 8 seasons, I felt like I knew these people. I laughed with them and I cried with them. This show is available on You Tube, since it originally ran in Australia from 2001 to 2008.

I was so taken with MacLeod’s Daughters, that once it ended, I felt a little lost. I started watching it again from the beginning. I called it “my happy place,” especially the first few seasons when the characters seemed to be at their very best. During the summer nights when it was too hot to go outside and absolutely nothing was on TV or I didn’t feel like watching another movie, I sat down to watch my favorite characters.

Since then, I’ve found several other Australian shows to watch. John and I have enjoyed them. On Hulu, we watched 7 seasons of Offspring, a light-heart, really funny show about an obstetrician named Nina Proudman, who came from a very wacky family.

I wasn't completely smitten with this show until about the third episode, and then I was hooked. It just kept getting better.

We also watched three seasons of Rescue: Special Ops. This was, as its name implies, Australia’s version of a medical/emergency drama that began in 2009. 

It was available for viewing on You Tube. It was easy to like these characters. Just the concept exemplifies heroism. And the episodes seemingly got better and better every week. 

Interestingly, I chose this show because the characters--the fictional characters that is--since I read that some of the cast members from McLeod’s Daughters’ had a role in some episodes. Sadly though, the final season ended abruptly.

And finally, another Aussie show that captured my heart was 800 Words. This show, currently in its third season, is about a recent widower who takes his family from Sidney to a remote town in New Zealand to flee memories of his late wife who he misses. What he finds in the little town of Weld is sometimes enchanting, and sometimes zany, but always entertaining. He writes a column for a newspaper in Australia which is always 800 words long.

I don’t know what it is about Australian television, but I admit I’m hooked.