With bulls, guns and baddies, dusty land saga Territory aims to thrill

Territory ★★★
Netflix, Friday

This Top End drama begins with a statement finish: a pack of dingoes maul to death an injured cattle baron. Dan Lawson (Jake Ryan) goes down swinging, but the real action stems from the void created by his death. His fractured clan turn on each other, while rivals look to exploit the tragedy. More dingoes, just larger ambitions. “Everything up here is trying to kill you,” muses Dan’s wary sister-in-law, Emily (Anna Torv), setting up a dusty milieu of bulls, guns, crime, corporate conspiracies, and a brutal patriarch.

Basically, everything on this show is trying to thrill you. Territory is a land saga – the obvious and envious comparison is Taylor Sheridan’s Montana blockbuster, Yellowstone. Set on and around the biggest cattle property in the world, the Lawson family’s Marianne station, it’s rife with big gestures. Whether it’s romantic attraction or villainous scheming, nothing is that subtle across these six episodes. Creators Ben Davies and Timothy Lee have made a litmus test: how little contemplation does your storytelling need?

Characters vehemently deliver lines like, “When this is over, I’m coming for you”. Although here, it’s delivered by Torv’s Emily, a woman toughened by a drunk husband, Graham (Michael Dorman), and a sneering father-in-law, Colin (Robert Taylor), who can’t forget that she’s from a family of cattle thieves now run by brother Hank Hodge (Dan Wyllie). Emily’s daughter, Susie (Philippa Northeast), wants to buck her grandfather’s misogyny, while stepson Marshall (Sam Corlett) is the black sheep in exile running with outback criminals.

The middle episodes get into sinewy topics, such as native title and the outlook of the Indigenous community, but even then the focus is on whether aspiring Aboriginal cattle baron Nolan Brannock (Clarence Ryan) is willing to match the skulduggery of his white contemporaries. Given the imposing landscape, it’s not surprising that everything central leans in hard, even the emotions. The self-despair comes off Graham in waves, as he struggles to match brother Dan’s example, while Colin registers on the Menendez parenting scale.

The dialogue has an earthy bluntness – “pick a window, you’re leaving”, is a tasty start to a pub brawl – but the show’s bullish refusal to slow down does start to wear. You’re told that Marianne station is the size of Belgium, yet the characters quickly meet up as required, while at a certain point what should be a crushing loss comes and goes so quickly that you’ll be checking whether you skipped forward by accident. Territory does exactly what it sets out to do, but there are limits to its ambitions.