Another month, another grisly death – or two, or three – in some far-flung outback location. In June, a handful of scientists met gruesome ends in The Killings at Parish Station, possibly for cult or alien-related reasons; now, in Treasure & Dirt, one poor fellow in an opal-mining town has lost his noggin. Well, not exactly: his head is right there in his lap.
This beheading triggers, as the press notes put it, “a labyrinthine case with no easy answers”. Which sounds a tad rote – but this six-part series, co-produced by the BBC and superbly directed by Madeleine Gottlieb, is actually a terrific watch, strikingly unlike your average crime drama. Treasure & Dirt brings a grand and surreal cinematic scope rarely seen in television crime dramas, and the writers – Matt Cameron and Kate Mulvany, adapting Chris Hammer’s novel of the same name – redeploy familiar genre elements in unpredictable ways.
