The Australian comedy-drama-caper-thriller Reckless, a retooling of Neil Forsyth's Leith-set series Guilt, delivers a four-hour ride that is both preposterous and plausible, grounded by a realistically fractious sibling relationship and light but piercing commentary on racial and socioeconomic dynamics in Australia. The series aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX in the UK, and on SBS on Demand in Australia.
Siblings in a Hit-and-Run: The Premise
The story follows record shop owner Charlie (Hunter Page-Lochard) and his older sister June (Tasma Walton), a First Nations family in Fremantle, Perth. After a family wedding, Charlie, driving under the influence of a joint, hits a pedestrian walking late at night in his pyjamas. His sister, whom he is taking home, tells him to keep driving.
Charlie, however, gets his fingerprints all over the corpse's wallet, drags the body out of the road in front of neighbours' houses, and puts him back into his home. June, finding a letter about the dead man's terminal cancer, suggests they saved him months of agony. But Charlie is too sweet and chaotic to follow her rigorously logical damage limitation strategies.
A Sister's Logic and a Brother's Chaos
June's reaction is partly informed by the knowledge that the odds will be unfairly stacked against them if they turn themselves in. She does not want to lose the law firm she has built, whose proceeds enabled her to buy Charlie the record shop. She also fears Charlie losing contact with his daughter and becoming "just another absent Black father in prison."
Unfortunately, Charlie drops his wallet in the dead man's house, so he goes to the wake to retrieve it. There he becomes enmeshed with the dead man's English niece, Sharne (Jessica De Gouw). June advises him to stay close to her until she signs estate paperwork and returns to the UK.
New Complications and a Drunken Investigator
Sharne is perturbed by the police report's mention of bruising on the body and damage to the pyjamas. June introduces Roddy (Clarence Ryan), a shambolically drunken private investigator she recently fired, whom she insists is the best of the best, citing a long line of bush trackers. Roddy seizes on the case as a chance for redemption, sobers up, and starts running down every lead.
The lies, obfuscations, porch cameras, contradictions, and near-misses arrive at pace. Only one episode was available for review, but the series maintains tonal consistency despite a large cast of idiosyncratic characters. Many balls are juggled, none dropped. Reckless is, underneath its flourishes, a masterpiece of control.
