Disney+ calls Australiana on star-studded drama Last Days of the Space Age. But does it deliver?

Disney+ will add its latest Australian original to its catalog today. The task seemed to be to “amplify Australianness” – and it really is a cacophony.

Last Days of the Space Age is a vivid, lush look at an incredible moment in Australia’s recent history. It’s promising that Disney is finally investing some money into a series with high production values ​​and a focus on Australian voices, but the execution itself leaves a lot to be desired.

A late promise

The launch of Disney+ in Australia in November 2019 caused a huge stir. In the weeks leading up to its launch, Disney ran an elaborate public transit advertising campaign and hosted numerous pop-up events across the country.

In the week following its release, the company hijacked entire prime-time commercials from local commercial stations with a rotating roster of its seemingly endless library. Ash Barty and Rove McManus played important roles in this early marketing.

Disney’s goal was clear: it had launched a local hiring drive because Australia was an important market for the company and the company intended to produce new content here.

Since then, Disney+ has enjoyed great popularity. It recently overtook Prime Video as the second most used subscription streaming platform in Australia (after Netflix), with 28% of adults using the service in the first half of 2023.

However, as we saw with Netflix, Disney’s early promises to produce Australian content were not immediately implemented – and it took almost three years for a series of local content orders and acquisitions to be announced.

Several documentaries have now been released (Matildas: The World At Our Feet and Shipwreck Hunters Australia). Two scripted series – “The Clearing” (a thriller about a female-led cult) and “The Artful Dodger” (an Oliver Twist sequel set in 1850s Australia) – also came out last year but arguably underperformed Radar.

Everything, everywhere, everything at once

Set in Perth in 1979, Last Days of the Space Age is about three families and multiple generations dealing with the strangest confluence of true events: a strike at the local power company, the arrival of Miss Universe contestants from the… the whole world and a crashing US space station Skylab.

It’s an incredible and exciting premise. But perhaps there were concerns that there wasn’t enough going on already?

Why else are we taken on a feminist surfing odyssey reminiscent of Puberty Blues, a Vietnamese refugee’s search in Malaysia for her lost son, and the journey of a character who grapples with her participation in the British government’s atomic bomb tests 20 years ago argues?

“Last Days” features deaths, defections and debaters – all in eight short episodes. As a result, we only get a brief glimpse of Eileen Wilberforce (Deborah Mailman) as she struggles to be accepted by her terrible neighbors. And I really want to know more about the backstory of Svetlana (Ines English) and Yvgeny (Jacek Koman) in the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, the fantastic events in Western Australia 45 years ago find it difficult to breathe by including as many storylines as possible.

The advantage, however, is that unlike Disney+’s previous local productions, the show is aimed primarily at Australian viewers.

A brilliant cast from Home and Away

The cast of the show is huge and amazing. Disney is doing what seems necessary by hosting a show with established and recognized international talent. It has brought Iain Glen from Game of Thrones and the incredible Linh-Dan Pham from The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) into the mix of the series to appeal to viewers around the world.

But it has also lured home Australian exporters Jesse Spencer and Radha Mitchell. Thomas Weatherall is captivating and goes far beyond his performance in Heartbreak High, while the sisterly dynamic between newcomers Emily Grant and Mackenzie Mazur feels real. Still, “Mailman” may be the best thing about the series.

To the Australian ear, the series sounds reassuring as it refuses to convert or explain innuendos for an international audience. The writing team, which has worked on Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Heights and Hungry Ghosts, has created a world that is both familiar and full of humor.

Given the particular events of 1979 that are the focus of the series, it’s unlikely we’ll see a second season of Last Days.

What then does this mean for future Disney+ commissions in Australia? Disney hasn’t commented on what it will invest in next.

It will be interesting to see if the reception of “Last Days of the Space Age” inspires more local storytelling. If the series crash-lands (sorry, I had to), that could be bad news for the streamer’s distinctly Australian orders.