This won’t be the first season of the franchise to be shot in the Arctic Circle, with the Scandinavian iterations and seasons six and 11 of the US series having been set there. But it marks a huge step-up for cast and crew on the winter-time conditions in Australia and New Zealand, where the first three seasons have been set.
Next year’s Alone Australia will be filmed in the Arctic Circle, the location for season 11 of the US series.
“This is totally out of their comfort zone,” said Maxwell. “They will go in autumn, where conditions might seem fairly benign, but then winter will sweep in and conditions will rapidly change. It will be colder and more intense than anyone has ever experienced in Australia before. We’re really excited about it.”
On the drama front, SBS will launch The Chaplain, set in an international airport and co-created by Elise McCredie (Stateless) and Jude Troy (The Clearing).
It will also have Reckless, a co-commission with NITV, in which Tasma Walton and Hunter Page-Lochard star as feuding siblings who struggle with the fallout of a hit-run fatality and cover-up.
Coming next month is the previously announced documentary series The People vs Robodebt, a three-parter examining the personal toll of, and fightback against, a bungled government program that targeted almost 1 million vulnerable Australians.
We Are Jeni, meanwhile, tells the remarkable story of Dr Jeni Haynes, a woman who has a claimed 2500 alter egos. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by her father, Haynes testified against him in court in the guises of six of those alter egos.
Dr Jeni Haynes, the subject of We Are Jeni.Credit: SBS
Also turning the spotlight on a true-crime story, The Jury will return for a second season, while 2.6 Seconds will examine in detail the forces at play in the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker by NT police officer Zachary Rolfe in 2019.
That four-part series, to be directed by Darren Dale of Blackfella Productions (Total Control, First Contact), is “a really good case of SBS going where other people don’t”, said Maxwell. “I’ve been quite shocked to see how little the story of Kumanjayi Walker has been in the papers.”
Maxwell said the line-up – in unscripted particularly – shows SBS trying to carve out a space that was unique in the free-to-air broadcasting landscape.
“Our challenge is not just the types of stories we’re telling, but how we tell them,” he says. “Robodebt is drama-doc, Alone is entirely self-shot, 2.6 Seconds is a thesis-led piece, We Are Jeni is totally distinctive in what it’s doing, John Safran is trouble-making. So there’s not a rinse and repeat, there’s a real sense of how can you challenge the form as much as the subject.
“Our job is not to take a position, our job is to get people to engage with these topics. Our biggest success is if we can get the nation talking about some of these things – not tell them what to think, but let them make up their own mind.”
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