Pink Dog

The Code: Series 1

Using Australian’s beautiful landscape and Canberra’s stunning architecture to full effect, The Code is a political drama following journalist Ned Banks and his autistic brother Jesse as they dragged into a major scandal with possible international reach thanks to a car accident in the outback.

The Code - Series 1 - DVD coverJesse Banks is a computer hacker and some of the best moment of the series are when imaginative on screen graphics make even the simplest of computing tasks exciting. Seeing someone drag a series of files one by one to to their wastebasket, or a series of documents queued up to print, has never been quite so exciting. Those graphics have echoes of the modern remake of Sherlock Holmes, whilst the frozen time-lapse sequences are redolent of series such as Breaking Bad. It’s as if most of the cutting edge approaches to drama have been rounded up expertly into one show

A review on Amazon complains that, “At times it leaves you wondering who are the goodies, and who are the baddies and what is it all about anyway”. For me, however, that is exactly what appeals – the plot has many complications and twists along the way, but in the end boils down to a moderately plausible simple kernel of one person who was planning to do one thing and then got sidetracked by one mistake into another set of events too.

This is what an intelligent thriller should be – with the excellent soundtrack and imaginative credits sequences a bonus on the side. The acting, especially that of the autistic Jesse, is great – the scenes with Jesse are worth watching the series for alone.

The only slight blemishes are that the DVD comes without subtitles and with no extras. A ‘making of’ piece, especially about how they got access to the Australian Parliament building for filming, would have been good to have.

The ‘Series 1’ appellation is sometimes optimistically given to series which were, and remained, one-offs. In this case it’s accurate as earlier in 2015 a second series was commissioned. Hooray.

If you like this, you might also be interested in King’s Game.

Got a view on this review? Then please rate it on Amazon.

Buy The Code – Series 1 here.

 

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