Ratings May Have Just Begun But Have We Already Seen The Worst Show Of The Year?

9 February 2015 | 2:39 pm | Andrew Mast

Nine premiered House Of Hancock and a nation let out a collective 'eww' during THAT massage scene.

For the past two years we have witnessed Sam Neill own one of the greatest TV dramas ever made – the stylised period Brit gangster series Peaky Blinders.

Last night we witnessed him flush his legacy down a diamante-studded toilet. What made him think Nine’s House Of Hancock was a good idea? The writing was so limp it’s doubtful the old ‘it looked good on paper’ excuse would even do in this case.

But there he was doing a Grumpy Old Man turn as Lang Hancock in the pantomime version of the mining mogul’s life story.

This magnate-meets-maid-and-disowns-daughter tale kept our fingers inky as it unfolded in newspapers in-real-time back in the day. Yet watching it re-enacted last night it was hard to remember why. This was so dull it was a struggle to remain until the first ad break - and by then it already felt like you’d just binge-watched three Hobbit films back-to-back.

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But the actors tried – they really did try. Mandy McElhinney nailed that posh bogan accent of Hancock offspring Gina Rinehart and managed a fine line in blank-eyed stares and ugly grimaces.

It jumped from scenario to scenario with all the subtlety of one of Rose’s gowns.

Peta Sergeant, as maid-turned-mogul’s wife Rose Hancock, had the hardest task (and not just because she left solid paid work on American TV to do this) but somehow managed to capture the spirit of a woman who presented herself as wily yet kinda kooky in her days in the spotlight. Sergeant took it there.

The problem here was vanilla story-telling. It looked like every other banal Nine Network drama we’ve seen in the past ten years. There was nothing epic about it whereas this family's life was nothing short of EPIC.

House Of Hancock didn’t so much tell a story as stitch together a few vignettes — jumping from scenario to scenario with all the subtlety of one of Rose’s gowns.

The script also heavily telegraphed all the big moments that we the viewers at home SHOULD KNOW ABOUT. At one point Gina shows dismay at her husband pushing her to take legal action against daddy-not-so-dearest, saying: “My family does not take each other to court.” Oh how we laughed knowingly.

HoH lacked subtelty in other departments as well. It was lit like a first year film student’s Tropfest entry and was rounded out with some bad make-up and dodgy wig hairlines that in HD must have made McElhinney look like she had a permanent line drawn across her forehead.

And speaking of McElhinney... there was one of those driving scenes that we are all used to by now in film and TV. Y’know, the ones where a character fake drives and swaps lines with someone in the passenger seat while NOT LOOKING AT THE ROAD. But somehow when it’s being done by the actor formerly known as Rhonda in the AAMI commercials you just worry about her car insurance. “LOOK AT THE ROAD, RHONDA!!!”

It was also difficult to sit and listen to the racist terms being thrown around casually – without there being much depth to the story-telling it lacked any real purpose. It just sounded like casual racism. Wince much?

And have we mentioned the massage scene? Actually, best not to.

House Of Hancock’s biggest problem was quite simply being boring. Even the pop songs selected for the soundtrack were boring: Love Is a Battlefield, Lovefool, Wishing Well, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

And this was just Part One. If this is Nine’s idea of ‘event drama’ it’s no wonder we prefer reality TV.