Love My Way

Having heard a great many good things about Love My Way, I finally borrowed it from the video library. Not being the best with long running dramas, I managed to watch the three seasons over a period of time. This did not in any way deter me from enjoying the series, praise for which is well deserved. Its themes are fashionably gritty at times, the conflicts of its 30 something characters can sometimes be clichéd but the drama transcends this to achieve a somewhat poetic and ruminative quality. It is helped along by some marvellous performances by the main cast which functions together so well that it is hard to say which performance outshines the rest. And it captures a certain kind of Sydney, confined to life along the eastern suburbs, very well.

Love My Way Cast: From left: Brendan Cowell, Ben Mendelsohn, Claudia Karvan, Asher Keddie and Dan Wylie.

Normally I am never fully engaged emotionally with anything I watch. No matter how moved one is by a movie you realise once it is over that it is artifice and that you have been suspended for a length of time in a world that could plausibly exist but most emphatically does not. Few movies or dramas engage you enough to blur this distinction and oddly enough Love My Way, in spite of some TV soap elements, did. In fact its second series, which was pretty dark, left one with the distinct feeling of being dragged down till it ended on a positive note and brought you back up again. I think part of this comes from its writing which has been well thought out and makes for consistent characterisation. I cannot think of any other Australian product on television that comes close. It has never aired on free to air television here (it started life on Pay TV which has a smaller viewership) but perhaps it would not have been as good under its constraints. Die hard fans would probably want a fourth series but the three series in themselves are a sort of compact whole; essentially a time capsule of the lives of a bunch of affluent and bohemian Sydney 30 somethings in the first decade of the 21st century.