Mr Inbetween: Australia’s Best TV Show, A Meat Pie Stuffed with Gunpowder.

Mr Inbetween isn’t just television - it’s a sly uppercut wrapped in a smirk. It swaggers onto the screen like an unpolished gem dug up from the suburban dirt: rough around the edges, glinting with menace, and dazzling precisely because it refuses to be cut to shape. Where most crime dramas polish their moral quandaries until they gleam, this one just tosses them in your lap with a shrug, as if to say, you figure it out.

If television is a mirror to society, then Mr Inbetween is the fractured shard you stumble across in the back of your nana’s linen closet - cracked, dusty, reflecting something you recognise but don’t entirely want to admit lives inside you. It’s equal parts deadpan and dead serious, the kind of story only Australia could spin - a smirk, a sucker punch, and a plastic Woolies bag in the same frame, with a bloke who can read a bedtime story one minute and dig a shallow grave the next, all before the kettle’s even whistled.

The show’s DNA is proudly scrappy. Ray Shoesmith, our antihero with resting menace face, first appeared in The Magician (2005), Scott Ryan’s micro-budget mockumentary shot for around AUD $3,000. Ryan wrote, directed, edited, and starred in it - and somehow managed to get it into the Melbourne International Film Festival. The film, picked up for distribution by Hopscotch, felt like Man Bites Dog’s scruffy cousin - less stylised provocation, more alleyway confessional. Where the Belgian cult classic went for circus grotesquerie under full lights, The Magician whispered in the shadows of Melbourne, asking whether jokes and bullets could share the same punchline. They could.

Looks like your friendly neighbourhood dad… until you notice the Woolies bag has more than bread inside.

A decade later - buoyed by FX’s vote of confidence and sharpened under Nash Edgerton’s steady hand - Mr Inbetween surfaces leaner, slicker, yet still pulsing with the same pitch-black heart that first beat in Melbourne’s shadows. Ray isn’t softened - just honed. He’s the kind of bloke who’ll help you change a flat tyre, but might flatten you if you give him grief about it. He’s not wrestling with morality; he’s dismantled the wrestling ring and sold the parts for scrap. His life is errands, with occasional executions thrown in - because why not pick up milk and handle a contract killing before dinner?

Violence here isn’t stylised, balletic, or underscored with swelling strings. It’s as quick and matter-of-fact as changing a lightbulb. One punch, one chokehold, done. You don’t applaud, you just nod - because for Ray, it’s not performance, it’s maintenance. And when he’s asked if he enjoys hitting people, his deadpan reply - “If I hit someone, I generally have a pretty good reason” - is the thesis statement of the show. Ray isn’t existential; he’s efficient.

Watching Mr Inbetween is like biting into a perfect meat pie: flaky on the outside, dangerously hot in the middle, spilling complexities onto your hands when you least expect them. One moment, Ray’s tenderly debating unicorns with his daughter Brittany (played with refreshing normalcy by Chika Yasumura); the next, you’re jolted into a scene of brutal violence that reminds you he’s the nightmare version of the dad at school pick-up. He’s neither monster nor martyr - he’s that gnawing, uncomfortable truth that ordinary life and extraordinary brutality can co-exist without explanation.

Australia has always been bewitched by its rogues - from Chopper Read’s larger-than-life menace to the feral family saga of Animal Kingdom. But where those stories flirt with operatic myth-making, Mr Inbetween is refreshingly flat. It doesn’t glamorise or moralise. It doesn’t dissect Ray like he’s a lab rat. Instead, it simply asks: what if being a hitman was just a job - less “Shakespearean tragedy,” more “tradie invoice”?

That’s precisely why the show feels so Australian. It embraces the gallows humour we wear like a national uniform, that dry shrug in the face of absurdity. It captures a culture where villains become folk heroes after a few pints, where a bloke’s moral compass spins wildly but still points to “pick up bread on the way home.” It’s no accident that the show found greater success in the U.S. before it was fully embraced at home - Australia’s networks initially passed, unable to categorise a show that was neither melodrama nor satire.

Scott Ryan’s performance is the linchpin. With his angular face and measured calm, Ray doesn’t need theatrics - his menace lives in the negative space, in the pauses, in the stillness. He’s a coiled snake that might strike or might just slither past, and the uncertainty is half the terror. His restraint makes the bursts of violence inevitable, like a thunderclap after the long, heavy silence of a summer storm.

The critical reception backs it up. Across its three seasons, Mr Inbetween scored a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, praised for its tight 25-minute episodes that pack more nuance than most hour-long dramas. American critics hailed it as one of the best shows of the 2010s, while in Australia it developed a cult following - proof that sometimes you need outside eyes to tell you what you already have in your own backyard.

So why is Mr Inbetween arguably the best thing Australian television has produced? Because it refuses to explain itself. It’s raw, unsettling, and deeply funny in the kind of way that makes you feel guilty for laughing. It’s a series that sneaks up on you like Ray’s grin - casual, disarming, but always carrying the suggestion that something terrible is about to happen.

Mr Inbetween is Australia distilled: sharp, dark, bone-dry in humour, and oddly tender at the strangest moments. It doesn’t glamorise the outlaw - it normalises him. And in doing so, it forces us to recognise that beneath the barbecue banter and everyday errands lurks a quiet violence, woven so tightly into the fabric of ordinary life that we barely notice it until the blood hits the lino.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of FX.