The Airport Chaplain ★★★★

The Airport Chaplain★★★★

I devoured the first four episodes of this new Australian drama. The individual instalments are not quite a half hour in length and that works all too well – any longer and the show’s inherent interest about how people and structures genuinely operate would become overwhelming. The Airport Chaplain has a thrilling sense of curiosity, for characters and organisations. It shows you enough to leave you wanting more, helping make it the timeliest Australian series in recent memory.

As the fictional chaplain of Melbourne Airport, Tobias Wallace (Hugo Weaving) is the first responder of choice for the emotional, erratic and misplaced. Armed with empathy, vouchers, and intricate knowledge of the facility’s infrastructure, the old hand rushes from one pressing issue to the next, be it an unregistered support animal, a flight arriving with a passenger who has died onboard, or someone barricading themselves in the prayer room. “No, I’m not authorised,” Tobias will note, then carry on as if he is.

Weaving suggests, without ever stressing the point, a myriad of qualities in Tobias, including the contradictory. Is he so determined to solve a problem that he creates more? Is he a humble aide or the possessor of a hero complex? Estranged from his own family, for reasons hinted at, Tobias is so dedicated to his unpredictable job that he appears to be living in a remote corner of the airport. He’s a people-first humanist lodged in a billion-dollar business. That’s tricky.

“Your role here is undefined,” his new boss, Terminal Manager Mira Ansari-Cole (Shabana Azeez), tells Tobias, bringing an end to his unsupervised pastoral care. A beacon of efficiency from a different generation and background than Tobias, Mira is at the pointy end of corporate growth – she’s being squeezed from above and defied from beneath, while her own domestic situation is plainly fraught. Tobias and Mira are wary of each other, sometimes adversarial, but there’s also a sense that perhaps they could help each other.

The Airport Chaplain was created by Elise McCredie (Stateless) and Jude Troy (The Clearing). The storytelling has a sense of people and place that feels authentic – the bustle and friction is perpetual. The airport is a living organism, complete with a black economy, undocumented favour bank and anthropological edges. The first time Mira tries to make demands of the lead baggage handler, Lex Pascoe (Erroll Shand), he explodes with pent-up complaints about the substandard work conditions his subterranean crew endures.

There has been a slew of reality series about airport terminal chaos, but in this setting every day brings new issues: don’t get rostered on Valentine’s Day, do help the fearful wife trying to get on a flight before her abusive husband finds her. But in a broader, unspoken way, The Airport Chaplain is about how things work at scale in Australia, and the individuals who influence them. The theoretical and the practical are constantly at odds, as are people and profits.

The show’s understanding of these trade-offs is darkly accurate. The first time Mira tries to officially corral Tobias, he skips free because he’s spent years bantering about the AFL with her boss, a Collingwood fan. The look on Azeez’s face is perfect – the bloody footy? – and there’s no doubt that, fresh from The Pitt, her performance is the complementary equal to Weaving’s. Between them, they reveal the cost of getting something done, for better or worse, in an age when nothing comes easily.

The Airport Chaplain premieres at 8.30pm on Wednesday, August 26, on SBS and SBS on Demand.

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