Stateless is an Australian TV series that ran back in 2020–a six episode drama inspired by real-life stories of would-be refugees stuck in an Australian immigration detention centre. I got curious about it a while ago because of the presence of a couple of different actors, and put it onto my viewing goals for the year.

Spoilers

Stateless is largely the stories of four different characters whose lives intersect and overlap at the fictional Barton detention centre in the Australian desert, which each character coming at the situation from a different direction. Their experiences vary but each of them are told really well, which makes the whole series engaging, even though some of the storylines take their time unfolding.

Our main characters include Clare Kowitz, the newly appointed government administrator in charge of Barton, who has gone specifically with he brief to quell the growing political controversy about its operation and to keep the place out of the news. Cam Sanford is a new guard at Barton, who has taken the job in order to give his family a better life. Ahmad Ameer is a refugee from Afghanistan who has to hide some of the circumstances of his journey to Australia, in the hopes of getting a visa. And Sofie Werner is a German-Australian woman whose trauma-feuled mental health issues cause her to be wrongfully detained in Barton for an extended period of time.

In the early episodes it was Sofie’s story that I found held my attention the most. It’s just so unusual–we see her descend from an apparently bright and confident young woman into a victim who has been completely broken down by cult that she gets involved with that she steals someone’s identity in the hopes of being deported out of the country. Yvonne Strahovski, well known to me as the second lead in Chuck, plays Sofie and is excellent in the role. She obviously becomes an outlier at the detention centre–none of the other detainees are white and none of them are trying to leave Australia. But the lack of attention given to her obvious mental-health needs showcases just how broken the system behind the centre is (just as the true story that inspired Sofie’s character did in the real world). As the series progresses, Sofie actually loses more and more of her agency as a person, but in this case it’s a strength to the storytelling rather than a weakness. A big part of what this series is about is how a place like Barton dehumanises people–anyone, really, regardless of who they were beforehand and why they have come.

We see this same idea playing out in each of the other storylines. Cam Sanford arrives at Barton intending to make the best of things, but the injustices that he is confronted with wear him down to the place where he really becomes as bad as or worse than anything he has seen around him. Clare Kowitz goes through something similar, but from a position of higher authority. She doesn’t set out to cause harm, but political pressures push into her multiple decisions that steal away the dignity of the people in her charge.

Ahmad Ameer’s story is probably the most like what you’d expect from a series like this. The first episode details the terrible hardships he and his family face as Afghani refugees in Iraq, willing to pay any price for the possibility of getting to Australia. He does, of course, but suffers a terrible tragedy in the process. The rest of the series goes into the terrible stress he endures trying to convince the authorities of the legitimacy of his claims for asylum, and ultimately this much more the focus of the finale than Sofie’s story is. The suspicion that he falls under due to a whole confluence of circumstances is understandable but heartbreaking–his hardships have been real, and yet for reasons that reasonable but wrong, he is unable to access the help he needs.

Even with all this heaviness, Stateless has, on balance, an conclusion that while not exactly uplifting, is at least not completely depressing. In some way or another, Cam, Clare and Ameer all find a measure of humanity in the end, and though Sofie seems completely psychologically wrecked, she is at least located and rescued by her distraught family. None of the endings are forced–they are as earned as all the setbacks and challenges that the characters faced along the way. That’s one of the things that really won me over about Stateless–it’s incredibly well-crafted in its storytelling.

The other thing, of course, is the performances. Along with Strahovski, the entire cast is excellent. Fayssal Bazzi and Asher Keddie are both completely compelling as Ameer and Clare. And Jai Courtney–an actor I’ve never warmed to–does his best work that I’ve ever seen as Cam. Cate Blanchett (who is also the show’s co-creator) and Dominic West are both good in featured supporting roles as the couple who lead the cult that takes in, abuses and ultimately rejects Sofie. Rachel House also stands out as particularly unpleasant guard at Barton. And working alongside both her and Courtney’s Sanford as another guard is Clarence Ryan, an actor I’ve actually had the privilege to work with briefly over a decade ago on an ambitious short feature called Wongi Warrior, for which I served as an executive producer and various other roles.

Stateless has been criticised for not really dealing with the actual condition of statelessness. There is validity to this, I think–none of the main characters except maybe Ameer fit that description, and it doesn’t really deal with the implications of being in such a terrible situation.

But that doesn’t make it any less of a good show. It’s genuinely compelling drama that gets into some meaty territory, which