(courtesy IMDb (c) ABC TV)
When life begins to resemble a faint sparkle of its former sparkling promise and glow, the natural reaction is to withdraw from the people around you.
It makes sense in one way; life has become too much to handle, and since people make up much of what constitutes the ebb and flow of our lives, they are swept up in their recoiling from the day-to-day stuff our lives.
But what becomes quietly yet powerfully apparent in Dog Park, available on the iView, the streaming service of Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC after a run on its main broadcast channel, is that while that’s an understandable impulse, it’s not what we ultimately need.
But as Roland (Leon Ford, who created and co-wrote the show) shows in ways taciturn and vulnerably open, it’s hard to know what will serve you well when depression and loss are swirling intensely around you.
The irony of all that intensity though is that it feels dead and lifeless when it is, of course, anything but, and caught up in a mid-life crisis, exacerbated by a fractious relationship with teenage daughter Mia (Florence Gladwin) and his slowly disintegrating marriage with wife Emma (Brooke Satchwell), Roland is finding it hard to find his way back out again.
Not that he appears to be trying too hard to make that happen.
The wild card in all inertia surrounding and subsuming Roland is that as his wife flies out to the US for the job offer of a lifetime, which quickly because the role of her dreams requiring much more time away from home in Melbourne, she insists he walk their dog Beattie (Indie) with a local dog walking group over in the nearby park.
Roland doesn’t even want to go any where near these people or their dogs – he tolerates Beattie but that’s about it, though this changes convincingly over time – but one member of the group, Samantha (Celia Pacquola in perfect form) won’t let him hide away from the world with copious amounts of red win, and keeps turning up and engineering ways for Roland to end up at the park.
He is a grump and she is a bright ray of sunshine, but not one without layers which is testament to the skilled writing at work here, and their interactions, though testy and manifestly reluctant at first, fuelled of course by Roland’s depressed state of mind, soon become one of growing connection and perhaps even growing attraction?
Thankfully Dog Park is too well written and sensitively realised a show – it’s supposed to be a comedy, at least that’s what the trailer suggests but it is more of a drama with lights threads of comedic diversion – to entertain that romcom element as a dominating theme, preferring instead to concentrate on what life feels like when you have lost all connective tissue, at least that’s how it feels, to everyone you know.
What really grabs your attention and seizes your heart in Dog Park is that it recognises how hard it is know to know what is good for us when we are lost within ourselves.
The people at the titular dog park are a lovably idiosyncratic bunch – besides Samantha, there’s Penny (Elizabeth Alexander), Pamelia (Grace Chow), Jonah (Ras-Samuel) and Andrew (Ash Flanders) and their much-loved attendant dogs – and become, in ways big and small the found family Roland is most adamant he does not need.
The writers of Dog Park do a superlatively good job of taking Roland from the depths of an existential abyss and slowly nudging him, if not completely out of it, the out of it enough that he can become to see what life may still have something good to offer him.
It is beautifully and honestly done such that you never feel like Roland is having any kind of unrealistic epiphany, which he would never consent to anyway – Roland’s response to anything promising is to treat as if it’s the plague come to do him harm; you can almost feel the recoiling and the walls going up through the screen – and each and every step forward by him feels like something grounded in real life.
And therein lies much of the appeal of Dog Park.
It is a TV show, of course, and there are moments that could only happen in that medium but in amongst all the charm and sweetly lovely narrative contrivances, exists some raw and brutally honest humanity the kind that doesn’t shy away from how devastatingly sad life can be.
It embraces the realness of life with nuanced gusto and much of what makes it a joy to watch is that you can relate to what it feels like to feel like everything has fallen off a cliff only to slowly realise that maybe someone has provided a soft place for you to land.
As Roland comes to appreciate how soft a place the dog park are to land and how much he might need that kind of life bolstering connectivity, Dog Park comes even more affectingly alive, a love letter to the fact that while we might feel everything is irredeemably lost, it is usually far from that and salvageable in ways that we can even see from our abyssal viewpoint.
Full of honesty and charm and an incisive eye for how life marks and heals us in equal measure, Dog Park is one of those shows that delights the heart and tears healingly into the soul in equal measure.
It is infused with quiet moments of connection, scenes of separation and impending loss and a very real sense that we need people to make life even halfway livable, and it will make you sign with recognition, cry more than a little and laugh too, which pretty much sums up life and how it can beat us down but also lift us up on the shoulders of people we might’ve thought we don’t need but who become, happily and unexpectedly, the very building blocks of our new lives.
Dog Park streams on the ABC’s iView service.