AustLit

'A breakout success from the beginning, Fox’s prison drama returns for a new season with an old face, a botched heist and all the noirish style for which it is rightly becoming famous On its arrival seven years ago, Wentworth — an adaptation of the famous, if creaky, Reg Grundy-produced Prisoner, the jail soapie that was such a hit in the early 1980s — came with low, if not derisive, expectations. The campy, overacted original might have run for 692 episodes but surely this daggy piece of TV history had no place in the emerging new world of high-end HBO-style ­production, in an era when TV was becoming the new cinema?' (Introduction)