As airports become increasingly hectic, understaffed and prone to worker strikes, it's an alluring ideal to have a Jack-of-All-Trades airport guru to keep flustered families and harried staff under his gentle control. In The Airport Chaplain, Hugo Weaving portrays just such a rare creature.
As Tobias Wallace, he is the ageing, self-assured Airport Chaplain. Under his watchful eye, everyone from the executive to the first-time flier toddlers follow airport protocol, with sensitivity shown to fliers of all faiths, genders and nationalities. As we all know, if we've stepped foot into an airport, there's an immediate frisson of drama in the snaking queues, wailing over lost luggage, a forgotten passport, panic attacks and last-second nerves. That's before the wait for the flight, the power dynamics of boarding lines, and exorbitantly overpriced espresso.
Wallace is practically engineered into the infrastructure of Melbourne Airport, so the introduction of Mira (Shabana Azeez, currently starring in U.S. drama The Pitt) – a new, efficiency-minded terminal manager, and new mother – threatens to shake the bolts loose and unseat the Airport Chaplain from his benevolent reign.
In their battle for how the airport ought to operate, and how crises of all scales ought to be responded to, there's more than an individual dynamic at play. It is a question of generational priorities and expectations of the workplace, male versus female, white Caucasian privilege facing off with a young, South Asian woman, and the wisdom of experience versus fresh thinking. It's a dynamic that is at play daily for most Australians at work.
As Azeez told SBS in a recent interview, “My character is somebody who is running away from stuff. A very well-travelled person who's lived in many places. Nobody goes to the airport to go to the airport, right? Everybody goes to the airport to go somewhere else. It's a really transient space. I think very few people actually stop to think about the people who live and work there every day, right?”
Made by a smorgasbord of Australian screen talent on-and-off the camera, the series was inspired by Melbourne Airport's The Chaplaincy (which is located on Level 2, Terminal 2 if you're looking).
Multi-award-winning screenwriter of both Stateless and Ride Like a Girl, Elise McCredie created the series with Wooden Horse producer, Jude Troy. McCredie and Troy had both previously co-created thriller series The Clearing. Fellow writers include Mithila Gupta, Sarah Bassiuoni and Vidya Rajan. The staff and the passengers alike represent an Australia not seen frequently enough on the screen, and it is a rich reminder that heightened political debate doesn’t recognise the commonalities we all have – Black, brown, queer, bi, straight, labourer or lawyer – there’s no skipping the queue, and there’s no dodging customs.
It was Troy’s experience of calling upon a Melbourne Airport chaplain that inspired this new SBS commissioned series. Troy's lost handbag, containing her ID, money and keys, were recovered with the assistance of the chaplain. Directors Bonnie Moir (Run, Not Dark Yet, Lion) and Tig Terera have the privilege and challenge of herding established and emerging Aussie actors from Claudia Karvan (Logies award winner for SBS Original Homebodies, Bump, The Big Steal) and Thomas Weatherall (Heartbreak High, Narrow Road to the Deep North) to Kavitha Anandasivam (The Hunting) and Erroll Shand (Wolfram).
The series is refreshingly tight in its moderate 8 episodes, each under 30 minutes. These are the sort of made-for-bingewatch episodes that you can fit in after a busy workday, on a lengthy train or bus trip (using headphones, of course), or waiting for a flight (though it might raise your heart-rate to contemplate everything that could go awry).
Within such a tight framework, the funny, absurd and sometimes heartbreaking dilemmas that ordinary people experience in the airport do not overwhelm the sweetness, nuance, and sensitivity of friendships, allegiances, and grievances of Wallace and his workmates. The smart-mouthed, cool-as-a-cucumber Cath (Karvan) is a trusted ally of the sort so necessary in a high-pressure environment. She has an astute eye for when work situations are hitting a bit too close to home for Tobias, and this comes to a climax in the penultimate episode when two children appear at the airport without guardians.
The loose threads that occasionally emerge about Tobias's personal life, his motivations for being so committed to his work – and so absent from his personal life – gradually weave into a more sympathetic whole.
If we are lulled into a sense of quiet self-reflection and personal narrative at this point, no such smooth trajectory is offered. The final episode is a life-or-death affair, in which the Airport Chaplain might either guarantee his redundancy, or polish his legacy with some divine intervention. How does it end? Get aboard this series the Guardian labels “thoroughly bingeable”, and find out.
The Airport Chaplain is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
