Before even a single frame of Operation Buffalo is splashed across the screen, the title card warns the series is a piece of historical fiction but that a lot of the “really bad history actually happened”.
That line, of the truth inherent in the show, creeps into your mind even as you’re laughing at the ridiculous action on screen. It’s a chilling reminder.
From Rake creator Peter Duncan, the six-part miniseries is part satire and part thriller, a dramatisation of the secretive nuclear testing at Maralinga in the South Australian outback during the 1950s.
Operation Buffalo stars Ewen Leslie, Jessica De Gouw, James Cromwell and Tony Martin, and through its smart storytelling takes aim at the ludicrousness of the whole endeavour – Australian politicians selling British nuclear testing as a plus.
Like Dr Strangelove before it, the Cold War obsession with the bomb in addition to the heightened paranoia of the era, is ripe for ruthless derision, and Operation Buffalo takes more than a few punches.
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From 1956, over a period of seven years, the Brits detonated seven nuclear bombs in South Australia, one of them was double the power of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed almost 150,000 directly and indirectly.
More than six decades later, the sites of these bomb tests are still poisonous.
The Australian government at the time allowed this to happen for many reasons, including its eagerness in being a good Commonwealth player to our empirical parents, and because the Cold War was nothing if not a nuclear arms race – MAD is mad, after all.
Retrospectively, while it seemed like the main action was between the US and the Soviets, the British were desperately trying to stay in the game but had been cut out by the Americans after distrust over the Cambridge Five spy scandal.
Operation Buffalo is the fictionalisation of the first bomb test at Maralinga and all the farcical political posturing and pressure surrounding it.
As one character correctly points out in Operation Buffalo, you can’t exactly bomb the rolling hills of Gloucestershire, so Australia, with its facetious mandate of Terra Nullius, was chosen – and as happy to oblige as a younger sibling with an inferiority complex.
Major Leo Carmichael (Leslie) is the second-in-command at the Maralinga base, an engineer tasked to build the towers from which the bombs are dropped. He’s a WWII war hero and effectively runs the base with the Commandant, General Crankford (Cromwell), too whimsical to really be in charge.
When Leo is told the first test has been moved up to accommodate the British Ambassador’s schedule, he faces challenges on multiple fronts with a missing prostitute, publicity-mad politicians, the arrival of a new meteorologist (De Gouw) and an Indigenous family who government policy says officially doesn’t exist.
It is, borrowing military slang, a clusterf**k.
Operation Buffalo elegantly weaves together the various subplots and the historical context to tell a story that doesn’t let anyone get away with the absurdities committed in the name of national (and Commonwealth) security.
It’s all told with a cheeky wink and the horrors of hindsight – scenes of soldiers with no protective equipment scouring the test site post-detonation makes you want to laugh and retch at the same time.
It’s an over-the-top production that balances the thriller elements with its darkly comedic DNA, an effective melding of tones that keeps you entranced and horrified – two reactions that guarantee audiences will keep coming back for more.
It takes about two-thirds of the first episode for Operation Buffalo to find its voice but once it does, it’s hitting some pretty high notes.
The performances from the core cast in a large ensemble are really persuasive and compelling, especially Cromwell’s well-meaning and somewhat paternalistic Cranky, and Leslie’s relatable but ethically compromised major.
Sometimes, dealing with the monstrosity of historical acts, events that are so outrageous it’s almost beyond comprehension, is best served through humour – not to make it palatable but to really drive home the insanity of something like the Maralinga tests.
As much as sombre images of death and destruction can evoke emotional reactions, nothing hits the point as hard as the glaring judgment of satire done well – which is exactly what Operation Buffalo is.
Operation Buffalo premieres on ABC/iview on Sunday, May 31 at 8.30pm
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2020-05-31 08:34:10Z
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