Hungry Ghosts And Housing Estates
Pick your favourite Australian TV show of recent years and chances are it features on Debbie Lee’s CV. The director of scripted development at Matchbox Pictures has also done stints as commissioning editor at the ABC and at SBS Independent and has helped develop boundary-busting shows including Safe Harbour, Please Like Me, The Family Law and Upper Middle Bogan. With her latest project, Hungry Ghosts, screening over four nights on SBS (Monday August 24 to Thursday August 27), we took the opportunity to talk to Debbie about diversity, the upside of streaming and taking up Japanese running stitch.
Hungry Ghosts is a supernatural mystery set in Melbourne’s Vietnamese community – that’s not something we’ve seen on TV before. What excited you about working on this show? There are so many untold stories in Australia. I remember long ago being in a Vietnamese restaurant, eating fantastic food, and wondering why Vietnamese restaurants first started popping up in Australia. With migrant communities, there is always a story behind why they came here: in this case, it includes the Vietnam War and Operation Babylift. So many communities have been part of Australia for a long time, but their stories are too rarely seen on television.
You don’t often find a ghost story on free-to-air television. Ghost stories are part of Vietnamese culture and also part of my Chinese background; they are a way of trying to deal with trauma through ritual, a way of processing things that haunt you and SBS was excited about finding an entertaining way to examine big issues. Also, thanks to streaming, it is easier to make genre shows now. It’s a global business, so you can find small audiences all over the world that together make up a big audience. The ability to reach these international audiences is really exciting.
You have produced plenty of high-profile shows. Are there any less well-known ones that you have a soft spot for? I’m really proud of The Heights, our soap set in public housing [on ABC TV and iView]. It’s screening on BBC1 in the UK and doing fantastically well. It has engaging characters, it deals with issues, it deals with class, it has a cast with a lot of different cultures in it which reflects the realities of how we live. It feels like a series for the times because we’re all turning back to community. I’m also really proud of Mustangs FC. It features a group of young women of all shapes and sizes and ethnicities playing soccer. The target audience was girls between 8 and 12 years, but I know people in their 50s who loved that show, I know men who loved that show. Kids’ shows are incredibly important because children are the future.
What has been entertaining you lately? I have watched some episodes of I May Destroy You, which focuses on a woman called Arabella who has had success on Twitter chronicling the life of a fed-up millennial, who is sexually assaulted. It’s done with a real lightness and it feels ground-breaking in its very personal, messed-up perspectives. I’ve been listening to the audiobook Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, about our inclination to trust people and how that allows people to get away with bad stuff. I recently declared this year the International Year of the Hobby, when I realised I still wanted to be learning things. I did a bit of wooden spoon carving, a bit of Japanese running stitch. I still haven’t done ikebana!
Interview_ Ute Junker
Photo_ Sarah Enticknap {Stills shot on homepage}