The actual title of this Australian mini mini-series isn’t printable, but it is available on Amazon Prime Video under the title “F*%#ing Adelaide.” The show is just six 15-minute episodes, but it crams in plenty of story and depth, a travel-size version of the sunny but textured family drama in which adult siblings come to a new understanding of their childhoods — and thus themselves and one another.
Eli (Brendan Maclean) is a would-be glam rocker, playing marginal afternoon gigs and scrapping with bartenders. He reluctantly returns home to Adelaide after an insistent phone call from his mother, Maude (Pamela Rabe). His older sister, Emma (Kate Box), has also been summoned, with her family, from her nonprofit work in Thailand. His younger sister, Kitty (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), is somewhat distracted from the family reunion by the anonymous sex she likes to have, however contrived or inconvenient it may be.
Maude declares that she is selling the house, which resurrects everyone else’s feelings about their abusive, now-absent father. All the planets here are in different orbits, though. Kitty doesn’t even remember the guy, and she yearns for a connection, despite what everyone else says. Eli and Emma recoil from the mere mention of his name, and Maude’s various storage boxes suggest she is hanging onto more than just stuff.
Despite its short run time, “Adelaide” gets in some juicy squabbles, and the chemistry among the adult siblings has a fun edge and a barely contained feral physicality. The house feels too full, the boxes stacked too high, the bathroom always occupied.
“Adelaide” takes a surprising turn in its final two episodes, one that cannily changes the weight of the previous four. The show also weaves in Eli’s style of looping music, in which certain lines and syllables from the dialogue are remixed as breathy songs. The resulting omnipresent score is sometimes poignant but also sometimes like being around a draining 9-year-old who is discovering the pleasures of recreational echolalia.
I know what you’re thinking: Is there a gender-nonconforming tween magician in this show? And the answer is, You know it, baby. Cleo (Aud Mason-Hyde), Kate’s child, gets some of the best scenes. In one, Cleo and Maude are playing a guessing game, with Maude describing the attributes of the person she has in mind. Cleo guesses Kitty, and then Emma, and then Eli, but oh! Maude is describing herself. Somewhere, a shrink is buying a new couch.
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