Australian Romance-Scam Thriller 'Fake' Features One of the Best Episodes of TV You'll See in 2024

A drive to the airport in a rideshare is one of life's mundane experiences, whether or not you're en route to a wedding, and also regardless of if you're meant to be collecting your partner and their dry-cleaned suit along the way. In Fake, this routine journey on an average Melbourne day is a masterclass in tension, a portrait of an unravelling and an unwanted realisation unfurling with no escape. With journalist Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart) sitting in the backseat as much that she's trusted melts down, it's a stunning episode of television, arriving five instalments into this eight-part Australian thriller that brings its page-to-screen and reality-to-fiction tale to Paramount+ in full from Thursday, July 4.

Viewers spend the preceding four episodes of Fake waiting for a moment like this. For those who haven't read Stephanie Wood's memoir of the same name, charting her time dating a former architect-turned-grazier who pairs his grand romantic gestures with erratic behaviour, there's still no doubt that it's coming. It has to, and not just because series creator Anya Beyersdorf (The Twelve) and her co-scribes Jessica Tuckwell (Year Of) and Hyun Lee (Born to Spy) have Birdie's beau Joe Burt (David Wenham, Elvis) note in voiceover that she was onto him from the get-go. While Fake is a love- and lies-fuelled saga, it's also about how someone gets taken in not by the kind of tales that Joe spins but by the emotions that they prey upon, even when their intuition tingles at the outset — and how deceptions like this, from someone manipulating others and someone fooling themselves alike, always shatter.

The words "Joe, 51, grazier" on a dating app introduce the ex-property big shot to Birdie; however, everything that he utters on their first date almost halts their romance there. When the pair meet at a sleek bar, he has a business acquaintance (Yuchen Wang, White Fever) in tow and talks only of himself, grandstanding with the recognisable arrogance of someone who refuses to believe (or simply hasn't stopped once to consider) that they aren't the most-interesting person in the room. She cuts and leaves quickly, despite his insistence to the waitstaff that they'll share more wine. Then she ignores his persistent follow-ups afterwards, until she doesn't.

Stylistically, Beyersdorf, her co-writers, and also directors Jennifer Leacey (Prosper), Emma Freeman (The Newsreader) and Taylor Ferguson (Fires) adopt two approaches to bringing both Joe's flurry of messages and Birdie's inner questioning to audiences. The contents of texts and emails are written across the screen, overlaid upon the scene's ordinary background — train windows feature heavily — and also spoken aloud, as worries about being almost 50, single and heartbroken from a failed IVF experience are similarly given voice through repeated snippets of conversation. Sometimes, Birdie's own words haunt her. Sometimes, Joe's do. Sometimes, the judgement of her sniping mother Margeaux (Heather Mitchell, Ricky Stanicky) echoes. Combined, the impact is inescapable: when his indefatigable pursuit joins her lifetime of doubts, especially that she's being too fussy and will always be alone, relenting to his overtures and investing in his narrative is the inevitable outcome.

Fake relays its story within this psychological space — a place where it's clear to everyone, including to Birdie, that little is right — to explore how a person who investigates for a living succumbs to fantasy over fact. Joe gleefully spins dreams, beginning with his quiet farm life, then escalating into bigger and bolder promises. He also ticks the basics, such as showing interest, sticking around, declaring his love and making Birdie feel like romance hasn't passed her by. But Joe equally has a tale for everything that always seems tall. He misses as many dates as he makes, his excuses mushrooming as well. His ex-wife receives ample blame, frequently with the smack of convenience. He's cagey about specifics, too, and vague and defensive when questioned.

When Leacey, Freeman and Ferguson, plus cinematographer Sky Davies (House of Gods), devote Fake's frames to staring Birdie's way, they push Keddie's excellent performance to the fore — and it is exceptional. She's the lead in a yell-at-the-TV type of show, where viewers can't help but say aloud that Birdie is making the wrong choice again and again, and grounding those ill-fated decisions in relatable emotions isn't a simple task. The more that Fake peers, the more that it also turns the sight of its protagonist hoping yet fraying into a mirror. One of Birdie's potential articles at work is about homelessness, a situation that's never as far away as most would like to think — and one of Fake's throughlines is that being Birdie with Joe isn't beyond anyone's realm of possibility.

Wenham, no stranger to on-screen shadiness and slipperiness but with memories of SeaChange's Diver Dan still imprinted in Australia's pop-cultural memory, is equally first-rate. His remit isn't straightforward, either, selling the charm that still wins Birdie over in tandem with the sketchiness that's lurking beneath Joe's striving facade — and the character is almost ceaselessly striving — which is a gig on par with both Joshua Jackson (Fatal Attraction) and Edgar Ramirez's (Wolf Like Me) efforts in season one and two of medical-meets-romance scam series Dr Death. Indeed, Wenham does such an unshakeable job as Joe that by the time that Fake spends the aforementioned fifth episode in a car with Birdie, his presence doesn't stop cutting deep, nor showing the scars that it's carving, even just over the phone.

It's hardly astonishing, then, that Fake is impossible to stop binge-watching once its first instalment puts its pieces in place: that warning-sign initial date, Birdie's loneliness trumping her niggling uncertainty, society's conditioning that to be a woman of a certain age without a partner and kids is to be a failure, the disappointment that we can all direct at ourselves if we haven't met our own expectations and, of course, the clash of Joe's dubiousness and his magnetism, for starters. It's also far from surprising that when the route to the airport beckons, and one of 2024's best episodes of TV with it, Fake's audience is right there in the Uber with Birdie, riding and feeling the same bumps.

Check out the trailer for Fake below:

Fake streams via Paramount+ from Thursday, July 4, 2024.