Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which, each fortnight, we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track… So, we’re going to do the hard work for you.
This time round we’re looking at Homebodies, an SBS drama that combines the supernatural with an exploration of a mother and son as they try to reconnect following his gender reassignment surgery. Despite its high-concept stakes, reviews have focused on the tender relationship study of a family haunted, literally and figuratively, by their choices. A Special Mention at last week’s Series Mania has only added to the intrigue and international potential.
Name: Homebodies
Country: Australia
Producers: Mad Ones
Distributor: tbc
Network/streamer: SBS/SBS On Demand
For fans of: Transparent, The Danish Girl
Homebodies is part of a growing lineage of stories about transgender identity on screen, but what sets apart the short-form digital series for Australia’s SBS is both its focus on transmasculinity and the introduction of supernatural elements to a quiet family tale.
The plot follows Darcy (Luke Wiltshire), a young trans man who returns home to care for his mother (Claudia Karvan), only to find she has been living with a ghostly pre-transition version of him, Dee (Jazi Hall). Homebodies showrunner AP Pobjoy explains how this sets the scene for an exploration of family and identity: “Dee embodies that emotional, electric period of being seventeen – invincible, confused, and searching,” they say, and “isn’t just a ghost of the past but a vital fragment of who Darcy is.”
That’s the underlying core of the drama – the notion of how the past relates to the future, especially in cases such as Darcy’s life. Having become estranged from his mother after coming out, the spectre forces him to consider who he was before and the fact that this facet of his personality remains within him.
The story comes from multi-cultural pubcaster SBS’s Digital Originals initiative, which champions underrepresented voices. Mad Ones Films, the Australia production house behind Sophie Hyde film Jimpa and Tilda Cobham-Hervey’s It’s All Going Very Well…, starring Jonathan Pryce, is the producer, with Screen Australia and Screen NSW providing financial support. Pobjoy is the writer, with Charlotte Mars writing on eps 3 and 5.
Though it is just six 10-minute episodes long, Homebodies has been gaining traction since launch in Australia last month. At last week’s Series Mania it debuted to international audiences and gained a special mention in the Students Award category. Homebodies is currently without a distributor but it will be a surprise if sales houses don’t soon start queuing up.
For Harry Lloyd, the show’s director, the appeal was in Homebodies taking seriously “the idea that transition isn’t a before-and-after story,” and because it felt true to their own experience and conversations they’d had with other transmasculine people.
“For me as a director, Dee is a mirror that Darcy can’t look away from but can’t look at directly either,” adds Lloyd. “That tension is what makes the character so dramatically rich. There’s something specific about encountering your pre-transition self not as a memory you can file away, but as a presence that talks back, makes demands and has feelings about how things turned out.”
Pobjoy adds: “Dee represents that unnerving feeling that alights what you want to forget, only to find out it makes up who you are. For Darcy, there’s shame in that history at times, but there’s also a kind of fearlessness and fire that’s infectious and, deep down, something he’s missed.”
Reviews for the show have been uniformly positive, with Australia academia-meets-journalism site The Conversation writing that the story “gives space for an exploration of the challenging, interpersonal relationship between [Darcy] and his mother through the haunting of an unresolved rift,” and that, “Refreshingly, this is done without Darcy ever doubting his understanding and acceptance of himself.”
“What I hope attracted SBS to Homebodies was the combination of genuine specificity and accessibility,” says Lloyd. “The show has a very clear point of view but it’s not insular. The genre does a lot of work – the supernatural frame gives audiences who might not seek out a trans story, a way in, and then the characters do the rest.”
Pobjoy says the high-concept premise “felt like a natural fit” for SBS’s Digital Originals initiative, as it presents, “Something specific in its perspective, but universal in its themes, with a distinctive genre twist that speaks to contemporary audiences.”
Both Lloyd and Pobjoy had simple expectations for Homebodies at France’s international TV drama get-together Series Mania: That it was seen and made people “feel something unexpected,” whether that’s familar, funny or uneasy. “If the series travels beyond this festival and finds audiences in other countries, that would mean the story is doing what I always hoped it would, proving that this experience and these characters, belong to everyone,” adds Lloyd.
Societal change
Pobjoy noted that on a societal level, there are still few representations of trans men and transmasculine people “portrayed as fully realized human beings on screen,” and this was core to Darcy’s character. “It was important to center a trans man not just as a lead, but as someone deeply relatable,” they say. “A son, a love interest, someone returning home. Someone audiences can recognize and connect with regardless of gender identity too.”
Lloyd adds: “On a societal level, I think we’re still at a point where transmasculine representation on screen is binary in the sense it’s either token or traumatic. Darcy is neither. He gets to be the guy coming home, the complicated son, the person someone falls for. That ordinariness is actually radical right now, and I don’t think we should be shy about saying so.”
Australia has a heritage in films and TV about gender and queer representation, taking in everything from Stephan Elliott’s seminal road trip movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert through to more modern examples such as Prime Video’s comedy crime drama Deadloch and Stan’s Invisible Boys, which we wrote about last year. However, films and TV shows based on transgender stories have not been prevalent. Homebodies remains in the minority, but SBS’s digital program has been making a difference in platforming many minority groups.
“Traditionally, getting a series like Homebodies made in Australia is incredibly difficult,” says Cyna Strachan, producer and co-founder of Mad Ones. “However, we produced the series through the SBS and Screen Australia Digital Originals initiative, which is a very competitive but well-structured program that has become an indispensable pathway for emerging writers, directors, and producers to break into television in Australia.
“It has been a game-changer locally and continues to have a wide-reaching impact. We had great success through the initiative with our series Latecomers in 2022 and have loved the opportunity to channel what we learnt into bringing Homebodies to the screen this year.”
English (US) ·