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Devil’s Playground audience swells

Just 48,000 people watched the two-hour premiere of Devil’s Playground on Tuesday September 9 on Foxtel’s showcase, but with repeat screenings over the next six days the audience totaled 150,000.

“We consider that’s a very solid number,” Foxtel director of programming Ross Crowley told IF today.

Comparisons with other Australian series and miniseries screened on Foxtel in recent years are difficult because Devil’s Playground airs on the movie tier, which reaches about 56% of the platform’s subscribers. Crowley said the most recent like-for-like comparison is with the drama Tangle, which it has tripled.

A sequel to Fred Schepisi’s seminal 1976 semi-autobiographical movie The Devil’s Playground, the six-hour series stars Simon Burke as a newly-widowed Sydney psychiatrist as he’s hired by the Catholic Church to counsel troubled clergy.

The cast includes Jack Thompson, Don Hany, Toni Collette, Andrew McFarlane, NIDA graduate Uli Latukefu, Leon Ford and Max Cullen.

Matchbox Pictures produced the drama scripted by Blake Ayshford, Cate Shortland, Alice Addison and Tommy Murphy, directed by Rachel Ward and Tony Krawitz.

Crowley says he expects the audiences to build. “I think some people were wary, thinking it would be a hatchet job on the Catholic Church,” he says. “Now they realise it is balanced and I think it will rank as a defining Australian miniseries. It has all the nuances you would expect from Matchbox.”

One school of thought is that the show might have drawn bigger audiences had it been programmed as three, two-hour blocks. Crowley disagrees, noting it is Foxtel’s policy to screen weekly episodes after the premiere for minis of more than four hours.