The creators of The Castle are going into animation with a new series. Pacific Heat is the first animated series from Working Dog, whose panel show Have You Been Paying Attention? is screening on Channel 10, and whose satire on bureaucracy, Utopia, can be seen on the ABC. It's also Australia's first adult primetime animated series. Commissioned by Foxtel in 2014, the 13-episode series will premiere in Australia on the Comedy Channel before becoming available in other countries through Netflix. Utopia also streams on Netflix outside Australia under the name Dreamland.
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Writer-producer Rob Sitch describes the series, which is set on the Gold Coast and focuses on an undercover unit known as "Pacific Heat", as a satire on cop shows. In an interview with The Australian Financial Review late last year, he described it as "A-Team meets Hawaii Five-0."
Sitch told Variety that the show was inspired by the flood of television crime shows. "Two decades ago, we laughed [because] we didn't think they could think of another cop show…[but] we sat down one day and we almost got to 100 with the number of shows we've drawn from."
Sitch voices the character of Special Agent and maverick cop Todd Sommerville, Santo Cilauro plays tough guy Agent Zac and Have You Been Playing Attention? host Tom Gleisner is their chief. Rebecca Massey (The Lowdown, The Principal) and Lucia Mastrantone (Tangle) play Special Agents Maddie Riggs and Veronica V.J. Delane. Together, the team works as unit tasked with tackling the crime flourishes in the shadow of the Gold Coast's glitz and glamour.
Pacific Heat appears to have a similar set-up to another adult animation series Archer, which also streams on Netflix in Australia. The critically-acclaimed, Emmy-award winning show, now in its seventh series, centres on a maverick secret agent and the personnel of the spy team run by his mother.