Cirrus@Austlit

'It's a story about justice...and the corruption of justice. JANUS is about the lawyers, police, judges and magistrates who work with a very imperfect system. The focus of our story will be the new Director of Public Prosecutions Officer, taking over the handling of all Committals for trial - the first sweeping changes recommended by the Janus Taskforce Committee.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/5/2013)

A character-based television drama series about the lives of police officers in the fictitious Australian country town of Mt Thomas, this series began with the arrival of Constable Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune) to the Mt Thomas station in the episode 'A Woman's Place'. Doyle and avuncular station boss Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon (John Wood) were the core characters of the series until the departure of Lisa McCune.

Immensely popular for a decade, Blue Heelers was cancelled in 2006 after thirteen seasons. The announcement was front-page news in Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Age in Melbourne, and Brisbane's Courier Mail.

On June 8, 2006 Ross Warneke wrote in The Age:

'It's over and, to be perfectly blunt, there's no use lamenting the demise of Blue Heelers any more. When the final movie-length episode aired on Channel Seven on Sunday night, 1.5 million Australians tuned in, a figure that was big enough to give the show a win in its timeslot but nowhere near big enough to pay the sort of tribute that this writer believes Heelers deserved after more than 500 episodes. It is unlikely there will be anything like it again. At almost $500,000 an hour, shows such as Blue Heelers are quickly becoming the dinosaurs of Australian TV.'

'A hard-edged, gritty drama about the tense and claustrophobic world of a Major Crime Task Force set up to solve an urban terrorist bombing, a Task Force which brings together a crew of idiosyncratic, competitive characters over a knife edged maximum stressed two months. PHOENIX is no traditional cop shop or crime story. Its characters are not clean, super hero cops, just real police whose attitudes can be shocking and whose humour is grim and black.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 3/5/2013)