Cleverman - 'First Contact'

This cast shot encapsulates Cleverman's one major weakness (an underabundance of female characters) far better than its strengths.

In a grim, near-future city in Australia (I'm not sure which one, but I might if I knew Australia at all,) humanity lives alongside a newly-emerged yet ancient hominid species known as 'Hairies' or 'subhumans'. Forced to live within the walled 'Zone', the hairies are preyed on by opportunists like Koen West, a bartender who smuggles hairies out of the Zone and then reports them for a reward, while Koen's half-brother Waaru strugles to maintain the peace between humans and hairies within the Zone and media tycoon Jarrod Slate (Game of Thrones' Iain Glenn) pushes a liberal agenda and laps up the ratings from footage of atrocities. When Koen smuggles a family out of the Zone and then turns them in, the resulting raid goes bad .The Containment Authorities try to separate the children, and in the struggle a young girl named Jyra is shot and killed.

The events of the series are triggered by a tragedy during an attempted
deportation. The series premiered in June of last year and has only become
more topical.

Moving between these players is Uncle Jimmy, the Cleverman, a conduit of the Dreamtime. He visits Koen and Waaru, seemingly breathes life into a corpse, and then calls a meteor from the sky, from which emerges a creature, Namorrodor, that tears out his heart. When the hairies learn that Koen smuggled and betrayed Jyra's family, they bite off one of his fingers to punish him, but the finger grows back, revealing that he and not Waaru is the new Cleverman.

Essentially using a mixture of various Australian Aboriginal traditions to create a mystical superhero ethos, Cleverman is one of the most unexpected things I've yet come across on Netflix. We start with the hairies - hirsute hominids with considerable strength and endurance with their own culture and language(1) - which feels like it's going to be the big thing in the series, but then Uncle Jimmy is breathing ghostly mist into corpses and calling monsters from space, and Koen is healing like he's Wolverine and you realise that the whole thing is much bigger and weirder.

Uncle Jimmy - Rad AF. He's like... Professor X meets Aboriginal Magic
Einstein.

I won't pretend that I get half of what the show is talking about, but it's already made me want to learn more about Australian Aboriginal culture (which is to say, pretty much anything.) I went into the series knowing basically nothing about it, but was surprised and intrigued by its mix of urban fantasy, gritty dystopian SF and mysticism. Its only real weakness is that it has, so far at least, a significant dearth of interesting female characters, with the story rooted far more with the men. This may change as the series progresses, however. I am only on episode one.

(1) Their culture is apparently formed from a fusion of Aboriginal cultural concepts, and they speak the Kumbainggar language.