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The universe doesn’t always play nice when it comes to righting wrongs. Occasionally, it needs a helping hand. Such as when a disoriented old man with terminal cancer strays onto a road at night and gets run down by a car. And when the occupants of that car see no harm in returning him to the recliner in his lounge room so they can pretend the accident never happened.
Sometimes, justice doesn’t happen naturally.
If that set-up appears familiar, it’s likely because you’ve already seen the Scottish black comedy Guilt, which opens with the driver and passenger of a car that went bump in the night carrying the corpse of a once-ailing man across his front lawn and back into his favourite armchair. It’s funnier than it sounds on paper.
Hunter Page-Lochard as Charlie and Tasma Walton as June in Reckless.Credit: David Dare/SBS
The touchstones of Guilt are evident in Reckless, a new locally made, four-part NITV/SBS crime caper, where the end credits read, “Based on the format Guilt created by Neil Forsyth”. But there are notable shifts in this version. In the original, the driver and passenger are brothers; here they are a squabbling sister and brother: June, played by Tasma Walton, a briskly efficient corporate lawyer, and her younger brother Charlie (Hunter Page-Lochard). The setting has shifted from damp Scotland to sunny Fremantle in Western Australia.
And most crucially, Reckless is cast, created and produced by First Nations people.
“I was gifted a great plot from the Scottish series, and I thank them,” says Reckless writer and executive producer Kodie Bedford, whose writing credits include Territory and Return to Paradise. “But for me, I really wanted to make the characters their own and make them a product of Fremantle. I was so interested to see what these characters would do and where would they go because they are First Nations. And it ended up deviating a little bit from the plot as well. But that’s great. I made it distinctly different.”
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Reckless is a notable change of pace for Walton, who has been a steady fixture of Australian TV since Blue Heelers in the 1990s. “The delightfully subversive thing about Reckless is that we are unapologetically exploring characters who are morally ambiguous. It’s this lovely and darkly funny exploration of people who are just making choices under immense pressure but who happen to be indigenous.”
“And yes, that does inform some of their choices. Because, you know, for June, she is saying, ‘I don’t want my brother to end up being another blackfella in prison because we’ve been in this terrible accident.’ And she knows from her lived experience that that is highly likely because he’s a young black man, he might well find himself dealing with a much harsher representation of the law than what non-indigenous people might get.
Tasma Walton and Hunter Page-Lochard play siblings June and Charlie in the new SBS series Reckless.
“She is coming from that lived experience and reality that Aboriginal people face. But she’s also [thinking] at the same time, ‘I have things in my life that I need to preserve, and I don’t need anybody putting a spotlight on me and everything I’ve worked so hard to achieve.’”
With her crimson powersuit and unfiltered, sassy barbs, June is a far cry from the weighty and gruelling roles Walton has played in recent years, most notably as the troubled wife of detective Jay Swan in the film and miniseries Mystery Road.
Nonetheless, Walton sees June as a survivor, “a strong Aboriginal woman who’s been forged by fire”.
“She has learnt throughout her entire life that there are two sets of rules,” says Walton. “There’s one for the people that she encounters in her work field that seem to have an easy run of it. And then there’s a set of rules that she has been conditioned to abide by, and she has made choices in her life that are based on what is best for herself. That may not always be ethically right, but she’s a little bit like, ‘Well, if you can do it, why can’t I?’
Hunter Page-Lochard as Charlie with Clarence Ryan as Roddy in Reckless.
“I see her as somebody who has mastered the art of surviving, and, in a way, has reconciled within herself that the end justifies the means, as long as people aren’t too badly hurt in the process.”
Adds Bedford: “This is not a worthy show. I can’t write without humour. And I think it’s not just the Aboriginal way of telling stories, but I think it is an Australian way of telling stories. I feel like a lot of our art has become so serious, and maybe rightly so, because of the state of the world and the reckoning with history.
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“But I can’t write things without a bit of tongue in cheek and a bit of joy. I can’t emphasise how much fun it was to write these cheeky characters with, you know, questionable morals.
“You look at the history of television, the most interesting characters – Tony Soprano, the police in The Wire, the family in Succession – they’re all shady. They’re all like very, very questionable in their dealings with each other, and yet we love them. We love watching them, and that’s what I wanted to bring into Reckless. I wanted to allow First Nations characters to be on screen and act naughty and stab each other in the back. Because we are people, we are human. It’s a human trait this exploration of power. I just wanted to put that on screen.”
Hunter Page-Lochard says playing Charlie, a happy-go-lucky slacker who’s never had to shoulder adult responsibilities, was a breath of fresh air. “I’ve committed suicide on screen and on stage way too many times,” he says.
“Charlie doesn’t know how to stand up to things. He’s very much let his mother and his sister do all that for him. So when he’s thrusted into a position where he has to do shit for himself and take responsibility, it’s a bit hard.
Reckless’ executive producer and writer Kodie Bedford.
“But I related to that quite a lot because I’m quite a shy person, and when conflict or something comes up it always takes me a minute to put on my big boy boots and address the situation,” he says.
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Reckless lands on SBS at a critical juncture for local TV. Between them, Seven, Nine and Ten have announced only one new comedy and two dramas for 2026, leaving ABC, SBS and the streaming platforms as the primary commissioners of scripted content. After years of lobbying, streaming services will soon be mandated to invest 10 per cent of their local expenditure on new local drama, children’s, documentary, arts or educational programs. That is expected to inject much-needed money into the production sector, albeit across a range of genres.
But there is no uncertainty about the career trajectories of Bedford, Walton and Page-Lockard. Bedford recently relocated to London, where she works as a scriptwriter. “I began feeling like I was writing the same old characters and the same old story, getting boxed in as an Indigenous writer. And I just thought, ‘I’m not going to be a better writer if I keep writing these things.’”
Walton was last month announced as the co-winner of the ARA Historical Novel Award for her second novel I Am Nannertgarrook. And among Page-Lockard’s forthcoming to-dos is a feature film to be directed by his father Stephen Page, which he is producing through the production company he started three years ago.
“I reckon it takes a few creative leaders that are coming up in this next generational wave to grab a defibrillator and spark everyone up,” he says. “And I have to be optimistic, otherwise I’ve definitely got no f---ing future being a blackfella.”
Reckless premieres at 8.30pm on Wednesday, November 12, on SBS and streams on SBS On Demand.
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