Harry Strang (Roy Billing) and Cam Delray (Aaron Pederson) have located a winning horse that's been put out to pasture, but they can turn him back into a champion and make a killing at the races. All they have to do is keep the horse separate from Harry's well-known name, so they use Irish as the horse's owner, which leads to all sorts of shenanigans, including the horse staying in Jack's courtyard at his house (no, this wasn't his idea or doing).
Meanwhile, Jack gets pulled into a weird conspiracy involving a mega-church, a dangerous private military group, religious animosity between Christians and Muslims, and an odd money trail that starts with a mysterious payment made to his account by a Filipino bank that doesn't really exist. Jack will have to rely on Linda for help in solving the mystery, but she's got plenty on her own plate.
Her plush job turns out to be not so much when she discovers nothing is as it seems. Her boss, Orton (Jacek Koman), just sits on the roof of the decrepit office all day, reading the paper and boozing it up. Meanwhile, nothing works in the office and she is lucky when the internet is up. Linda is chasing the story of a Australian-born Muslim terrorist said to be working out of the Philippines, but gets more danger than she bargained for while hunting the infamous man. When she and Orton happen upon a decimated village that is somehow tied to the mega-church's oversight board and a power plant being built, she also discovers a brave little orphan girl named Fatma, who steals her heart. Even though she and Jack can't seem to commit, Fatma may just change Linda's heart.
With Linda AWOL, Irish gets tangled up with a gorgeous sculptor named Sarah (Claudia Karvan), whose sister was working for the Way of the Cross mega-church in the Philippines and subsequently disappeared under odd circumstances. As she and Jack search for her younger sister and begin to unravel the mystery surrounding her disappearance, they begin a relationship, but as is standard with Jack's limited romantic experience, things don't go too well. By the end of the series, he and Linda will have solved their respective, yet thoroughly entangled mysteries, but still won't be sure about one another and their future.
While Jack Irish: Season 1 is an interesting yarn, it felt like plot-twisting information and character overload to me. It seemed like there was too much being crammed into the intertwined storylines, and as I said in my review of Jack Irish: The Movies, I preferred the shorter format of the films. This was still good and quite interesting, I just didn't enjoy it as much as the films. It was good to see the regulars back, for the most part, including Harry Strang, Cam Delray, Barry Tregear (Shane Jacobson), Drew Greer (Damien Richardson) and Simone (Kate Atkinson), along with The Fitzroy Youth Club pub regulars. Charlie was played by David Ritchie, following the death of Vadim Glowna, but he did a good job. He just wasn't as crusty and cranky in the role as Vadim Glowna.
Special features includes a behind-the-scenes featurette and a photo gallery.
Overall, if you liked the movies, you'll want to see how the story carries on and how the characters develop. It'll be interesting to see where life takes this motley group.
