Tidelands is an Australian Netflix original series that released in December of 2018. Although Australia is not a prolific producer of speculative fiction, there have been a number of well-known shows from our distant Oceanic cousins–Farscape comes to mind, as do Glitch and Terra Nova.

The concept of the show is excellent: powerful sirens (merfolk-adjacent mythical creatures) have a long-established foothold in the drug trade. It’s centered on the story of a young woman, Cal McTeer (Charlotte Best), who has just been released from prison after serving ten years for a fire she set at age 14 which killed a man. Cal returns home to find that her brother is working with the “tidelanders”–the sirens, who the locals believe are a hippie commune–in the drug trade. She jumps in and quickly becomes entangled in the dangers of what her family is involved in and the mysteries of the tidelanders.

The acting in this show is quite good. Not a single performance comes across as inauthentic. However, their efforts are undermined by some poor choices behind-the-scenes. Although the lines are consistently well-delivered, the lines themselves are sometimes canned, sometimes, unnecessary, and sometimes cryptic. The show’s score is also generally over-engineered; that is, the music does not always match the moment and sometimes overtakes the narrative beats, unnecessarily elevating scenes that ought to be mundane.

If you like the idea of a gritty mermaid story and can tolerate some distinctly medium production choices, Tidelands is worth watching. It’s only eight episodes, a single season–you can binge it in a day. Put it on in the background while you’re working at a computer or something. It’s a worthwhile thing to have in your repertoire, but not an edge-of-your-seat, can’t-miss-a-beat kind of show.