‘Dalliance’ Season 1 Review: A Six-Part Reminder That Life After Sixty Is Just Getting Complicated

Paramount+ has quietly assembled one of the most stacked casts of veteran Australian talent in recent memory for ‘Dalliance’, a six episode drama that follows a tight knit circle of friends whose lives get upended when one of their own dies. Hugo Weaving, Heather Mitchell, Georgie Parker and David Wenham anchor an ensemble that also includes Wayne Blair and Catherine McClements, and the pedigree shows almost immediately in how comfortably these actors inhabit people who have known each other for decades.

The premise sounds deceptively simple. Billy, a retired cameraman played by Weaving with a loose, magnetic charm, crosses paths with Dani, a chef played by Mitchell, and that encounter sets off a chain reaction through a friendship group that thought it had already settled into the shape of its final act. Marriages get tested, old secrets surface, and everyone is forced to reckon with the idea that sixty is not the finish line they assumed it would be.

What struck me first is how little this show cares about plot in the conventional sense. There is no mystery to solve, no ticking clock, just people making messy decisions and living with the fallout. That should sound like a recipe for something aimless, but the writing keeps finding sharp, funny, occasionally devastating moments inside ordinary domestic scenes, and I found myself far more invested in a dinner table argument here than in most contrived twists elsewhere on streaming right now.

The performances are what carry it. Weaving plays Billy as the kind of man who fills a room without trying, and that ease makes the character’s flaws land harder when they eventually surface. Mitchell goes the opposite direction, all restraint and quiet calculation, and the contrast between the two of them gives the central relationship a genuine charge. Parker, meanwhile, ends up doing the heaviest emotional lifting of the ensemble, grounding the show every time it threatens to tip into melodrama, and Wenham gets to be genuinely unlikable in a way that feels earned rather than cartoonish.

Not every thread lands with the same weight. Some of the supporting characters get sketched in broad strokes and never quite catch up to the depth given to the central four, which occasionally makes the ensemble feel lopsided across only six episodes. A show this interested in interiority needed a bit more room to let its edges breathe, and there are stretches where a subplot is introduced with real promise only to be resolved a little too neatly in the name of pacing.

Still, the tone is the thing that sets ‘Dalliance’ apart. It treats desire, jealousy and grief in people over sixty as worthy of the same nuance television usually reserves for characters half their age, and it does so without condescension or forced quirkiness. The humor is dry rather than broad, the heartbreak is earned rather than manufactured, and the direction gives every actor space to underplay a scene when a lesser show would have pushed for a bigger reaction.

I also appreciated that the series never tries too hard to explain its characters to us. Backstory arrives in glances and offhand comments rather than clunky exposition, trusting the audience to piece together decades of history from the way two old friends sit next to each other in silence. That confidence in the material, and in the cast’s ability to carry it, is what elevates ‘Dalliance’ above a fairly familiar friendship drama premise.

By the time the finale arrives, the show has earned its bigger emotional swings because it spent five episodes doing the quieter work first. It does not reinvent the ensemble drama, but it executes the form with a warmth and specificity that made me want to sit with these characters for another season immediately after the credits rolled.

Taking the whole season together, ‘Dalliance’ is a confident, beautifully acted piece of television that occasionally spreads itself thin across its ensemble but never loses sight of what makes its central relationships worth watching. My score for Season 1 lands at 8 out of 10.

Have you started ‘Dalliance’ yet, and does its take on love and betrayal in your sixties land the way it did for me? Let me know in the comments.