Television has spent decades showing us what it thinks life after 60 looks like.
There are grandparents, carers, retirees and characters contemplating the supposedly quieter years ahead. What we don’t see nearly as often are people in their 60s falling in love, wanting sex, making questionable decisions, ending relationships, starting new ones and discovering that six decades of experience haven’t necessarily made life any easier to understand.
Georgie Parker has a rather more succinct description of the problem: older people on television have too often been made “boring”.
“They’re often portrayed as carers or people being cared for, with lives that are somehow diminishing,” Parker tells Starts at 60.
“For women especially, a lot of the roles I’ve read or seen simply haven’t explored what being in your 60s is actually like.”
That is emphatically not the world of Dalliance, the new six-part Australian drama premiering tonight on Paramount+. Parker and Heather Mitchell lead the impressive Australian ensemble alongside Hugo Weaving and David Wenham in a story about people who, according to conventional wisdom, should have everything figured out by now.
They don’t, not even close.
Dalliance begins when charismatic former cameraman Billy, played by Weaving, meets restaurateur Dani, played by Mitchell, on a Sydney Harbour ferry.
There is an immediate attraction and one fairly substantial complication: Billy is married to Rose, played by Parker. They have been together for 40 years.
Then Billy brings Dani home to meet his wife.
What follows reaches well beyond a simple love triangle, pulling friends and family into a story about loyalty, desire, secrets and upheaval, and what happens when the life you’ve known for decades suddenly shifts.
For Parker, exploring what happens when a relationship that has defined much of your adult life is suddenly thrown into uncertainty was irresistible.
“I was drawn to the question of how you keep living when the foundation of your life is shaken,” she says.
“Rose still has friends and a daughter — so how does she absorb this change? How does it manifest?
“Everyone handles things differently, and Rose is a very particular person. I loved the way her story is slowly revealed. It was a real acting challenge and a beautiful piece of work to inhabit.”
If passionate relationships involving people in their 60s still feel vaguely confronting on television, Parker thinks years of conditioning have plenty to do with it.
“We’re not used to seeing older people wanting sex or having sex on screen,” she says.
“We’re conditioned to think of sex as a ‘youthful’ experience, so TV constantly shows young people making love.
“When you see someone on screen and think, ‘That woman is my mother’s age’ or ‘That’s my dad’s age’, and they’re having a great time sexually, it can create discomfort. But that conditioning is disappointing because it doesn’t reflect reality.
“Older people still experience everything internally as though they’re 30 — they just have more years and experience behind them.”
Importantly, Dalliance isn’t populated by 60-somethings desperately trying to behave like they’re 30. Their history is part of the attraction of the story with marriages, children, careers, mistakes and decades-long friendships making their choices more complicated, not less interesting.
Mitchell says much of that authenticity came from the experiences of those creating the show.
“In the writers’ room, nothing was wildly imagined,” she says. “The stories come from our own experiences — mine, John’s and the other writers’.
“We weren’t fabricating ‘wouldn’t it be crazy if…?’ scenarios. Often it was more like, ‘This actually happened last week — how can we use that?’ That’s why the relationships feel rich and real.”
Mitchell was determined Dani wouldn’t simply be reduced to “the other woman”.
She has no children and hasn’t made a long-term relationship the central pillar of her adult life. Much of her identity has instead been invested in her career.
“She’s someone who thought she could ‘do it all’, as women of our generation were told, but in reality it’s very hard to balance everything without enormous support,” Mitchell says.
Her career is then taken from her, with public humiliation attached, leaving Dani reassessing where she belongs.
“She becomes an outsider twice over — first in the world generally, and then again within this tight-knit group of friends,” she explains.
“It felt important to have a character like Dani who already felt like an outsider before the story even begins. Not everyone has the classic life of partner, kids and white-picket-fence, and I wanted that reality on screen.”
It’s a question Dalliance keeps circling.
After spending 40 or 50 years building a particular life, do you owe more to what you’ve created, or to the life you still want to live?
Mitchell doesn’t believe there is one answer.
“I think it’s a personal choice,” she says.
“If you have the courage, resilience and fortitude, you can absolutely make a radical change later in life if that’s what you need.”
She points to Luke, played by Wayne Blair, whose decision to make a major change has consequences for those around him.
But Mitchell has an interesting take on what we call reinvention.
“Sometimes ‘reinvention’ isn’t really reinvention. It’s going back to something that was underdeveloped — a part of yourself that never got the chance to fully emerge.
“You’re not inventing a new self so much as finally allowing an old, true part of yourself to come through.”
Romantic relationships provide plenty of Dalliance’s drama, but friendship matters just as much.
Mitchell describes her friendships as “enormously important”, while acknowledging some quietly disappear over the years without any dramatic falling-out.
Parker says major changes in life can also reveal things about friendships you may not have expected.
“Friendships shift and change,” she says.
Longstanding friends, however, possess something newcomers can’t replicate.
“Those friends have known you through everything. There’s a shorthand, and if you’re honest with each other, they’ll challenge you: ‘You did that before and you didn’t like it — don’t forget,” Parker says.
“Age can also change how much unresolved baggage we’re prepared to carry. As you get older, you sometimes think, ‘I don’t know if I have time to keep this going if it stays unresolved.'”
Mitchell, who is also a producer on Dalliance, has spent enough years in the industry to recognise how much her attitude towards female roles has changed.
“As a young actress, I basically accepted that I would always be in service to the male character,” she says. “I might have questioned it privately, but I didn’t push back. Now, I absolutely do. I don’t want to play female roles that lack agency. It’s not about needing more screen time; it’s about whether the character has real purpose and autonomy.”
That confidence extends beyond the characters she chooses.
“I’m much more confident now about speaking my mind. I truly back myself,” she says. “I’m bolder in saying, ‘I’m uncomfortable with that choice; we need to talk about it.’ What I love is the conversation that follows — not a simple yes or no, but a real exchange.”
With that confidence, she says, has come a willingness to question her own certainty.
“Just because I feel this strongly about something doesn’t mean I’m correct. It could just be a habitual response,” Mitchell says.
“So I try to slow down, listen to others, and often I’m convinced that I was on the wrong track. That’s actually liberating.”
When Dalliance was announced, the promo notes summed up its premise in one sentence: “If you think you’ll get it all worked out by your 60s, think again.”
So what have she and Parker discovered about getting older that their younger selves would never have believed?
For Parker, it’s how much she still wants to learn.
“There is so much I still want to learn,” she says.
“I seriously want to go back to adult education — study history, music — just dive into subjects I love.
“I’ve also accepted that I love working and being challenged by my work. It took me a long time to admit that. I kept saying I wanted a break, but the truth is I’m a bit of a work fiend, and that’s a strength, not an inconvenience to ‘real life’.”
Mitchell’s answer is beautifully simple.
“My younger self would never have believed that I’d have more energy now than ever,” she says.
“I sleep because I have to in order to function, not because I’m exhausted. It’s almost an inconvenience — ‘I’d better get some sleep so I can get up and do everything I want tomorrow.’ I never imagined life could be more energised as an older person than it was as a young one.”
Dalliance premieres tonight, Thursday, August 27, on Paramount+.
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