Australian miniseries Stateless is ostensibly about the government’s treatment of asylum-seeking refugees, who are detained in camps sometimes for years while their visa applications are slowly processed (and often rejected). Much like the situation in the U.S., there are heightened tensions on all sides with activists protesting the mistreatment of detainees and the separation of families.

Yet, somehow Stateless centers the perspectives of mostly white Australians, combining the refugee drama with a ripped-from-the-headlines story of a young woman in peril, based loosely on a famous case from the early ’00s. It doesn’t serve the story of the genuine refugees who struggle in the government-run camps, nor does it effectively serve the story of German-Australian woman Sofie Werner (Yvonne Strahovski), who ends up in a detention center when her efforts to escape both a cult and her overbearing family go wrong.

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Only one of the main characters, Afghan refugee Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), represents the perspective of the thousands of asylum-seekers who attempt to reach Australia. And he doesn’t get the same attention as Sofie or the other Australian central characters, detention center guard Cameron Sandford (Jai Courtney) and government bureaucrat Clare Kowitz (Asher Keddie). The first episode follows Ameer as he attempts to get his family on a boat to Australia, after they’ve already traveled from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Indonesia while fleeing Taliban persecution. He’s an upstanding family man who will sacrifice anything for the safety of his wife and daughters, which makes him sympathetic but not particularly complex.

Ameer’s journey runs parallel to the initially unrelated story of Sofie, a flight attendant with judgmental German-immigrant parents and an unhealthy attachment to a self-help center that is very clearly a cult. By the end of the first episode, Ameer and Sofie both arrive at Barton, a holding facility in the middle of the Outback, and the next few episodes fill in some of the gaps on how they got there.

It’s not hard to guess what happened to bring Ameer to Barton, but when Sofie arrives there speaking in a German accent and calling herself Eva, there are obviously some missing steps along the way. The mystery of Sofie’s identity lends the series some suspense (at least for people unfamiliar with the real-life case of Cornelia Rau), but it also distracts from the more grounded stories of refugees waiting to be approved to enter the country.

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And instead of delving more deeply into the lives of other refugees, the series focuses its other main storylines on Cameron and Clare, both of whom are conflicted about the roles they play within Barton and the larger immigration system. Cameron takes the guard job to make better money to support his family, but he doesn’t share his fellow guards’ contemptuous attitude toward the detainees, and he’s repeatedly placed in compromising positions in which he has to make difficult moral choices. Clare is more dedicated to her job, but she sees the assignment to Barton as a demotion of sorts, and she starts to question the decisions her boss at immigration headquarters pushes her to make.

There’s nothing wrong with humanizing the people responsible for the poor treatment of refugees to emphasize that they aren’t faceless villains, but complex people who are serving competing interests. And the performances from Courtney (who’s mostly seen in Hollywood in one-dimensional action roles) and Keddie are strong, giving these potentially villainous characters a level of sympathetic understanding. Their struggles are nothing compared to what Ameer is going through, though, and brief subplots about other detainees offer intriguing glimpses into alternative directions the story could have taken.

More than anything, the show is about Sofie, with lengthy flashbacks in each episode to her experience in the cult and her gradual mental breakdown. While this seems disconcertingly abrupt in the first episode, it gains extra dimension as the six-episode series progresses. Cate Blanchett, who also co-created the series, shows up in a small role as half of the creepy power couple running the cult (Dominic West is even creepier as the other half), and there’s enough unsettling material there to wish for an entire show devoted just to this group (which is also inspired by a real-life Australian organization). Strahovski, best known for her role on The Handmaid’s Tale, immerses herself in Sofie’s fractured mental state, and series directors Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse weave in fragmented images of her past to give an idea of how she’s unraveling.

The fourth episode, featuring a breakout attempt by several detainees including Sofie, provides some tense, exciting moments, and the show overall is well-constructed with the kind of grand scope needed to tackle such a wide-ranging social problem. With big-name Australian stars like Blanchett, Courtney and Strahovski in the cast, Stateless was a major TV event when it aired in Australia in March, and it carries the kind of serious tone that indicates it’s meant to feel important.

As a statement on government policy, it’s admirable, but as drama, it’s less effective. The slow, measured plot development, uneven focus and inconsistent characterization make it less engaging on a narrative level, even as it provokes the requisite outrage and calls for change.

Starring Yvonne Strahovski, Jai Courtney, Asher Keddie, Fayssal Bazzi, Dominic West and Cate Blanchett, all six episodes of Stateless will premiere July 8 on Netflix.

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