Australians came to the ABC’s The Killing Season in their droves, their fascination with the Rudd–Gillard struggleas unfinished as the saga itself.
Rudd and Gillard dominate the drama as they strain to claim the narrative of Labor’s years in power. The journey to screen for each of their interviews is telling in itself. Kevin Rudd gives his painful account of the periodand recalled in livid detail the events of losing the prime ministership. Julia Gillard is frank and unsparing of hercolleagues.
More than a hundred people were interviewed for The Killing Season—ministers, backbenchers, staffers, party officials, pollsters and public servants—recording their vivid accounts of the public and private events that made the Rudd and Gillard governments and then brought them undone. It is a damning portrait of a party at war with itself: the personal rivalries and the bitter defeats that have come to define the Rudd–Gillard era.
The Killing Season Uncut will be structured in the same format as the TV series but will be enriched by the inclusion of much of the material that never went to air.
