There's been a resurgence of that in contemporary big budget SF. The Martian. Project Hail Mary. For All Mankind and The Expanse on TV.
I'd put the Expanse there though.
Then again, maybe understandable, since he's a veteran ex cop in the midst of tweakers, junkies, madmen, and generally people not well geared for success in life. And it makes for bigger payoff when we DO get a situation where anantagonist actually does get the better of him - that tells us we're dealing with a sharp customer.
What great frickin' writing.
It should give every greasy shiny suit film executive a bowel-evacuating fit of shame that a support character like Mike gets more audience engagement than a half billion bucks spent in SWeIX: TRoS or Justice League or that godawful Marvel Immortals movie.
Hey, Finance Guys: you find creatives you know are good (y'know, using that newfangled notion of Domain Knowledge), you give 'em a kitchen and you let 'em cook.
Mr Inbetween gets more done with thirty minutes than I thought possible.
Scott Ryan deserves a big break more than most others I can think of - which he might be on the way towards, word is he's got a lot of agents sniffing at his door. He might have to give up his fixation on writing-directing-starring . . . that combo is a very hard combo to pull off at scale. There's only so much one person can do on set . . which is why all that the creator of Mr. Inbetween has managed basically boils down to just . . Mr. Inbetween.
Unless . . . Scott Ryan isn't a great Hidden Filmmaker or Outback Actor at all, and Scott Ryan actually is Ray Shoesmith. It's not Great TV, it's just Tuesday. Which would be super awesome and horrible at the same time.
On rewatching Mr Inbetween, it's good fun to pick out all the fore-shadowing of events, especially parts where Ray figures out a person before it's made obvious to the audience. Awesome writing.
Love the idea of their parents calling them Joel and Noel. :)
(He played the "kitschy" character that Ray pushed through the glass window and of course he's the real-life dad of Ray's "daughter")
It's a great show. We actually thought we bounced off it, but he inhabits the character and his little world so well that we kept thinking about it and were drawn back.