The woman who owned the video store in my 1980s hometown also moonlighted as a scriptwriter for A Country Practice. There was a hand-drawn sign on her counter, text in block capitals above an upturned cartoon pig: ‘Who cares who killed Laura Palmer,’ it read, ‘I killed Doris.’

At the time, this sign was an enigma to me. I was too young for auteur–director David Lynch’s surreal soap opera Twin Peaks. Now, though, I read the sign as a rare insider-critique of Australian TV. Look, it declared, look what holds our attention. Cruel flies buzzed around the trotters of the TV event of the decade: the death of Doris, the pig with a drinking problem from Wandin Valley.