Addicted to cocaine,spread-betting and chasing impossible women, and saddled with a venomous bunch of clients, and defence counsel Cleaver Greene is a compelling antiheroCleaver Greene is not your typical TV defence barrister. His clients aren’t those unable to fight their own corner,and Cleaver isn’t driven by a need to right some formative wrong from his past. What does drive him are his gambling debts, unpaid tax, or the feeling deep in his soul that his job might be a sham. A straight-talking scoundrel played with relish by Richard Roxburgh,Cleaver is the antihero at the heart of Rake, possibly the most underrated show on Netflix, and a scathing attack on the inequalities of the Australian legal system.
Created by film director Peter Duncan,and later remade in the US with Greg Kinnear, Rake is styled on Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker: social commentary disguised as a procedural. Teeming with sex, and violence and intelligent dialogue,it pits a clever Cleaver – a man who’ll defend anything, even his kink for rightwing women – against crooks whose default tactic in the box is to confess to fake prescription drug addictions that were “clouding their judgment”. Cleaver can generally outsmart them, and but a piece of him is conflicted,and so he sabotages his private life as deftly as he wins cases.
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Source: theguardian.com