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The seven-part British series Banished (CBC, 9 p.m. ET) is a good but brutal ride.

It opens with a woman screaming and an attempted rape. From there on, there is a lot of rape, brutality and bleakness. All of that is occasionally lightened by flashes of human decency; flashes that are the central meaning, perhaps.

If you've ever wondered what was it like for the British convicts shipped to Australia in the 1780s, Banished attempts to provide an answer. It was life in, as one character puts it, "A godforsaken corner of a godforsaken country across a godforsaken ocean." Banished also deals directly with the traumatic experiences of the men who guarded the convicts.

The series is written by Jimmy McGovern, one of the most important TV writers of the past few decades. He created Cracker, with its unforgettable, messed-up criminal psychologist played by Robbie Coltrane. And he created The Lakes, a grim realist drama about the people living and working in a Lake District village. McGovern's work was the model for many who came after him, especially among American writers freed from network constraints by premium cable's investment in socially relevant, mature drama.

Here he is dealing with issues large and small. Banished is about Australia's beginning as a penal colony. It's about the birth of country. And it is about the small-scale, often horrifying intricacies of the grim life inside an outpost where, if the rules of civilized behaviour are abandoned entirely, there is only terrifying anarchy.

At first, it is all horror. The screaming young woman is Elizabeth Quinn (MyAnna Buring) and soon she has the status of being the first woman to be flogged in the colony. She's been caught leaving the male-prisoner quarters after a tryst with her partner Tommy Barrett (Julian Rhind-Tutt). See, the female prisoners "belong" to the soldiers guarding them. They are their sex slaves. Such is the grotesque balance of power that an officer who doesn't usually dally with the women tells another officer, "London will be sending more women [prisoners]. In the meantime, shouldn't we share the ones we have?"

The male prisoners work on constructing some sort of settlement for everyone. There is little to eat. A giant of a man, a brooding blacksmith bent on malevolence, steals the food of other men. Nobody complains and then, at last, somebody does. Everything that authority unleashes on the prisoners is meant to terrify and dehumanize them.

Not since Robert Hughes's magisterial book The Fatal Shore has there been such a vivid picture of early Australia as a black hole of barbarity – a terrible wickedness is unleashed when a small group of armed men have power over many others, and those others are designated as disposable.

Yet this powerful drama is not, in the end, about that barbarity. There are hidden poetical leanings in everyone, it seems. In such a place, where a truculent savagery is the system of control, decency can still rise to the surface. This is McGovern's message.

As brutal as the flogging of Elizabeth is to watch, it is preceded by a scene in which the designated flogger refuses to do it. Something in him rebels against treating a woman in this way. An officer snaps at him, "You flog this whore or you die." The essential tension is not between the prisoners and their captors, but between the best and worst of human instincts. Extraordinary events unfold. A benign quality blossoms on occasion.

Banished is, as such, both maddening and compelling. The narrative never moves quite as you expect it. It is among the most odd of British period dramas – political, poetic, naive and nerve-shredding.

All times ET. Check local listings.

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