“Heartbreak High” achieved a global run that saw it hit the top 10 in 53 countries, earn an International Emmy, take home two AACTA Best Drama wins, plus more – confirming something the Australian industry had spent years arguing about: locally specific, unapologetically diverse stories don’t need to be softened to travel.
That argument is now settled, but Ayesha Madon, standing at the show’s final season party, wasn’t talking about what the show proved; she was talking about what it didn’t fix.
“Colourism is still a massive thing here,” she said. “I would really love to just see more dark-skinned Australians on TV.” Then, without breaking stride: “I just hope we get to see more nuanced stories come out of this country, exported inside out, rather than the other way around.”
Inside out, not Australian but filtered through what other markets expect or accept. Not diversity as a category to fill, ours, in full. Which raises a question the industry has been largely avoiding in the wake of the success of “Heartbreak High”: in proving that diverse Australian stories travel, did we also just prove that a specific, curated version of diversity travels, and call it enough?
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The cast of “Heartbreak High” is genuinely diverse by any standard measure, but diversity on screen has never been a single axis. Research into colourism in casting, in Hollywood and beyond, consistently shows that lighter-skinned actors from minority backgrounds are disproportionately cast in leads, while darker-skinned actors are funnelled into secondary roles or not cast at all.
The breakthrough of representation, in practice, is not evenly distributed across the spectrum it claims to represent. You can make a diverse show and still replicate, within that diversity, the same hierarchies of proximity to whiteness that the show was ostensibly pushing against.
This is the more uncomfortable version of the “Heartbreak High” conversation. Not whether Australian stories can go global, that question has a clear and proud answer now, but whose Australian story gets to be the one that does.
Australia’s screen industry has historically operated from what researchers have described as a “colonial default” — the Anglo-Celtic baseline that governs what gets green-lit, what gets cast, and what format of the country gets exported. “Heartbreak High” disrupted that default, but disrupting a baseline is not the same as dismantling the structure that produced it.
Madon’s phrase — “inside out rather than the other way around” — is doing more work than it first appears. The default model has always been outside in: the industry imagines an external audience, predicts what they will accept, and produces content shaped by that prediction. The result, historically, has been content that exports a flattened, palatable version of Australian identity: sun, beach, easy confidence, nothing that would require explanation.
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“Heartbreak High” moved away from that. But the next step, which is what Madon is actually calling for, is to go further: to tell stories that don’t start from any imagined external audience at all. Stories that begin from inside the most specific, most overlooked, most under-represented versions of what this country actually is.
That includes dark-skinned Australians. It includes First Nations stories that aren’t about trauma or reconciliation as the primary frame. It includes the multicultural working class of Western Sydney, not as local colour but as protagonists.
The infrastructure for this exists: Screen Australia’s funding frameworks, the networks’ stated commitments to diversity, and the proven global appetite for Australian content. What has been missing is the follow-through. The willingness to back stories that require the industry to relinquish the last remaining controls on what Australian means.
“Heartbreak High” ends this week, and what it proved was real. What Madon is saying is that proof was only ever the precondition. The actual work is what comes after, and whether the industry, now that the argument is won, will use the momentum to go somewhere genuinely new or simply polish the same surface until it looks different enough.
Exported inside out, all the way in.
“Heartbreak High” Season 3 arrives on Netflix today.