Richard Roxburgh is great at playing delusional hypocrites, so there was reason to be optimistic about him playing the pastor of a Hillsong-like mega church. Sadly, Prosper fails to deliver. Its fictional pastor, Cal Quinn, is a rather wishy-washy megalomaniac, it that makes sense. Sure, he's a controlling, egomaniacal, duplicitous piece of work. But compared to the real-life megachurch leaders we've all read about, he's really not worth getting too excited about. The writers seem to want to have it both ways: Cal is something of a con artist, but he's also a genuine believer, albeit with a tortured relationship with the man upstairs. It's the latter proposition that fails to convince. Cal's wife, Abi, also barely registers on the Tammy Faye scale, and it doesn't help that she's played by Mrs Suburbia herself, Rebecca Gibney. The rest of the family is an equally dull lot, and the murder mystery plonked into the megachurch narrative does nothing to generate the much-needed suspense. In short, it's typical Australian drama: an under-cooked concept, lame storylines, uninspired dialogue and ho-hum direction. Roxburgh and Gibney give it their best, but without much support from an otherwise lacklustre cast. Another not-half-bad idea utterly wasted.
