Streaming columnist NICK OVERALL looks at an Australian television series that’s setting the world on fire.

There’s a lot of things one could call Boy Swallows Universe.

A coming-of-age tale about a boy living in working-class Queensland? Yep. An absorbing crime drama exploring the victims of the heroin trade? Absolutely. 

On top of all that you could even describe this as a funny and tragic teenage love story and still be on the money.

It’s perhaps the inability to define Trent Dalton’s spellbinding novel about a deeply troubled family trying to carve out a life in ’80s Brisbane that makes it so hard to look away from.

First hitting shelves in 2018, Boy Swallows Universe has gone on to sell more than a million copies worldwide, making itself a staple of contemporary Aussie fiction that some have gone as far as to call an “instant classic”.

Now it’s got the streaming treatment in the form of a new, seven-part series on Netflix that’s been topping the platform’s charts this week.

So what is Boy Swallows Universe actually about? 

At its core this is the story of Eli Bell, a teenage boy who dreams of breaking out of the poverty he’s grown up in and becoming a crime journalist at The Courier-Mail.

It’s no coincidence that Eli himself has grown up surrounded by crime.

There’s his mother, Frances (Phoebe Tonkin), who is angelic to Eli and his older, mute brother Gus even in her heroin-addicted madness.

His step-father Lyle (Travis Fimmel) is a drug-slinging battler whose belief in the Australian dream has been broken beyond repair.

“How do you get to live in a place like this?” asks the relentlessly inquisitive Eli after visiting a luxurious home in Brisbane’s upper-class enclave.

“You rob a bloody bank mate,” Lyle tells him.

Then there’s his babysitter Slim Halliday (Bryan Brown), a former jail inmate better known as the “The Houdini of Boggo Road” for his numerous daring escapes from prison.

Here’s where things get interesting. While “The Houdini of Boggo Road” might sound like something ripped straight from the pages of a concocted detective yarn, Slim Halliday was indeed a real person who did break out from jail and who served as something of a father figure to Trent Dalton in his own troubled childhood.

The author has called his novel and its now adapted series “semi-autobiographical”. While there are clues here and there, the precise amount of his own life that’s funnelled into the story mostly remains a mystery and an intriguing one at that.

Transmogrifying a tale like this from the page to the screen was no easy feat. Dalton’s writing captures the extraordinary in the ordinary, able to imbue something as typical as a bowl of spaghetti with a sense of magic and, just minutes later, horror and make a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Brisbane feel cosmic.

Remarkably, the show is able to pull off that same sense of wonder and it’s thanks to a deeply committed cast spearheaded by an amazing performance from Felix Cameron as young Eli.

One thing about Eli is that he cries easily, a trait he often berates himself for given the macho figures that surround him. That’s no small ask for any actor, let alone one as young as Cameron and yet he pulls it off effortlessly while also giving his character a sense of innocent, childlike curiosity.

For amidst all the fear of the crime-fuelled world Boy Swallows Universe depicts, this is still a sweet and nostalgic spiel about growing up in Australia.

And, boy, is it Australian.

From lunch orders chock-full of lamingtons to the spluttering motor of a Ford Falcon, the sights and sounds of Down Under are out in force here and that’s not even to mention a banger soundtrack filled to the brim with icons such as The Angels, Men at Work and Paul Kelly.

It’s certainly resonated, storming its way to Netflix’s most watched show in Australia this week and also cracking the top 10 in both the US and the UK.

There’s a lot of things one could call Boy Swallows Universe. A great TV show can be added to that list.