I almost passed on Mr Inbetween because the runtime looked like a red flag. Every prestige crime drama I actually finish runs 50 minutes or more, like the still-making-news Breaking Bad and The Sopranos — shows that need the extra time to let a scene sit before it turns violent. Twenty-five minutes felt like a show that hadn’t put in the hours yet.
It was a Sunday afternoon, I was bored, and I was scrolling Hulu for something I could bail on after 10 minutes if it didn’t hold up. The title card came up, and I checked Rotten Tomatoes out of habit, mostly to confirm I wasn’t wasting an afternoon. 95% from critics. 98% from audiences. I sat at that second number for a second — I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a show clear 90% with almost nobody I know having heard of it. Could it be another Hulu series few have heard of that was really good?
Twenty-six episodes later, I understand completely. Ray Shoesmith doesn’t need an hour. He barely needs the 25 minutes he gets.
Where Mr Inbetween came from
Scott Ryan spent a decade getting Ray Shoesmith to the screen
To understand why Mr Inbetween feels so distinct from the algorithmic churn of modern streaming television, you have to understand where it came from. The show is the brainchild of Scott Ryan, who wrote every single episode and stars as Ray Shoesmith. Ryan originally introduced the character in a gritty, zero-budget mockumentary titled The Magician back in 2005.
Despite winning critical praise and developing an underground cult following in Australia, the film didn’t launch Ryan into instant Hollywood stardom. Instead, he spent the better part of the next decade working odd jobs, driving taxis, and laboring, all while relentlessly pitching and polishing the scripts that would eventually become this series.
Nash Edgerton directed. That’s one guy behind the camera for the whole run, not a rotating cast of TV directors parachuting in for an episode each. You can feel it; the show never has that lurch where a new director’s style shows up for 40 minutes and then disappears again.
Who is Ray Shoesmith in Mr Inbetween?
A hitman who never separates his two lives
Set against the sun-soaked, working-class suburbs of Sydney, the series follows Ray while he navigates society’s fringes. Ray is a freelance criminal tradesman. If a local strip club owner needs a bouncer, a loan shark needs a debt extracted from an evasive gambler, or a kingpin needs a severe problem buried in a shallow bush grave, Ray is the professional who takes the call. He does his job cleanly, dispassionately, and with a toothy, disarming expression that can curdle into cold-blooded menace in the fraction of a second.
What makes the series exceptional, however, isn’t the mechanics of Ray’s violence; it is his total lack of compartmentalization.
Ray doesn’t maintain two entirely separate identities like Walter White or Dexter Morgan. He lives openly in the messy middle ground. When he isn’t roughing up deadbeats, he is managing the everyday logistics of raising his young daughter Brittany (played by Edgerton’s stepdaughter, Chika Yasumura, whose natural chemistry with Ryan grounds the entire emotional spine of the series). He is attempting to date Ally (Brooke Satchwell), a paramedic who slowly senses the dark current beneath his affable demeanor.
Most movingly, he is serving as the primary caregiver for his older brother Bruce (Nicholas Cassim), who is progressively deteriorating from motor neuron disease.
The show refuses to treat Ray’s domestic responsibilities as dramatic distractions or mere contrast against the crime plots. One scene finds Ray burying a corpse after an interrogation goes wrong; the very next scene finds him attending a parent-teacher conference or picking up dim sims at a suburban takeaway counter. Ray lives by an intensely personal, unbending moral code: treat people with basic decency, protect the defenseless at all costs, and mete out sudden, disproportionate physical consequences to anyone who behaves like an unprovoked bully.
How Mr Inbetween avoids streaming’s runtime bloat
Every scene earns its place in a 25-minute episode
No network is cutting these shows off at 42 minutes anymore, and you can tell most of them don’t know what to do with the room they’ve been given. Somebody’s crew starts arguing about logistics. A detective chases something for six episodes that gets resolved in about 90 seconds during the finale. It’s dead weight, and everybody kind of knows it, and the shows keep doing it anyway.
Mr Inbetween rejects every ounce of that indulgence. Treating the 25-minute runtime as a creative constraint rather than a handicap, the storytelling moves with ruthless efficiency. Ryan trims away all the narrative throat-clearing. No scenes show Ray explaining his plan to an associate, executing it, and then debriefing afterward. The show drops you into the middle of an encounter, lets the character dynamics develop in sharp, naturalistic dialogue, and cuts straight to black the second the narrative point lands.
Casual conversations in the front seat of a car perform the heavy lifting that other prestige dramas reserve for whole multi-episode arcs. Across all three seasons, I kept waiting for the inevitable mid-season filler episode — a half-hour when characters tread water while waiting for the finale — but it never arrived. Every minute serves a specific narrative or thematic purpose.
The dark comedy that makes Mr Inbetween work
The humor never lets you forget what Ray actually does
“Hitman drama” undersells how funny this show is. “Dark comedy” undersells how much it can rattle you a scene later.
A debtor won’t stop talking about something totally unrelated to the money he owes, and Ray’s face just falls. That’s the joke. Two criminals get into it on the side of the road about whether Santa Claus is a morally defensible concept. Ray tries to walk a guy through anger management techniques while the guy is actively squaring up to hit him.
The violence still lands wrong when it comes. People stay broken by it — the show doesn’t cut away early or let a time jump smooth it over. There’s no arc where Ray earns his way back into being a good guy. He reads his daughter a bedtime story on a Tuesday and does something unforgivable by Thursday, and that’s just the shape of the week. The show doesn’t comment on it. It just moves to the next scene.
Why Mr Inbetween ended after three seasons
One of the greatest weaknesses of successful television is knowing when to walk away. Network and streaming models alike are heavily incentivized to milk a popular intellectual property until the creative premise has been completely exhausted. Ryan and Edgerton deliberately resisted that trap.
After three tightly plotted seasons spanning just 26 episodes, Ryan announced that he was stepping away from the character, having told the exact story he set out to tell. Because the creative team controlled the timeline, the finale delivers one of the cleanest, most satisfying thematic conclusions on modern television. It doesn’t insult the audience with a tidy, unearned redemption arc, nor does it deliver a cynical, moralizing punishment to appease genre conventions. It simply stays true to Ray Shoesmith right up to the final, iconic frame.
Mr Inbetween is streaming in full on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ everywhere else. All 26 episodes, most under 30 minutes — you could get through it in a weekend if you had nothing else going on. If Barry worked for you, or you go back to The Sopranos (or another of the many impressive crime dramas) for the quiet scenes as much as the loud ones, this is worth the time.