Australian
Screen

Clip description

Frances (Robyn Butler) and staff members Dawn (Heidi Arena), Nada (Nicole Nabout), Neil (Bob Franklin), Ky (Keith Brockett), Lachie (Josh Lawson) and Matthew (Stephen Ballantyne), search for a suitable theme for Book Week but are interrupted by an early customer who is having difficulties returning her book. Frances’s irritation is coloured by the perception that the customer is a Muslim woman who, by definition in Frances’s prejudiced mind, is deliberately flouting the library’s rules.

Curator’s notes

As Robyn Butler herself said of The Librarians, ‘It’s not really about a library, it’s about Frances and the relationship she has with Christine and her eccentric staff’. This clip is only a small part of the long scene which sets up most of these eccentric characters.

The weekly staff meeting is a proven way to introduce characters to a serial and, in this case, it is particularly well managed. Dawn’s irritating and clumsy attempts to please everyone, Neil’s sneers, Nada’s martyrdom, dopey hunk Lachie, the intellectually pretentious Matthew and overly eager Ky are all neatly described. Also set up nicely is the antagonism between Neil and Frances, which provides the basis for the overall story arc of the six-part series. At this stage you would be expecting to have some sympathy for the person who has to run this circus, but you don’t. Frances is shown to rule the library with a combination of threats, sarcasm, condescension and petty punishments – an adult version of schoolyard bullying. Robyn Butler gives a tour de force performance.