Brisbane’s most colourful inner-city precinct will provide the backdrop for a major new six-part ABC crime drama, with Queensland production company Moving Floor Entertainment set to begin filming Fortitude Valley in the suburb from April 2026 ahead of its 2027 national premiere on ABC TV and ABC iview.
The announcement confirms that one of Brisbane’s most cinematically distinctive and culturally loaded neighbourhoods is finally getting the screen treatment many have long argued it deserves. The series places Fortitude Valley at the centre of a crime thriller that moves through family secrets, underground power structures and the moral compromises that accumulate in a precinct where extremes of wealth and poverty have always coexisted within a few city blocks of each other. For residents and regulars of the Valley, the prospect of seeing their suburb rendered on screen with the full weight of a prestige Australian drama behind it carries a particular kind of significance.
The Series and the Story
Fortitude Valley is a six-part crime thriller exploring underground crime syndicates, family secrets, corruption and power plays set in the Queensland capital. The series stars AACTA Award-winning First Nations actor Hunter Page-Lochard, known for Reckless and The Newsreader, alongside acclaimed actress Kat Stewart, whose credits include Offspring, Black Snow and Five Bedrooms.
Page-Lochard is not only the lead actor but one of the series’ three co-writers, sharing writing credits with Moving Floor Entertainment co-founders Stephen M. Irwin and Leigh McGrath. Direction falls to Sian Davies, with Andy Walker producing and Ross Allsop serving as co-producer. Executive producers are Irwin, McGrath, Greg Sitch and Page-Lochard, with ABC executive producers Brett Sleigh and Rachel Okine overseeing for the national broadcaster. International distribution is handled by DCD Rights.
The series carries major production investment from Screen Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Screen Queensland, and will film and complete post-production entirely within Queensland.
The Company Behind It
Moving Floor Entertainment was founded in 2020 by Brisbane-based writer-producers Stephen M. Irwin and Leigh McGrath, who had previously collaborated for seven years across productions including Harrow, Tidelands and Secrets and Lies. The company launched with a clear commitment to produce high-end drama from Queensland for international audiences, and Fortitude Valley marks its most significant project to date.
The pedigree behind the series is substantial. Irwin co-created the forensic crime series Harrow for the ABC, created and wrote Secrets and Lies, which the ABC Network later remade in the United States, and co-created the Tidelands for Netflix. McGrath co-created and co-executive produced all three seasons of Harrow and co-created Five Bedrooms, which now airs on Paramount Plus, Peacock and BBC One. Both have worked extensively with major broadcasters in the United Kingdom and the United States. Fortitude Valley marks the first project they have brought to screen where Brisbane’s streets are not merely a backdrop but the explicit subject of the story itself.
McGrath graduated from Griffith University in 1994, and his return to produce a landmark series set in his home city represents the kind of career arc that the Queensland screen industry has spent decades working to make possible.
Why Fortitude Valley
The Valley’s particular geography of contrasts, the Chinatown precinct, the heritage-listed Art Deco facades, Brunswick Street’s strip of venues and late-night trade, the social services concentrated along its edges and the significant levels of disadvantage that persist alongside recent gentrification, gives the series a built-in visual and thematic richness that few Australian suburbs can offer. It is a place where multiple Brisbanes overlap: the tourist precinct and the struggling community, the developer’s vision and the street-level reality.
Those contrasts have made Fortitude Valley fertile ground for storytelling across its history. The suburb’s real-world story includes the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police and political corruption that ran from 1987 to 1989 and fundamentally changed the relationship between law enforcement, vice industries and civic power in Queensland. The inquiry’s findings emerged largely from the Valley itself. A crime drama set in contemporary Fortitude Valley carries the weight of that history whether it addresses it explicitly or not, and it gives the series a depth of local cultural memory that purely fictional settings cannot replicate.
What It Means for Queensland Screen
The Fortitude Valley production joins a growing slate of work that positions Queensland as a serious force in the Australian drama landscape. Screen Queensland’s current supported productions include Muster Dogs, Dance with Tom, Troppo Season Two and the upcoming Dustfall. Fortitude Valley, backed by both Screen Australia and Screen Queensland through the Screen Finance Fund and the Post, Digital and Visual Effects Incentive, represents the largest locally created drama production the state has supported in recent years.
Every cast and crew position, every day of location shooting through the Valley’s streets and laneways, every post-production hour completed in Queensland contributes to an industry infrastructure that needs exactly this kind of sustained, high-profile investment to retain and develop the talent pipeline that makes future productions possible.
Filming begins in Brisbane in April 2026. Fortitude Valley airs on ABC TV and ABC iview in 2027.
Published 1-March-2026.
