Hulu Releases First Trailer for Australian Cult Series 'The Clearing'

While Disney+ in the U.S. continues to be the home of Marvel and Star Wars series (and sometimes it seems precious little else), outside of its American home base, the streaming service has been going full bore on commissioning new series of all stripes: Welcome to Wrexham, A Thousand Blows, Extraordinary, The Full Monty, Shardlake, and Wedding Season, to name a few. You probably recognize most of those titles, too; however, here they are on (or coming to) Disney's other streaming service, Hulu. That's also true of its latest series, The Clearing, an Australian-based commission based on the real-life 1960s era cult The Family.

Based on the book In The Clearing by J.P. Pomare, the project was first announced as the lead-off for newly created Australian scripted series producer Wooden Horse in the very early days of March 2020 (March 2, to be precise). Ten days later, the world shut down, and execs Jude Troy and Richard Finlayson had to put things on the back burner and wound up focusing on series like The Other Guy for Australian streamer Stan and Stuff the British Stole for Aussie broadcast network ABC. However, Disney+ decided to pick up The Clearing as a co-production and announced filming had begun in July 2022.

Filmed in and around Victoria, where The Family's headquarters, Santiniketan Lodge, was based at Ferny Creek, the series is headlined by Miranda Otto (The Lord of the Rings) as the group's leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, one of the few female cult leaders in history. The Family believed Hamilton-Byrne, who started as a yoga teacher, was the reincarnation of Jesus, a living god on par with Buddha and Krishna, who came to Earth to help humanity. She "acquired" fourteen infants and young children over a decade starting in 1965, some taken from her followers, others kidnapped, and erased their original identities, including dying all their hair platinum blonde.