Middle-age angst with a bit of bite

Robyn Malcolm in Agent Anna.

Life’s still fraught, but funny, for Agent Anna.

In the opening episode of Agent Anna, Robyn Malcolm's beige-bedecked housewife Anna Kingston was forced into the real estate game after being left broke and homeless when her indebted husband absconded to Australia.

For the rest of the short, six-episode first season, Anna simply couldn't seem to catch a break, with a cavalcade of comic humiliations heaped upon her. In the final episode these included the excruciating embarrassment of her snarky colleagues at Eden Realty finding out about her ill-advised, booze-fuelled bonk with company owner Clint (Roy Billing), and a confrontation with her ex that ended with her being escorted out of a hotel by security.

And yet for all that, season one finished on a note of optimism, with Anna popping open a bottle of cheap bubbly to celebrate her first house sale, courtesy of the acrimonious end of two former friends' marriage and the division of their marital assets.

So at the start of season two surely we'll see a happier, more successful Anna. Or at least someone who's a little further along the "journey to independent assertiveness" I predicted would be the show's trajectory after watching that initial ep?

Well, no, not really. It's quickly established that although agents Leon and Sandi (the excellent Adam Gardiner and Theresa Healey) are selling properties like grotesquely over-priced hot cakes, Anna doesn't even have any listings. That revelation prompts a chat with a concerned Clint, who tells Anna he has to face reality and have a little ponder about her future, even though he still clearly thinks very fondly of last season's training-course tryst.

Enter Joel Tobeck as Grant, a crass, apparently filthy rich potential buyer. He says he has $2 million burning a hole in his pocket, but he also has serious impulse-control issues, breaking into for-sale houses when the key's not easily found and getting into heated arguments with motorist mums.

By episode's end it's still unclear whether Grant will provide a much-needed financial fillip for Anna or if his example of unleashed id will start her down a slippery slope to the unethical behaviour that real estate agents insist with admirably straight faces is the exception, not the rule, in their profession.

As it happens, that moral jeopardy is apparently the thematic through-line for this season's 10 episodes, which the show's press kit succinctly sums up as, "Will success corrupt Anna Kingston?"

At this stage I'm betting that it will, just a wee bit, before Anna ultimately pulls back from the brink of selling her soul in exchange for the commission on a multi-million-dollar property. But that's no sure thing - although it's clear from the cast's heightened performances, the snatches of slapstick and the jaunty, joshing music that Agent Anna inhabits a comic universe, it's one that's shot through with a deep sense of middle-aged disappointment that life (and one's self) didn't turn out as hoped.

As such, there's no guarantee of a happy ending.

That trace of curdled dreams' sour taste is what gives this resolutely broad-appeal show a bit of bite and prevents it from playing as an overly saccharine ode to self-actualisation.

Which is why I'm happy to once more open my home to the team from Eden Realty.

Agent Anna returns at 8.30pm, Thursday, on TV One.