This is not the cardboard cells and high-strung melodrama of Prisoner: this is a hard-edged, cold-eyed descent into a brutal world filled with brutal women – and one thing it has in common with the original is its placement front and centre of an extraordinary female ensemble.

Wentworth’s genius is in creating a powerful, almost cinematic drama with its own identity, but woven cunningly with echoes of the source material. Fans should appreciate the references, but non-fans won’t suffer a bit – this show succeeds on its own terms. It’s Wentworth, but not as we know it: what the progenitors of Prisoner might have made without the constraints of 1979-vintage TV, a familiar world hardened up, a compellingly ferocious kick in the teeth. People will get hurt. There will be blood. Wentworth is back, and you won’t want to look away.

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The old razorwire gang are all back and there’s not a weak actor among them: Doreen (played by Shareena Clanton), Lizzie Birdsworth (Celia Ireland), Franky Doyle (Nicole da Silva) and crime matriarch Jacs Holt (Kris McQuade).

IT’S the fear in the eyes of Bea Smith, formerly known to Australian TV audiences as the terrifying top dog of Cell Block H on Prisoner, that acts like a marker between that series and its new “reimagining,” Wentworth, coming soon to Foxtel. The Bea of old was seemingly fearless, ruling the fictional women’s detention centre with an iron fist and animal instincts. This new Bea (played by Underbelly Razor’s Danielle Cormack) who is only just beginning her life at Wentworth as scared as a rabbit, a battered wife unaware what easy prey she could become on “the inside”.

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Her terror, as she sits in the back of paddy wagon is utterly palpable, the moral bankruptcy of some of the inmates, made clear from the first graphic scenes of episode one, screened for media this week and to air on the SoHo channel from May 1.

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