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 It's A Jungle Out There... Underbelly is an Australian drama revolving around the Melbourne and Sydney criminal underworld. The series (which consists of three separate series), is based upon the novel "Leadbelly: Inside Australia's Underworld", written by John Silvester and Andrew Rule, reportes for the newspaper The Age.The series consists of three distinct shows. The first season, simply titled Underbelly, aired in 2008. It portrayed the downfall of Alphonse Gangitano and the rise of Jason Moran and Carl Williams. When the Morans go into drug trafficking, Carl teams up with Tony Mokbel and begins using the Morans gear to produce and sell his own product. He is caught, beaten and shot, leaving him with a desire to tear apart the Carlton Crew, a desire that resulted in a gang war that left over twenty people dead.The second season, Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities, goes back in time to the late 1970s and the 1980s, as ambitious drug dealer Terry Clark teams up with Bob Trimbole to traffic in heroin from Asia. While the series is anchored by that storyline, other storylines play out. These include the Great Bookie Robbery (committed by career criminal Ray Chuck) and Ray Chuck's war with the Kane Brothers, which left one of the Kane siblings dead and Ray Chuck killed by the surviving Kane sibling, in a daring public execution committed inside a court house. Also featuring are the rise (and fall) of would-be assassin for hire Chris Flannery, the attempt on the life of casino kingpin George Freeman, and the increasingly unchecked corruption of the New South Wales police.The third season, Underbelly: The Golden Mile, is a direct sequel to A Tale of Two Cities and details George Freeman grooming his successor, John Ibrahim, and Ibrahim's ascension as kingpin of a stretch of land in King's Cross, Sydney, known as "The Golden Mile". Also, it covers the 1995 Wood Royal Commission, where a young corrupt police detective named Trevor Haken testifies against his fellow dirty cops after being caught red handed.During the show's first season, the series was banned in Victoria by Judge Betty King. At the time, several people portrayed in the work were the subjects of ongoing trials for the crimes depicted in the series, and so the ban was instated to prevent the work from influencing the trials' jurors. Despite - or rather, because of - this, the ban was widely discussed by the Australian media, sparking greater interest in the show, and bootleg copies of the series were quite popular, with people even ringing into radio shows saying how they purchased them from construction yards, and the radio hosts saying where they got their copies from.Following The Golden Mile, the producers stated that they will be doing a series of direct-to-television movies in order to focus on one-off events, instead of doing a full fourth season; these telemovies were placed under the umbrella title of Underbelly Files. Then they announced a fourth season anyway. Underbelly: Razor will be dedicated to the origins of Australian organised crime in the 1920s.For its US release, Direct TV's 101 Channel skipped the first Underbelly season, opting to instead air A Tale of Two Cities. As of October 2010, "The Golden Mile" has begun airing on the network. Meanwhile, the Starz Network has acquired the US remake rights to the series, which (if it goes into production) will focus on all-new stories involving American gangs and criminals. A New Zealand spinoff is also in production; Underbelly: Land of the Long Green Cloud is intended to be something of a prequel to A Tale of Two Cities showing the origins of the Mr. Asia syndicate in the 1960s.Underbelly provides examples of:
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