The Labor series was the brainchild of the late former ABC and Age journalist Philip Chubb, who created, wrote and directed it. Chubb hit upon a formula that set the demands of history-telling alongside the politician’s natural yearning for revenge and self-justification, both to be tapped at a time when they felt there were no immediate consequences for speaking their mind.

Chubb’s instincts paid off in spades.

After a decade in power and the most brutal of leadership brawls, the Labor team and the two PMs dished and knuckle-dusted with such gusto that it’s hard to capture now quite how stunning it was to watch at the time. Chubb was never seen or heard; the show was driven by a narrator, ABC journalist Kathy Bowlen.

It set the template for the three series that followed. The Howard Years, which came 15 years later, had just the one PM to deal with, but 11 extraordinary years, highlighted by the Port Arthur massacre, through to Tampa, 9/11, the Iraq war and all that flowed from it.

This time the ABC opted to put a high-profile reporter in the mix. Fran Kelly did narrating and interviewing duties.

That formula held for The Killing Season ( now showing on ABC iview), which had Sarah Ferguson guiding us through the Shakespearean dramas of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years, which were only a six-year-stretch even if they felt much longer at the time.

For Nemesis, the producers eschewed both narrator and, mostly, reporter. While Mark Willacy was occasionally heard, he was not seen; the participants tell the story in their own words, in the style of Australian Story. It’s a production choice that creates interviewing and editing challenges, but it works. And with these stories to tell, it often feels a matter of pressing record and letting the vengeance flow.

The F-word gets a solid work out across these 40 years, on air and on the couch. In Nemesis, when Professor Jane Halton admits to shouting this expletive at her own television during a Morrison press conference on vaccines, it was hard not to nod along at home.

It’s the presence of voices like Halton that elevate these series above the mere indulgence of political vanities. And Nemesis, like its predecessors, delivered a cast of engaging co-stars and subplots to keep us engaged.

Labor In Power had Graham Richardson and Gareth Evans among those running commentary. This time we had the earnest drollery of Eric Abetz (Peta Credlin’s “personal skills were sub-optimal from time to time”, he notes; and, “If Tony Abbott could walk on water then Malcolm Turnbull would articulate very effectively that this was proof positive that Tony Abbott can’t swim”.)

[Nemesis] would be lacking without the vaguely amused air of Christopher Pyne, always in the wings like Jiminy Cricket.

And the show would be lacking without the vaguely amused air of Christopher Pyne, always in the wings like Jiminy Cricket waiting for one of these prime ministerial Pinocchios to grow into a real boy. (Let’s leave aside the matter of a conscience.)

It has been delicious, and at times depressing, television, remembering the many embarrassments and indignities visited on us by these leaders, and by them upon each other. Did we, and they, really have to live through all that?

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There are also two notable holes in the record. Labor In Power, ending with the Keating victory in 1993, means his sole full term in office is not captured by the sweep of these programs. And with Nemesis, Tony Abbott became the only one of the eight PMs to decline participation.

But these are quibbles.

These four series stand as a monumental achievement, the kind of thing only the ABC could or would do. And at a time of unprecedented pressure and stress for the national broadcaster, Nemesis has been a useful reminder of the institution at its absolute best.

Nemesis and The Killing Season are on iview.