Blanchett focuses on immigration in ‘Stateless’

Cate Blanchett was an executive producer as well as the star of Hulu’s ‘‘Mrs. America,’’ but the multi-oscared actor actually made her debut as a television producer when the miniseries ‘‘Stateless’’ premiered in Australia in March. She also created the six-part drama — with Australian writers Elise Mccredie (a longtime friend) and Tony Ayres — and appears in a supporting role as a hustler who runs a cultlike self-help racket out of her dance school.

All of this Blanchettness is a good thing, of course — she’s predictably excellent as Pat, who gets to exercise her small-time song-and-dance talents in service of the scam, and warbles a creditable ‘‘Let’s Get Away From It All.’’

But it’s also a case of misdirection, because ‘‘Stateless’’ isn’t about charismatic fraudsters, at least not directly. It’s about the troubled history of Australia’s mandatory-detention system for immigrants without visas, specifically the centers where asylum-seekers are warehoused while their cases are processed.

The series, now available on Netflix, offers a four-pronged narrative, each strand involving a lost soul who washes up at a detention center in a desolate stretch of South Australia. One is an immigrant, Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), an Afghan seeking asylum. The other three are white Australians: Clare (Asher Keddie), the center’s new immigration director, essentially the warden of what’s a prison in all but name; Cam (Jai Courtney), a local who takes a relatively well-paying job as a guard; and Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski of ‘‘The Handmaid’s Tale’’), a troubled woman whose involvement with the cult leads, through a series of lies and mishaps, to her being detained at the center under a false name.

The disappearance of Sofie, an Australian citizen, into the detention system — her family has no idea what has happened to her — is the most equal among these equal threads, and given current cultural trends it’s impossible not to notice that a critique of immigration policy is being delivered largely through the story of a white woman’s dilemma. But before leaping to judgment, consider that Sofie is based on an actual person, Cornelia Rau, and that it was the public shock over Rau’s imprisonment that finally spurred an investigation of wrongful detentions. So in this case, form follows government folly.

There’s another solid argument for focusing on Sofie: Her story is where we get to see not just Blanchett but also Dominic West, as Pat’s predatory husband and business partner, Gordon, and Australian all-star Marta Dusseldorp as Sofie’s frantic sister. The show’s most interesting moments come in the first few episodes as Sofie is drawn in and then cast out by Pat and Gordon. West and Blanchett are particularly good in a scene when Gordon, suddenly realizing that Sofie has turned against him, leaps to his feet to publicly denounce her and Pat seamlessly goes along with his improvisation.

The other converging story lines of ‘‘Stateless’’ are credible and sometimes moving, but rarely surprising as the writers, Mccredie and Belinda Chayko, lean into the tropes of the prison movie.