We think of television – even in this age of a thousand streamers – as something we pig out on almost aimlessly like popcorn or smoking. Then something comes along that knocks all our snobberies for six and we realise that the form of entertainment we take for granted can rivet us with an image of our world that’s at one and the same time intimately familiar and a gift of God. It happens only occasionally with homegrown Australian television but when it does it creates a feeling of awe and enchantment.

It happens with bells on in Love Me whose second season Binge is about to start showing. Love Me is a family drama with Hugo Weaving whose wife Sarah Pierse is dead – though she continues to haunt him – but he’s found love again, against the odds, with the formidable Heather Mitchell. Weaving has a daughter, Bojana Novakovic who is cool crisp and authoritative and despite her tough suffer-no-fools manner desperately watches the clock and wants to get pregnant by the man in her life, Bob Morley. He’s such a good actor and such a good-looking guy that you wonder why he’s not a household name. But that quality of starriness is characteristic of everything in Love Me. This is a TV serial – six episodes in the new series – that in a single stride takes for granted the notion that Melbourne is one of the great centres of the world and that a group of more or less beset and besieged Australians (middle class but not rich) can have a multifaceted reality that really can bear comparison with the greatest of the Scandinavians: if not with Ingmar Bergman then with the extraordinary renaissance that characterises Danish television and which we associate with things like The Killing or The Bridge.

As it happens, Love Me was suggested by a Scandi prototype but the magic is in the way a quiet, even soapy, storyline is made to tingle and fascinate and surprise. There’s a young brother William Lodder, a lawyer boy, who with very neat dramatic irony has a baby by his erstwhile girlfriend Shalom Brune-Franklin so that there’s lots of baby holding even as Bojana Novokovic is breaking her heart at the thought that she’ll never be a mother.

Her performance has a breathtaking reality as we gradually warm to this ice princess who can bestride a hospital ward with a manifest sense of dominion and at the same time is at the edge of being bereft. It’s an utterly captivating incarnation of the kind of person who has always embraced coolness and control but is now confronted with the possibility that her deepest hopes are to be denied. Nor does it help that Morley – the kind of guy who in terms not just of looks but in warmth and sensitivity and charm any ice princess would want to thaw for – is told that he may not be fertile and this makes him wonder if he’s really the father of his sixteen-year-old son. And this disturbing idea makes him want a DNA paternity test which offends his former partner brilliantly played by Eryn Jean-Norvill.

Love Me is the kind of television which makes you think what we do here could be one of the wonders of the earth in the way Australian film was in the 1970s when Picnic at Hanging Rock and Sunday Too Far Away and The Devil’s Playground fell on the world like a revelation.

It presents a lyrical, almost haunted vision of the city of Melbourne, the Yarra, the skyscrapers, the hushed sense of refinement and self-conviction which works as a very powerful fiction because Weaving and Mitchell are actors strongly associated with Sydney. It’s as if Love Me has summoned up a dream of Australia, a compound of the two great eastern seaboard cities, and given them the depth of reality of a fully imagined world.

And what a pair these oldsters are. Weaving is full of bewildered doubts as Mitchell springs different confounding facts on him: she has no insurance, what’s the status of her house? He gives a superb performance as an apologetic guy, never less than sensitive and considerate, who is mightily in love and the autumnal richness of the characterisation, with its commingled confusion and besotted passionate affection is one of the greater performances in the history of Australian acting. And what a wonderful actress Heather Mitchell is. She has the hauteur of a lioness. She is terrific in the way she conveys her absolute independence and the depth of her passion. Who would have thought Australian television would provide an older actress with the means to create such a sweeping rendition of absolute erotic intensity.

Everything about Love Me is surprising and yet this comes with a shock of recognition. It is all more real than the stereotypes it swerves away from. Yes, cool dominating women yearn for motherhood. Yes, older people are capable of intense unexpected love.

And the last term of the equation is there too. We can produce television as measured and sophisticated, as high realist and engrossing, as open to the mightiest forces as any other country in the world if we simply have the courage of our self-possession.

Australians are aware of what is civilised and decent about their society, what is superior, without any consistent belief in its artistic correlative.

Of course you can get this in much humbler fare. The other night we stumbled on Summer Love which begins with images of the Victorian coastline: Aireys Inlet, Port Campbell. You felt yourself warming to the episode with Miranda Tapsell and Richard Davies as a young couple (she’s indigenous, he’s white) who have to look after a joey, a baby kangaroo. It wasn’t Bergman, it wasn’t Love Me, but it had real feeling, it did the trick.

There is of course every reason to be proud of the summits of Australian artistic achievement: the novels of Patrick White and Christina Stead, the work of that miracle of a painter Clarice Beckett which can be seen in a new exhibition at Geelong Gallery. But we should never surrender to the cultural cringe.

The best of what we do, big or small, should be close to our hearts.