When we last saw roguish criminal lawyer Cleaver Greene, at the end of the third season of Rake, he was hanging upside down from a rope attached to an out-of-control hot-air balloon sweeping over Sydney Harbour. Back in 2014, the people involved with the series, including showrunner Peter Duncan and his co-creator and co-writer, Andrew Knight, as well as star and producer Richard Roxburgh, thought that it would be the last we would see of their hero. And the image seemed an appropriate visual metaphor for the shambolic protagonist, a man who lurches from one crisis to the next, usually dishevelled, slightly huffy and with little sense of where he is going.

But now, in what Duncan wryly calls "the Nellie Melba of TV shows", that fond and fitting farewell has been revealed as temporary and Cleaver is back in an eight-part series, along with his idiosyncratic gang of family and friends, dodgy acquaintances, crooked coppers and corrupt politicians.

Richard Roxburgh is back to reprise the character of Cleaver Greene as Rake returns for a fourth series. Credit:ABC

So what happened? "It was a combination of things," explains Roxburgh. "We wanted to leave a good-looking corpse and we thought that was a pretty good-looking corpse. But there were a lot of people in mourning about the end of the show. So you start to think, well, across the span of your career you don't get many opportunities to invest so deeply in a character. What's great about series TV is that you're afforded that opportunity: you can take characters to extraordinary places and that's been the great adventure of this so-called golden age of series television. It seemed a shame to have come so far with this wonderful array of characters and then to let it float off after three seasons.

"We always said that if we were going to bring it back, there would have to be good reason to do it. So I met with Peter and Andrew and I pitched my thought for the shape of season four. Although slightly skeptical to start with, they quickly started getting excited about it."