- ★★★½
- Culture
- Neighbours
This was published 1 year ago
By Michael Idato
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Neighbours
★★★½
Ten and 10Peach, Amazon Prime
At the heart of the return of Neighbours sits a curious question: exactly whose idea was it to resurrect the iconic Australian drama that had, in 2022, been laid to rest with such meticulous precision and elegant self-reflection that it carved for itself a well-earned place in the nation’s cultural history books?
There was no grassroots campaign to bring the show back – remember Star Trek? Brooklyn Nine-Nine? – particularly after the audience had been propelled through a walk down memory lane that turned into a national sprint. As it closed the decades-old saga, the star power of guest returnees including Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan lifted its audience tenfold. Maybe we were just exhausted.
Perhaps the bigger question is, can you even turn back the clock? While the new series kicks off sometime after Neighbours 1.0 ended, and it plainly aims its storytelling lens towards the future, a brand reinvention like this is nonetheless built on nostalgia. It’s a television perennial. Just ask Harold (Ian Smith), who opines in the opening episode: “We can’t let history get away from us. We have to fill in the gaps while it’s still fresh in our memory.”
Television history is, in fact, replete with clocks turned back, and sentimental backwards glances. The ’90s/’00s sitcom Will & Grace did it, as did the iconic ’80s soap Dallas. Both were huge long-running hits whose encores were elegantly executed but – and here is the cautionary twist in retelling the tale – both reboots only lasted a handful of additional years. The reboots of Murphy Brown and Mad About You didn’t make a blip on the radar.
So from the kick-off, moving Neighbours from the weeklies back to the new release shelves is a risky move. (Give yourself extra points if you got the analog reference.) And anyone labouring under the misapprehension that Neighbours 2.0 heralds a new chapter of 30+ years is likely to be kidding themselves. The truth is that television in 2023 – particularly streaming television – is a much riskier proposition.
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The show makes a calculated decision to drop the audience headfirst into storylines that seem rewoven out of the show’s 2022 finale. Legacy viewers will matter to the reboot’s audience, but leaning on them too heavily can be a deterrent for new viewers and – critically – the show’s US viewers, who are seeing it for the first time on the streaming platform Freevee.
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To “fill in the gaps while it’s still fresh in our memory”, the script is pumped with expositional CliffsNotes that seem to both help the viewer understand who’s who but also taunt newcomers with the weight of what they have missed.
You do wonder at times whether a cleaner slate might have served as a better launchpad for what aspires, to some extent, to be a new series.
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It’s sweet to be back in Erinsborough, even if Mike Young (Guy Pearce) isn’t living in as the show’s finale promised, and Harold is wandering in and out of shot, providing historical details like a museum guide gone rogue. It’s colourful, familiar and nicely shot, courtesy of the show’s cinematography team Henry Pierce, Heath Kerr and Mark Heuston. Production designer Peta Lawson also provides a sense of completeness to the spaces that help hold the artistic walls together.
The weakness, however, is that the show feels like it’s starting a new race carrying 30 years of weight on its back. A new show – even a reboot – should be leaner, sharper, and pack more punch. The Dallas reboot worked, for example, because it carried less than a handful of characters forward and did not lean heavily on what had transpired decades earlier.
This isn’t that. Plus, the edit feels windy at times, full of the sort of silent gaps that characterise American daytime drama, and not the chunkier, more robust zing of an Australian drama, even a weeknight one. If Neighbours 2.0 wants to hold its own in the international streaming market it has to hum a little louder than it does.
Of course, it ends with a twist, which the press notes promise will be an earth-shaker. Maybe it is, if you’re a long-time fan of the show. It’s better than most but falls short of Marlena possessed in Days of our Lives, the UFO in The Colbys and “Who shot J.R.?” in Dallas. And it won’t leave you raging at the TV like you did – warning: spoilers – when Offspring bumped off Patrick, or The Good Wife bumped off Will.
But like all good soaps, it does leave you curious to see a little more. And by more, we mean American actress Mischa Barton arriving in the next episode, which is, frankly, a twist so bonkers that it makes episode one look like The Sopranos.
Neighbours airs on Ten, weekdays at 4:30pm, 10Peach, weekdays at 6:30pm and, one week later, on Amazon Prime Video. It airs on Freevee in the UK and the US.
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