But the Neighbours army assembled and their pleas for resurrection were successful. Power to the people. In swooped Amazon, the Farewell Tour became the Celebration Tour and suddenly big time serious actor Guy Pearce, whose character bought a house on Ramsay St in the “finale,” was unexpectedly on the hook to rejoin the Aussie soap opera he left in his dust more than 30 years ago.
There are substantial story hurdles the creators have to contend with, including Pearce’s departure. Their primary device for doing that has been to jump forward two years and have characters say catch-all phrases like “a lot has happened in the last two years” and “I know things have been a bit weird lately…” But the thing that really is weird is the arrival of The OC star, Mischa Barton. I’m not sure what she’s doing there. I can’t imagine it’s where she had hoped her career would have landed her 20 years after she was on the most talked-about show in the United States.
The thing with a soap is that it’s not about the quality of each individual episode. You can’t really review a handful of episodes, especially not the first few, the characters need to bed in. Enjoying a soap opera is about surrendering yourself to that world and welcoming these characters into your life as your friends and enemies. It’s accepting that there are characters and storylines you love and some you hate, that some bits are brilliant and progressive and others are exceptionally dumb. The Neighbours reboot is and will be all of those things over and over and over, as long as people watch it. A soap is a constant in our lives, their consistency night after night is what they thrive on.
Neighbours broke that consistency for its viewers and it remains to be seen whether fans will accept it back after such a long absence or whether they’ve moved on from Erinsborough for good.
HE SAW
The weight of 40 years of accumulated story detritus weighs heavily upon the new Neighbours.
The institutional memory needed to sustain a believable narrative about a place where so many unbelievable things have happened is enormous. They could employ a full-time staff member just to remind the writers of everything that’s happened in Paul Robinson’s tumultuous decades-long character arc, with its amputated limbs, hostage situations, balcony pushings, six marriages, many more affairs and countless nefarious dealings, but that employee would almost certainly resign within days due to burnout.
It’s hard to believe that viewers who have been shocked ad nauseum by this show since the 1980s might still be susceptible to shocks, but there we were at the end of episode 1 of the new season, our mouths once more agape, as we arrived at Terese’s climactic wedding to Paul only to find – gasp! – that it was actually to Toadie!
And so it was that the Ramsay St roller coaster once again set off from the station.
The resurrection of Neighbours represents everything wrong with the entertainment industry: the seeking of a sure thing, the shameless appeal to nostalgia, the unwillingness to push on in new directions, the hiring of a sort-of-big Hollywood name to drag in a few more subscriptions or views or whatever godforsaken metric the billionaires are demanding this month.
But, as I began watching it this week, for the first time since a year-long spell in 1999/2000, I came to understand that it also represents something very right with the world: the building of long-term relationships that grow and deepen to a rich golden hue; relationships that sometimes fade and die and are sometimes resurrected, that are with us through bad times and good, that become part of the fabric of our lives.
Quality over quantity is an easy and comforting catchphrase for the sneering elitist, but quantity is not to be sneered at. As I sank back into the familiar rhythms of Ramsay St, with bumbling gossip Harold, tricksy dicksy Paul and whatever Toadie has become, I felt a sense of connection born of long experience, and that’s something I never felt during this year’s big prestige dramas like Succession and The Bear.
There’s a reason we love our families more than anyone else, even when they’re not always good for us. Same with Neighbours.
New episodes of Neighbours are now available on TVNZ+ from Tuesday-Friday at noon, or 5.30pm on TVNZ 2, and are streaming on Prime Video from Tuesday.
