Oh Toadie, you bloody fool. Dee, you bloody scammer.
Melodrama and scandal have always been the mainstay of the soap opera but, lately, the wholesome family cul-de-sac vibe of Australia’s long-running series Neighbours has been jolted by plotline renovation. Something is up in Ramsay Street.
At the centre of the show’s newly spinning narrative vortex is an ill-fated couple: gorgeous blonde Dee Bliss (Madeleine West) and mischievous rogue Toadie Rebecchi (Ryan Moloney), who share a loving yet traumatic history. Toadie hasn’t seen Dee since their wedding in 2003; a tearful, romantic event that brought together two much-adored fan favourites.
But their fateful wedding day was also the day Dee died, after Toadie accidentally drove their car off a cliff while passionately, stupidly kissing his new bride at the wheel. He escaped but her body was never recovered. After 13 years spent in heartbroken guilt, Toadie remarried and had babies – yet never stopped loving Dee. But what if she didn’t drown at sea after all?
With news that Neighbours could disappear from British screens, is the fresh scandal enough to save Australia’s longest-running soap – and most wildly successful TV export – from redundancy?
Let’s dive a little deeper. The re-entry of Dee accompanies the revelation that she was pregnant at the time of her death – Dee and Toadie share a beautiful teenage daughter named Willow!
Naturally, this is a rank lie: Dee is in fact Andrea Somers, a woman with eerie physical similarities to Dee and an aim to defraud the Bliss/Rebecchi family estate. Her fake daughter Willow is a masterful juvenile blackmailer who, incidentally, harbours extremely realistic ambitions to be an airforce pilot.
Having defrauded Toadie of $100,000 last week on the pretext of needing school fees for Willow, Dee fled to London. This week’s London episodes promise what the Neighbours Australian PR team calls “A week of shocking secrets and scandals” and a next-levelling of soap farce: Fake Dee finally moving Toadie towards infidelity, spousal spying via Skype and the revelation of Dee’s true identity as Andrea the Lying, Cheating Swindler.
So far, the promises haven’t been fulfilled; Monday night’s episode was no more than an excuse to run Toadie around in a black cab to some pretty standard tourist locations like Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace. Crucially, the London plotline also transplants the show to the shores of its biggest market; Neighbours has far more viewers in the UK than Australia.
The overseas trip is a tried and true soapie strategy. It invigorates dusty suburban settings with an injection of drama and the new locations take the main plotlines to a more sensational climax. The US soap The Bold and The Beautiful, for example, takes occasional trips to Milan for fashion week and Aspen for sexy ski trips, using wonderfully dodgy green screens and adding fake seaside backdrops to their usual sets.
It’s not the first time Neighbours has gone to London (Karl and Susan got remarried, again, on the Thames in 2007) but this storyline has been prefaced with about two months of pretty great soapie nonsense on Ramsay Street. We’ve seen eavesdropping in bushes, characters exhibiting childish gullibility (Toadie: “Oh, Dee, you love me and we have a secret daughter? Gee whiz, here’s that $100,000 you were after!”), unbelievable permissiveness (Sonya Rebecchi, who ridiculously calls her husband Jarrod, and delusionally lets him chase his ex-wife overseas), gaslighting, gold-digging, blackmail, stolen identity, resurrection from the dead (except not), fake paternity and clunky exposition-as-dialogue (straight-faced Steph: “My mental health issues are starting to flare up again”) as well as your standard sociopathic deception and manipulation. The show’s media strategy has also taken a self-aware turn, coming in on the joke.
When your wife's eating for two and you're trying to keep up... pic.twitter.com/LTZiKCAIA3
— Neighbours (@neighbours) February 3, 2017
Consequently, Neighbours’ cultural capital has intensified: social media mentions are everywhere, episode recaps are going viral. But it hasn’t been enough to quiet rumours of a breakdown in negotiations between the show’s producers and its British broadcaster Channel 5. A petition has surfaced to keep the show on UK screens, attracting the signatures of 7,000 diehard fans.
Broadcast television is scratching desperately at relevancy. What does the old TV model offer that the new streaming websites don’t? Reality TV, news, sports and soap operas. These dependable formats are the salve of the traditional channels, the richest markets for linear television and the beating heart of nostalgic, throwaway, weeknight entertainment. But producers and network executives need to constantly update the way they approach these shows now that the television landscape has gone digital and changed forever. Unlike film, television offers assured distribution to assured viewers – it’s a far less risky proposition for a show to find an audience.
To secure international deals, Neighbours has to find ways to make itself relevant to its international audience and it has the most fans in Britain: a country with a stronger, bigger culture of television viewing than Australia. Neighbours generally draws 400,000 TV viewers in Australia and peaks at just over a million in the UK when there’s a sufficiently silly plotline. Historically, the UK has provided the biggest audience, with up to 20 million in the glory days of Scott and Charlene’s wedding. Those days are gone. By taking its most popular characters to the UK, Neighbours is trying to retain its threatened place in the global marketplace; without a place on UK screens, the show becomes a far less viable economic prospect for its production company Fremantle Media.
And so, in the war for digital screens, old mate Toadie has become an unlikely, global Australian icon: an invaluable, weaponised goatee to lure back British eyes.
The terrible truth, however, is that Neighbour’s recent litany of plotline insanity has nothing on the overreaches of American soap operas. The Bold and The Beautiful’s long-deceased Darla Forrester has been known to pop up as a disembodied, low-tech head, hovering on the edges of the screen to wish her loved ones well and provide thoughtful advice from beyond the grave. On the same show, Ridge’s wife Taylor came back to life, having been whisked away from her deathbed by a psychopathic foreign prince and imprisoned for years in the Middle East. Blatant racism aside, this is inspiring! If Neighbours wants to really save itself, it needs to quit the filler plotlines (Gary and his “ladybug” Therese’s budding romance?! Ugh) and go all out: true resurrection from the dead, ghosts, brothers in love with the same woman, long-lost evil twins and flashbacks. Compared with the true heights that soap opera can scale, the Toadie and Dee saga is, quite frankly, lame.
Beyond escalating the plotlines, Neighbours also needs to ramp up the camp acting (Toadie has been wild-eyed and on fire lately – the man was put on planet Earth to be a soap star) and the OTT production conventions (exaggerated close-ups, lingering zoom-ins on wordless facial expressions at the end of scenes, plus black-and-white dream sequences).
Traditional television is dying. What better way to revitalise a soap than with an old-school, sexist storyline in non-continental Europe that paints women as liars and gold-diggers! It’s a good start. But if Neighbours is going to outlive the shift in the media landscape, it’s going to have get a hell of a lot soapier.
Here’s hoping Toadie and Dee’s shenanigans are just the beginning of a brave new world of weeknight hysteria.
