Neighbours came back from the dead and brought its cul-de-sac with it

Here is a thing that happened: Neighbours ended. Not in the way that television shows normally end, with declining ratings and a quiet cancellation, but in the way that a civic institution closes. There was a farewell episode. Kylie came back. Jason came back. Guy Pearce came back (which, given what Guy Pearce has been doing for the last twenty years, was the equivalent of a Supreme Court justice returning to judge a school debate). Thirty-seven years of Ramsay Street, 8,903 episodes, and a finale that drew 4.23 million viewers in the UK, which was more than the show had managed on a regular Tuesday in about a decade. The show died the way it lived: watched more enthusiastically in Britain than in Australia.

That was July 2022. By September 2023, it was back. Amazon Freevee picked up the rights, production resumed at the Nunawading studios, and the residents of Erinsborough returned to their problems. The resurrection was announced with the confidence of a franchise relaunch, which is what it was, and the uncertainty of a show that had not yet figured out what it was for, which is also what it was.

I should be transparent about my relationship with this show. I grew up on it. Not in the way that people who want to sound culturally serious say they grew up on something, meaning they consumed it ironically and now have opinions about it. I mean I watched it every afternoon with my grandmother, who followed the storylines with the attentiveness of a Cold War analyst tracking troop movements. She knew things about the Kennedys and the Robinsons that she did not know about her actual neighbours. When she died in 2019, the show was still on. When the show ended in 2022, I thought about her more than I expected to.

The street as heritage site

Ramsay Street is Pin Oak Court in Vermont South, a real cul-de-sac in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs where real people live and have lived for decades alongside a fictional universe. The residents of Pin Oak Court have put up with production trucks, lighting rigs, and tourists for nearly four decades. When the show was cancelled, there was genuine concern about what would happen to the street as a tourist destination. When the show returned, there was genuine concern about what would happen to the street as a place where people live.

The set itself, the interiors at Nunawading, had been maintained during the hiatus. This is the kind of detail that tells you the cancellation was never expected to be permanent, or at least that someone was keeping the option open. You do not maintain a set that costs money to store unless you believe the set has value beyond its physical components. Ramsay Street is not a set. It is IP. It is a location that audiences recognise, that generates tourism revenue, that functions as a shorthand for a particular version of Australian suburban life. The houses are the brand.

New faces, old rhythms

The reboot brought back several legacy characters. Toadie (Ryan Moloney), who has been on the show since 1995, which means he has been a resident of Erinsborough for longer than most people live in any one suburb. Karl and Susan Kennedy (Alan Fletcher and Jackie Woodburne), whose marriage has survived more fictional crises than any relationship in the history of the medium. Harold Bishop was referenced, though Ian Smith’s involvement was limited. The returning cast provides continuity, which is the polite word for insurance.

The new cast is younger, more diverse, and pitched at an audience that watches on devices rather than on a television in the lounge room at 6:30pm. This is the structural challenge of the reboot: Neighbours was designed for a broadcast schedule. Its rhythms are calibrated to five episodes a week, each ending on a small cliffhanger, each picking up where the previous one left off. The architecture assumes daily appointment viewing. Streaming audiences do not watch that way. They binge, or they forget, or they watch three episodes on a Sunday and then do not return for a month.

Amazon has not disclosed viewership figures, because streaming platforms never disclose viewership figures unless the figures are impressive enough to function as marketing. The absence of numbers is itself a number.

What Neighbours is and is not

I want to be precise about this. Neighbours is not good television. It has never been good television, not by the standards that we apply to prestige drama or even competent drama. The acting ranges from adequate to enthusiastic. The writing prioritises plot velocity over character consistency. The production values are functional. The sets look like sets. These are not criticisms, exactly. They are descriptions. Neighbours is a soap opera, and soap operas operate by different rules. The question is not whether the show is good but whether it is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to create a world that audiences want to visit daily, populated by characters whose problems feel adjacent to the viewer’s own problems.

For 37 years, it did that. The question now is whether the world that audiences want to visit daily is still Erinsborough, or whether Erinsborough is a place that belongs to a specific era of Australian television that has passed.

The export question

Neighbours launched the careers of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Natalie Imbruglia, and Delta Goodrem, among others. It was the most successful Australian cultural export of the late twentieth century, more widely distributed than any Australian film, more consistently watched than any Australian drama. In the UK, it was a phenomenon. In Australia, it was furniture.

The reboot needs to answer a question that the original never had to ask: who is this for? The British audience that sustained the show for its final decade? The Australian audience that stopped watching years ago? A new, younger, global audience that has no nostalgia for Ramsay Street and will judge the show on its merits, which is a terrifying proposition for a show whose merits have always been secondary to its familiarity?

I do not know if the reboot will work. The first episodes are competent, which is both the best and worst thing you can say about a soap opera. The street looks the same. The problems are new but shaped like the old problems. The rhythms are familiar, even on a platform that does not reward familiarity the way broadcast television did.

My grandmother would have watched it. She would have had opinions about the new characters. She would have been suspicious of the ones she did not recognise and loyal to the ones she did. She would not have cared that it was on Amazon instead of Channel Ten. She would have cared that it was on.

I care that it is on, too. I am not sure that is enough.