Australia and the UK let out an emotional wail last year when long-running soap Neighbours was ending after 38 seasons. The consensus was that it was a huge loss to our cultural fabric, even if we hadn’t really watched the show for 20 years or so.
After the UK’s Channel 5 pulled its production money, the show was gracefully given a few months for a final storyline that brought a sense of closure before its finale in July last year.
Channel 5’s decision spotlighted the financial realities of a changed TV market. Neighbours wasn’t cheap to produce, and that money could be better spent on productions the network owned and could sell locally and internationally to streaming services. In the end, the death of Neighbours was just a sensible business decision.
But it’s hard to keep a true-blue hero down and, thanks to a Hail Mary from Amazon, Neighbours is coming back for yet another season in September, with new episodes streaming daily on Freevee in the UK and airing on Channel 10 in Australia. But there are questions around its return: how will UK audiences adapt to streaming what was once a broadcast soap? How many episodes will it go for? And will the revived show look and feel like the series we knew, loved and almost never watched?
There’s a lingering thought surrounding its return. To paraphrase Jurassic Park’s philosopher Ian Malcolm: TV executives were so preoccupied with whether or not they could bring back Neighbours, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
The problem facing Neighbours
In Australia, Neighbours is set to return as 30-minute episodes four nights a week on Channel 10 at the all-new time of 4:30pm in the afternoon (and again on 10 Peach at the old-school 6:30pm time slot). In the UK, it will be uploaded daily on Amazon’s Freevee despite what we already know: daily soaps don’t work on streaming.
Back in 2011, as daytime TV audiences were spending less time watching and more time online, long-running US daytime soaps One Life to Live (which started in 1968) and All My Children (1970) were cancelled by the US ABC network. A company named Prospect Park licensed the rights and revived the shows the following year for distribution via its own website and third-party services Hulu and iTunes.
The move was disastrous: Prospect Park discovered that viewers were overwhelmed by having too many episodes to watch and they stopped watching. With slow-moving soaps on broadcast TV, if you miss an episode or even an entire week it is not a big deal – you just catch up with the next one. But on streaming, episodes yet to be watched pile up. It feels weird to jump ahead if every episode is right there.
Within two and a half weeks, the producers halved their output to just two episodes a week. “Asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much,” Prospect Park said at the time. One Life to Live and All My Children were both cancelled by the end of the year.
Ryan Moloney (Toadie) and Lucy Durack (Rose) in Neighbours. Photograph: Fremantle
It became a textbook example of why daytime soaps fail on streaming. A daily soap works because it is disposable – and Neighbours is built for viewers to dip in and out of with ease. For UK viewers who are now being asked to make the move to Freevee for their daily Ramsay Street fix, the danger of too many episodes piling up is a concern.
If streaming viewers struggle to keep up with their daily soap in 2023 the same way viewers struggled back in 2011, how long might Amazon give it before they reformat Neighbours with fewer episodes a week … or cancel it altogether? And where would that leave Channel 10, committed to airing episodes nightly? Neighbours has been made with the UK as its primary audience for years, so whatever happens in the UK will have ramifications down under.
And this may be too-philosophical a question to apply to the show, but is a Neighbours on streaming still Neighbours? Would a Neighbours airing just one or two episodes a week still be Neighbours?
Any changes Amazon could make to adapt the show for streaming may upset a delicate relationship the show’s few remaining viewers still have to it. For many of us, Neighbours has been warm-blanket TV: a cultural constant that was always there at the same time on telly every day, a reliable salve in an unpredictable world.
So: is Neighbours back? That depends on where you are and how you’re watching it. For Australians, it will likely be the same-old daggy experience – but maybe not so for those in the UK. It’s still on Ramsay Street, and we still have familiar faces such as Paul Robinson, Susan and Karl Kennedy, Toadfish and Plain Jane Harris. But the act of making an active choice to press play and watch it daily will change our relationship with the show – and may change the show too.
Neighbours premieres on Channel 10 in Australia and Amazon Freevee internationally on 18 September
