16 hours ago
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It’s always sad to write an obituary, especially so when it’s for the second time. Neighbours, the Australian soap opera that made stars of everyone from Kylie Minogue to a man who will forever be known as Toadfish, is five months away from death. Again.
Yesterday, the show announced that Amazon, the company that resuscitated Neighbours two years ago after its dramatic 2022 finale, would be bringing production to an end. In July, filming will cease. In December, the final episode will be shown. True, there is the possibility that another buyer will leap in and save it, but that is looking more and more unlikely. After all, as the saying goes, you can’t make a zombie out of a zombie.
Obviously, there’s a lot to examine from the news. Perhaps the most important lesson is that legacy franchises should really think better of jumping into bed with big tech companies. Amazon proved this twice over yesterday alone; first by buying out Eon Productions, the British company that makes the James Bond films, hinting that it will transform a venerable 63-year-old property into a nightmarish Star Wars-style sausage factory of spin-offs and TV shows, and now this. When Amazon bought Neighbours, fans hoped it was a permanent solution, continuing the soap in perpetuity. But streamers operate on a different metric to traditional broadcasters – a long-running show with a loyal audience won’t increase the number of subscribers as much as something buzzy and new – and so it has once again been snuffed out of existence.
But hope springs eternal. Inevitably, someone has created a petition to save it. But even that barely has the energy to sustain itself, scraping together just over a thousand signatures in a day. Perhaps the time is right to let it go. After all, the entire history of the show has been spent teetering on the brink of cancellation.
In Australia, the Seven Network cancelled it after four months before it was revived by Network Ten. It ran for 22 years on BBC One in the UK, until the channel abandoned it in 2008 after Freemantle demanded £300 million for the rights. It was saved when Channel 5 agreed to show it, paying for the bulk of production costs in the process. But even that started to go south over financial disputes in 2017, before Channel 5 officially pulled the plug in 2022, tanking the show for the first time.
You will remember that because the finale was a big deal. Several big stars who had outgrown Neighbours returned to mark the event, including Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce, Jason Donovan and a bizarrely mute Kylie Minogue. In truth it was a pretty good finale, ending with a wedding that served as a celebration of the history of Ramsay Street. If you’re old enough to have enjoyed Neighbours at its peak, it was a near-perfect send off. And then it was all undone the moment that Amazon bought the rights.
The new series has been, well, fine. It’s Neighbours, so it’s still equal parts plodding and implausible, but after using up all that energy saying goodbye to it once, it was hard to fully embrace its new incarnation. What was once a communal experience – play Suddenly by Angry Anderson, the soundtrack to Scott and Charlene’s wedding in 1987, to a roomful of people in their mid-40s and they’ll all end up snivelling with nostalgia – had become impossibly fragmented. At times it felt like you were the only person in the world watching Neighbours.
Now there’s nowhere else to go. It seems like Neighbours has run out of road for good. Hopefully, this time it will do the dignified thing and stay dead. If nothing else, a new ending means that it will soon be time for a new finale. This is something to be excited about, at least. After all, the show has blown the chance of another celebrity-filled nostalgiafest because Kylie Minogue clearly isn’t going to risk her reputation by showing up to say goodbye again. So that only leaves the route of harrowing finality.
This is Neighbours’ chance to go big or go home. Nothing short of total destruction will do. We’re talking plane crashes, volcanoes, axe murderers. By the time the end credits roll, I want the few remaining viewers permanently traumatised. We cannot risk the possibility of another embarrassing about-face here. If someone wants to make a petition to destroy Erinsborough with an asteroid attack, I promise to sign it first.
