Why the end of Neighbours is bad news for Australian TV – and viewers

If Neighbours has to end – and, after 40 years, 9300 episodes, and two premature deaths, it really does – it’s going out with a bang.

Not an explosion, mind, but a party.

“I am ending it in a way that sets up future chapters,” says showrunner and executive producer Jason Herbison. “It’ll be very hopeful and optimistic, but it will be different to last time. Most importantly, it absolutely leaves the door open for a few different ways the show could come back in the future.”

This is the third time Neighbours has come to an end. And while Australian viewers might shrug and say “so what, I stopped watching years ago”, the impact on our screens could be felt for years to come.

When Neighbours folds, it will take around 200 jobs – cast and crew – with it. Perhaps most importantly, it will rob the Australian screen sector of one of its most fertile training grounds, the alumni of which have gone on to make and star in hit and critically acclaimed shows both here and abroad.

“The importance of Neighbours and Home and Away, these two institutions in terms of giving people a go, cannot be overstated,” says veteran writer-producer Tony Ayres, creator or co-creator of many of Australia’s most successful series, including Clickbait, Stateless, Glitch and the current Netflix hit Survivors.

The trend in Australia (and elsewhere) is to short-run series, often with just four or six episodes and rarely more than 10. Return seasons are few, if any. Neighbours, by contrast, turns out more than 200 episodes a year.

A long run means opportunities for new talent to learn the ropes, be tested, and fail in relative safety. No one is going to turn over one episode in a batch of six – at a cost of maybe 10 times an episode of the soap – to a novice. And that means the next generation will have fewer chances to learn how to do it.

“It’s very hard to not believe there’s something broken in our ecosystem,” says Ayres. “We had a tentative pathway, a trail of breadcrumbs you could follow through the forest, and it feels like that’s being swept away.

Director Scott Major – who started on the show as a cast member – watches playback of a scene on set.Credit: Alex Coppel

“We won’t actually see the results of this for another four or five years, when people like me age out of the industry. But basically, we don’t have a succession plan at the moment.”

For decades, Neighbours has primarily been an export product, with the bulk of its audience in the UK. Part of the reason it resonates there is the relentlessly sunny vision of Australia it sells, but on the day I visit Erinsborough in the final week of filming, before the last episodes air in December, it’s wet and bitterly cold.

The show employs two production crews, and on this Wednesday the “outside unit” is inside. There are 12 people doing make-up alone. As I head onto set, I pass a visiting class of wardrobe design students, getting a glimpse of a place they might once have expected to secure a job.

Dozens of cast members are crowded into The Waterhole set in Studio A, clustered into small groups, miming conversation as the camera moves past them to pick up the action in a particular spot. There are series regulars and returning faves (the producers want to keep as much of the surprise element as possible for fans, so no spoilers here).

Elise Jansen is among them. She’s playing Elle Robinson. It’s her third stint on the show, playing a different character each time. Actually, it’s her fourth if you include her day as an extra while at uni.

“Growing up, it was my favourite show,” she says. “And to think that now I’ve been able to be on it is quite extraordinary.”

Director Scott Major is moving along at a brisk pace. A former actor who skilled up to directing via the show, Major has gone on to handle bigger budgeted dramas (Riptide, Lie with Me, Playing for Keeps). But Neighbours (272 episodes and counting) is his bread and butter.

He gets one shot in two takes, then swaps camera positions for a reverse angle of the party. One take and he’s happy. It’s a fast and furious pace, but everyone knows what they’re doing.

“Shooting scene after scene after scene is a great way to cut your teeth, a great way to learn,” says Jansen, who happily describes herself as a jobbing actor, like the vast majority in the profession. “It’s a fast-moving train, and you just have to jump on and keep going at the speed that it’s going, and at some point you jump off.”

The roll-call of famous actors who’ve graduated from Ramsay Street is well known: Margot, Kylie, Jason, Guy. But there are many others who got their start, or at least an early break, here. Severance‘s Dichen Lachman, The 100’s Eliza Taylor, Xavier Molyneux, who has just been cast as the lead in Vikings spin-off Bloodaxe.

But it’s not just the actors, of course.

“In my six years here, we’ve trained 10 directors,” says series producer Andrew Thompson, who is responsible for the logistical side of keeping this train on the tracks. “There have been writers who have worked their way up through the script department. One of our sound recorders is someone who did an attachment here a few years ago, we’ve got people in the art department, lighting, continuity people. We’ve been training intimacy co-ordinators … I don’t think there’s a single department that hasn’t had some attachment at some time.”

Many of those positions have been formal placements, funded by the Victorian state government through its agency VicScreen.

Goodbye … for now?: Alan Fletcher has played Karl Kennedy for almost 7000 episodes since 1987. Credit: Alex Coppel

“Neighbours has played a significant role in the growth of Victoria’s screen industry,” says Minister for Creative Industries Colin Brooks, adding that “more than 50 people have taken part in the Neighbours training initiative since 2017, gaining hands-on experience in technical and creative roles.

“We are sad to see Neighbours come to an end, but our support for Victoria’s screen industries continues,” he adds, with 55 attachments across nine other productions – including high-end series All Her Fault, The Family Next Door and Goolagong – over the past 12 months.

Peter Mattessi is now president of the Australian Writers Guild. He was also the creator of Return To Paradise, the Australian spin-off of the BBC’s hit series Death in Paradise. But he too got his first big break on Neighbours.

“I was lucky enough to get my start over 20 years ago, when the show had the resources to take on trainee storyliners with no experience and no credits,” he says (showrunner Herbison also got his start this way, after writing to Channel Ten with some story suggestions when he was still at school).

If a trainee had the chops, there would be a job at the end of the placement. “For the next four years, I wrote and rewrote stories and scripts for the show every day, under the immense pressure of having to produce five episodes a week, every week,” says Mattessi.

Lights, cameras, actors: Andrew Thompson says people have been trained in every department in his six years with the show. Credit: Alex Coppel

Sometimes he turned out work he was proud of, sometimes not so much. “But I learnt more about writing from what didn’t work than what did. Neighbours was the foundation of my career and it taught me how to be a television writer. I would have been absolutely lost without it.”

For Dannika Horvat, Neighbours has offered a way to transition from writing to directing. Through a three-phase attachment, she got to trail a director and observe how it was done, then direct a 10-minute segment of an episode, then a full episode, and finally a block of three.

Last week, she watched in delight as her first effort went to air.

“It felt amazing,” she says. “It’s such a beloved institution, there’s so much history there, and to see my name in the credits was really humbling. I felt very proud and very grateful that I got to be a part of it.”

Just in the nick of time, too. Soon there will be no more attachments. There will be no more roles for promising teenage actors to cut their teeth on. There will be no more weddings or bouts of memory loss or misunderstandings or petty squabbles on Ramsay Street.

Or will there?

“Neighbours is a beloved brand,” says Herbison. “In writing the ending, I didn’t want to close any doors. But I think if the show were to come back, it might come back a bit differently.”

Right now, it’s hard to see it coming back again as a long-form serial. “But,” he says, ever the optimist, “all it would take would be for someone to do one somewhere in the world, and for it to be a massive hit, and then all of a sudden, there might be more of them again.”

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