Neighbours bids emotional goodbye as producer hints at new future
After four decades and 9359 episodes, Neighbours prepares for its final farewell tonight, but a late twist offers hope that the world of Ramsay Street could return in a new form.
After a remarkable 40 years and 9359 episodes the door will close on the iconic Australian soap opera Neighbours when the final episode airs on Channel 10 on Thursday night.
While stars of the show described their sadness and heartbreak at the cancellation of the much-loved drama, in the grand tradition of TV soaps there has been a twist in the tale with a brief glimmer of hope emerging that some of the beloved characters could live on in spin-off productions.
Neighbours executive producer Jason Herbison said the finale was a celebration of the ‘Amazon era’ of the show, which produced 460 episodes after a deal was struck in 2023 between Amazon, FremantleMedia and Channel 10 to revive the show after it was axed in 2022.
The storyline leading into it finds Ramsay Street under threat from developers and a freeway proposal that would plough through the suburb.
“I’ve brought back the old Ramsay and Robinson rivalry,” Herbison said.
“I’ve got Shane Ramsay back and he’s wanting to build a new suburb called Ramsay Hills and he wants everyone to move there and Paul Robinson wants to build Robinson Towers, which is a high rise in the city and he wants everyone to move there.
“At the very end there is a little bit of a twist which does leave open many possibilities.
“The Ramsay Hills and the Robinson Towers storylines that have been talked about in the final weeks of the show are very much possible spin-offs. The show could come back as either of those things, or many other things.
“There’s still a great deal of love for the show and the idea that it might come back perhaps as a limited series, not necessarily the 200 or 260 episodes a year that we have been doing, I think, is very real. We just have to see how it plays out.”
Herbison said he had not asked Neighbours superstar alumni including Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie to return for this third farewell — the show was axed in 1985 and 2022 before filming stopped in July 2025 — after they appeared in what was thought to be the show’s last episode in 2022.
“They were all so generous to come back before and I could not do that again. I didn’t ask and I would never have asked,” Herbison said.
For Alan Fletcher, who played Dr Karl Kennedy, he said he felt sadness and satisfaction as the end came for Neighbours.
“It has been home for me for 31 years and I’ve shared that time with Jackie (Woodburne) and other wonderful actors like Ryan Moloney, my great mate Stefan Dennis and Rebekah Elmaloglou,” Fletcher said.
“We have been a big family. There is sadness, of course, that the end has come, but there is also a deep satisfaction that we have achieved the best possible show we could.”
Fletcher said Neighbours’ legacy was the opportunities the show provided.
“The biggest legacy of Neighbours, I think, has been the employment and the training it’s given,” he said.
“Neighbours trained actors and crew in an absolutely complete way.
“It has been the best TV and film school in the industry and it is going to be totally, totally missed.”
Annie Jones, who fans adored as Jane Harris, said she would shed a tear while watching the final episode.
“Look I’m pretty sad, I have to admit,” she said.
“I am sad for all the people that I work with; we’ve all lost probably the best job that we’ve ever had.
“But I’m also really sad for the fans, because we do have them by the millions out there.
“A soap is such a fantastic genre to be a part of. Sometimes people look down on that, but they really shouldn’t.
“It is different to straight drama. With a soap you have to suspend your disbelief and just go with it, and that’s where the great fun lies for people working on the show and, I imagine, for people watching.
“Neighbours has certainly been very, very good to me and I am so very, very grateful to have been a part of it.”
Stefan Dennis, who created one of Australian TV’s great villains in Paul Robinson, said the past three years of Neighbours had been an emotional rollercoaster.
“We had the grand, emotional farewell in 2022 and then we were brought back in 2023, only to be axed again two years later,” he said.
“I think I’ve moved on very quickly this time round as opposed to when it finished in 2022.
“We had a year’s lead up to that demotion, we were more prepared and we had time to go through the grieving process of losing something like that, whereas this time it happened very quickly and a lot of people kind of went, ‘Oh, okay, all right, we’ve ended, let’s get moving on’.”
He said the show’s legacy was what it gave to fans and the Australian entertainment industry.
“People have asked me over the years, ‘Why was Neighbours so successful?’ It can be summed up in one word; it was entertainment,” Dennis said.
“When you have a show that takes you on a rollercoaster of emotions; that is pure entertainment. Each episode was interspersed with different levels and different genres of entertainment and, I think, that’s what made Neighbours so damn successful. It was a well-oiled machine that produced a family drama that people loved.”
Peter O’Brien, who played Shane Ramsay, was in the first episode of Neighbours which aired in March 1985, the 2022 finale and returned to be part of the 2025 final episode. Dennis was also one of the original cast who appear in episode one.
“I felt very special because I was standing with Stef in a couple of scenes and with someone you have known for such a long time there is a shorthand and an understanding that goes back to the very beginning, to that very first day of filming, the very first scene, and through to the first time that it was axed, the second time it was axed and now to this ending,” O’Brien said.
“I am really lamenting because such a great crop of people have come through Neighbours over the years; there was a real community. It was a great place to go to work.
“You turned out a lot of drama, but it wasn’t a factory, it wasn’t a production line. People cared.
“The realisation on that last day was we have not just lost a job, but we’ve lost a community. It’s like your street’s being bulldozed and the family home is being knocked down.”
Tim Kano, who played Leo Tanaka, described the end of Neighbours as “heartbreaking.”
“Someone was telling me a plane was flown over the Fremantle office (producers of Neighbours) in London with a banner reading “Bring Back Neighbours,” he said.
“That was the extent of the love from the fans and their dedication to the show. It is kind of heartbreaking for the industry and for the fans that it is gone.”
Over its 40 year history Neighbours was filmed at a studio in the Melbourne suburb of Nunawading and on location at Pin Oak Court in Vermont South.
The studio, which is owned by property development company, has been decommissioned since Neighbours was axed.
Originally published as Neighbours bids emotional goodbye as producer hints at new future
