CHANCES — When A Soap Goes Berserk!

 The first glimmer of what Chances would become appears in episode 60, when Connie comes home to find her son watching… Chances. This is what soap opera characters get up to when they don't have a plotline, apparently. Young Sam hasn't had one for ages, and in fact never will again. And just as Connie comes home from a long day of playing second-fiddle sounding-board to someone else's dreary plotline (and just before she has a scene designed to knock her own dreary plotline over the head)... she walks in as the end of the Chances  theme is playing over the TV. We hear what sounds like a couple of her fellow actors performing a seduction scene, followed by erotic murmurs and possibly an excessive amount of saxophone. "Um... Should I be watching this?" Sam asks, without taking his eyes off the screen. "Well you see they're... doing it, with no clothes on." Connie shrugs, pats him on the back. "If it shocks you, you're not old enough. And if...

 I don’t want to begin at the beginning. If the beginning were the really good bit, then Chances as we know it would never have happened—the Aussie TV-viewing public would have embraced the Taylor family the way they did the Sullivans, the Robinsons, or the Rafters. Then ratings wouldn’t have plummeted so far within seven months that they started performing open-heart plot-surgery on the show without even knocking it out first. If the beginning had been interesting, things wouldn’t have gotten really interesting. So when setting up this blog, I was tempted to steal a page from the awesome Danny Horn, whose Dark Shadows Every Day is the gold standard for insightful episode-by-episode retroblogging of a soap opera gone feral. (Seriously, check him out, even if you’re not a Dark Shadows fan yet—his blend of storytelling insight and leave-you-gasping-with-laughter delivery is without parallel.) Danny’s conceit is that Dark Shadows is a soap where for some reason, the first epis...

  The story of  Chances  begins with Lynn Bayonas – quite arguably the Verity Lambert of Australian television. A long-established writer-producer, and a proud feminist in the blokey network culture of the day.  Her decades in television, which included running a bunch of the country’s most popular dramas, also included work on a wide variety of SF and fantasy projects, mostly for kids – ranging from the ABC’s early-‘70s   Alpha Scorpio   to '90s/2000s projects like   The Girl From Tomorrow   and the post-Buffy take on Arthurian myth   Guenivere Jones . With  Chances , she and Brendon Lunney pitched Nine a straight drama series – following middle-aged Aussie battler Dan Taylor and his wife Barb as they won the lottery, and their lives and the lives of their three grown kids were turned upside down. Dan (John Sheerin) and Barb (Brenda Addie) with Dan’s old Vietnam buddy Bill (Michael Caton) But after they made their pilot, Nine was only w...

  How does a soap opera go completely batshit insane? Chances , which aired on the Nine Network in Australia in 1991-93, started out as a fairly ordinary, rather sleazy nighttime soap opera. But before the end of its run, it had become… Well, here’s a montage of clips… Blimey. You don’t get that on  Neighbours . But how on Earth did this show go from an earnest family-friendly drama, to a raunchy adult soap, and then leap into the world of bodyswapping, cross-dressing Nazis, and world domination? And how did this happen in the notoriously conservative TV industry of Australia, which spent decades not touching SF or fantasy for adults with a barge-pole? The recent DVD boxset release of the entire series of  Chances  has made it possible to trace the evolution—or maybe a better word is  mutation —of a TV show where the brakes have completely come off… and probably the wheels as well.  It’s the story of a thoroughly normal TV-movie pilot for a family dram...