The Beginning

 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 episode was numbered 210—that’s when the vampire showed up, and the show went from a fairly straight Gothic-tinged soap to a freakazoid Universal-horror-movie mash-up. There are these strange rumours of the existence of stories before that one, but frankly, he doesn’t care.

(Except when he does. If he really didn’t care, he wouldn’t have been able to regale us with the epic tale of the gold filigree pen, a shambolic shaggy-dog MacGuffin plot which made me simultaneously wince with recognition of how desperate the writers must have been, and chain-reaction giggle.)

But that won’t work here. Because part of what I aim to do here is to trace each step this show took, as it strayed further and further from God. I want to get inside the heads of the writers in the room, as they faced their near-daily crisis of what the hell do we do now. And to appreciate those first steps off the cliff, you need at least a sketch of the relentlessly adequate story they were originally hired to make.

So.

You begin with a wedding—a natural excuse for getting a whole clan of characters together. Working-class Aussie battler Dan Taylor and his wife Barb are giving their daughter Rebecca the wedding she’s dreamed of… but the money crunch is really beginning to bite. The bank won’t give him a loan on a construction-worker’s salary… will he be forced to sell the battered old boat he and his old Vietnam buddy Bill have been lovingly restoring?

The wedding introduces a whole clan of regular cast members—fifteen of them—almost all of them family, and each with their own dramas. Dan and Barb’s son Alex, a rising young advertising exec, has to come up with a better jingle for his latest campaign or his career’s done for. Their tearaway teenage daughter Nikki gets sloshed at the reception. Sister Connie’s wrangling two teenage boys and a mountain of debt, brother Jack’s still denying to his wife Sarah that he’s having it off with his secretary, oh, and mother-in-law Hettie has come over from New Zealand specially and won’t go away.

But then Alex borrows Rebecca’s new husband David right from out of his own wedding reception, to remix one of David’s songs for the jingle—he sells David on how this will be his big break, a one-time chance he can either grab or miss. As they’re hurrying back to the reception, ebullient—they lose control of Alex’s Porsche. Crash. David’s dead. Rebecca’s traumatised, Alex is blaming David to keep the police off his back, the family’s at each others’ throats.

And then… Dan and Barb win the lottery, with a ticket David had given them.

That’s the pilot of the show. From there, over two one-hour episodes a week, we see how money changes everything, except for who you really are. Rebecca’s in mourning and disintegrating; Alex sees the money as the first step towards everything he’s ever dreamed of; Nikki sees it as an excuse to cut loose. Dan’s brother Jack, always the more successful businessman of the family, feels emasculated by his younger brother suddenly having the money to make his own decisions; this leads to conflict at home with his own wife and kids and further womanizing. His sister Connie, a struggling single mum, gets gifted Dan and Barb’s old house—which causes her absentee husband to come sniffing back around… and also means she’s now living next door to Bill, who’s carried a torch for her for years. In turn, Bill—a hard-drinking, pot-smoking burnout—has to struggle with his longtime friend and co-worker suddenly becoming his boss, when Dan buys the construction firm they both work for. And Dan’s baby sister Auntie Sharon—cynical, grasping, and promiscuous, who was carrying on an affair with Connie’s husband—wrangles her way into a spare bedroom in the Taylors’ new mansion, along with Dan’s mother-in-law Heather. After a couple of weeks of story contrivances, all three of Dan and Barb’s kids end up living back at home too—giving them practically a Southfork Ranch amount of family drama under the one roof. There’s no reason that couldn’t make for a perfectly sound Packed to the Rafters-style family-drama series.

It’s just, it didn’t.

Not least because when the network picked up the pilot, they did so on the basis that this wasn’t going to be a gentle family saga with overtones poking at the dream of upward mobility and the class system Australia pretends it doesn’t have; no, Chances would be a raunchy post-watershed soap, complete with attention-grabbing nudity and salaciousness.

The fact that they were now trying to make a show about bonking in which almost all the regular characters were related, doesn’t seem to have crossed the network’s mind.

(Not that this stopped them; early plotlines included Jack’s wife Sarah having an affair with Connie’s son Chris, and then the revelation that Jack, not Dan, was actually Alex’s father. But there’s a limit to how many of these storylines you can do without spiralling into ludicrousness, and not the good kind.)

And even the naughty content is pretty timid at first. In the first episode, you get a few teasing shots of Rebecca in bed (alone) with strategically placed bits of sheet, some enthusiastic but fully-clothed foreplay between David and Rebecca, a flash of Alex’s bum as he leaps out of the bed of an advertising client … and that’s basically it.

Get used to it, folks.

Really the biggest dramatic question you can wring from the opening episodes of Chances is, why is this show the way it is? Its inoffensiveness is almost inexplicable. If the network picked up the straight-family-drama pilot on the understanding that it would be retooled to grab adult hornbags, then the storytelling changes made after the pilot seem even more bizarre… when they rewrote and reshot it into the first two episodes, they added extra characters, but rather than doubling-down on the young-sexy-people angle that you’d think they’d need for a raunchy show, instead they added pubescent teen Sam and grandma Hettie. Thus making sure every possible demographic is represented, but adding even more characters who couldn’t get up to sexy shenanigans even if they weren’t already blood-related.

The whispers under the surface of They don’t know what they’re doing are already audible. Not very loud, because nothing about Chances is very anything at this point. And to be fair, “they don’t know what they’re doing” is basically the default state of writing a soap-opera—these days it’s de rigeur for every other drama on the air to talk about their five-year plan, but on a soap you’re lucky to have a rough projection of your storylines thirteen weeks ahead, and your episode breakdowns maybe a month in advance of airing.  (And because this is an Aussie soap, and therefore slapdash even by American standards, the episodes aren’t even written by staff writers—they’re farmed out to a small group of trusted freelancers because they can’t even afford to keep them on staff full-time.)

The plus side is that you can turn on a dime—you’ll have to, because that’s most of your production budget—and respond to which characters or stories are working (or not). The minus side is that, if you don’t actually have enough good ideas on the board at that moment… you’re still out on stage tap-dancing for two hours a week, trying to fill time until you come up with something better. Because you’ve got to fill that screen time, sharpish. Two hours a week. Every week. Forty-eight weeks a year. Right now.

So what do they have to work with?

Their biggest plus at the moment is their star, and some of the characters near him. John Sheerin as Dan Taylor is an immediately likable everyman—charming, relatable, even a little bit romantic with his longtime wife—who goes out of his way to do right by people, even when his sense of what’s right is totally out of whack with his new world. (One of his great character beats is when he celebrates suddenly becoming a multi-millionaire with his mates on the construction crew, by shouting them a slab of beer… totally not getting why they think he’s being a cheapskate!) Brenda Addie as Barb brings a fair bit of spark to the dramatically thankless role of The Mum, and Tim Robertson as Uncle Jack mixes shiftiness with sometimes-overbearing filial concern. Michael Caton as Bill gets a juicy and unpredictable role—those early episodes give him the chance both for larrikin humour and unstable, violent emotional outbursts, as he has to cope with the fact that after twenty years playing the lottery in partnership with his old buddy whose life he saved back in ‘Nam, a different ticket won Dan the lottery and his ship hasn’t come in at all. And Alex is dramatically interesting because he makes risky choices, and then more risky choices to get out of the consequences of the first ones: we get to see him persuasively selling both David and Rebecca on his scheme for a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and we can tell this is a character who raises the drama level of any room he’s in. It’s hard to say this without factoring in hindsight, knowing which characters survive the various culls, but it seems pretty solid—Dan Taylor, and his immediate family and mates, are perfectly sound characters to build a show around.

Fish completely out of water.

But there’s so much of this initial Chances that isn’t particularly Dan’s show. It’s almost like the writers don’t have enough confidence in the lottery-winning premise to hang all their drama off it; they’re also throwing in a bunch of conventional soap-opera mechanics so they can tell plenty of stories which don’t even have that as their selling point. Jack’s an ex-cop, and his daughter Phillipa is a cop right now, so they can do cop-shop stories. Connie’s a nurse, so they can tell medical-drama stories. And Jack’s son Ben comes back to Melbourne and moves in as Phillipa’s roommate, but has to pretend he’s gay to avoid freaking out her other roommate, and then he starts falling for her, but she’s beginning to have a thing with Alex, and… oh please stop me. Or preferably them.

It’s like they threw in every kind of random soap they could, to appeal as broadly as possible, and as a result it appealed to nobody. Which is the direct opposite of the attitude of the later Chances; they knew they appealed to a fairly small number of completely insane people, but made a show that they’d remember for decades.

Frankly, if I had to invest sixty blog-entries up-front in this hapless twice-a-week soap… this blog would go the same way as Chances itself, and most people wouldn’t make it through. And yet there’s enough craft on display here that I can’t just dismiss it; it’s baseline television, but even that requires a hell of a lot of skill to make work.  I’m sure there’s stuff in these episodes which would be fascinating to the committed fan—and I want to be generous, because just getting two hours of TV a week out the door is an accomplishment worth celebrating in itself. Just not right now.

So one day, I shall come back. I’ll look in more detail at the first sixty episodes—and at the pilot they made nearly two years before the show was picked up, which only surfaced for the first time on the DVDs. I’ll sift through those seven months of twice-a-week soap particles—nearly half the total output of the show, but less than a third of the time it ran—and wring whatever amusing insights I can from them.

But not yet. It’s more fun to watch the show smash into the rocks, and then see what they make from the pieces.