CHANCES -- When a soap goes off its trolley!

 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 drama, which the Nine Network picked up… on the condition that it be turned into a raunchy post-watershed soap full of gratuitous nudity, in the vein of the groundbreaking ‘70s trashfest Number 96.  It’s the story of talented professionals—from famed Australian executive producer Lynn Bayonas on down—who were far more inventive than the lowbrow show they’d been assigned to make… and who, through a combination of desperation and network inattention, were left to come up with the wildest things they could imagine to get viewers to notice them.

Brilliant minds in panic are a wonderful thing to watch.

Here we’re going to trace, step by step—for the good bits, episode by episode—how this show strayed further and further from God. Why did they make these decisions? How did they end up where they did? It’s an exploration of storytelling on the fly.

The thing is, most serialised TV drama below the Netflix level is to a large degree improvised, only really looking a couple of episodes ahead—they may have an outline of where they want to go, but the treadmill of script deadlines makes it impossible to nail things down too tightly ahead of time.  And the turnaround on soap operas is especially tight. You can see practically week-to-week how the writers are scrambling to figure out what the hell to do next.  Because the previous episodes are already in the can, they’re largely written without a backspace key—all their mistakes and all their fixes make it to the screen.

The result isn’t a novel for television, or any of the other self-aggrandising phrases used about modern Peak TV dramas; it’s more like improv theatre on the screen. What’s working?  Do more of that.  What’s not working?  Get it offstage as fast as possible.  Is what you’re doing this week abruptly different from what you were doing a month ago?  Good, because last month wasn’t working—maybe this’ll work better.

And the secret truth of TV is that the audience only particularly cares about consistency if they liked what you were doing before—if they didn’t, but they like what you’re doing now better, they will go on vast leaping journeys wherever you take them.  And the speed with which Chances can tapdance from one approach to a wildly different one is breathtaking.

In two years—126 episodes—the show went from the tale of a family of Aussie battlers who won the lottery and got faced with the new challenges of life among the rich, through a saga of a young advertising executive’s battle with amnesia, conspiracies, brainwashing and mind-altering drugs, to a campfest involving Nazis, vampires, Egyptian goddesses, Triad gangsters, Amazons, Elvis, a henchwoman named Miss Severity de Sade and a hunchbacked assistant named Bruce, and whatever else struck the writers’ fancy—leading up to a final episode in which a metaphysical battle for the soul of the world comes down to our hero talking to God in the Melbourne public library reading room.  All on videotape on an Aussie soap-opera budget.

And it’s also a neat time capsule of changing attitudes towards sex and adult content on TV.  The Nine Network wanted to push boundaries, but perhaps Chances didn’t push them in the direction they expected…  Once the writers got over their embarrassment at network-mandated nudity and decided to dive into more extravagant storytelling, they started exploring what the sex could mean. We got sex as satire, sex as social comment, sex as ethical question, sex as study of human nature.  And sometimes they just felt like having Alex seduce a nun, Cal get blackmailed by a Nazi dominatrix, Maddie conduct a sex-magic ritual to conquer the world, Shazza inadvertently tempt a priest, Angela fall for a vampire, or Miss Severity de Sade simply exist, just for the sheer glee of breaking all the rules. Stuff that could just be shocking for shock value instead becomes playful.

It’s astonishing to see a show from the very start of the ‘90s which is raunchy but feminist, genuinely sex-positive, with about as much male flesh as female flesh on display, and which is friendly towards all sorts of kinks and preferences while still aiming to retain an ethical core of consent.  It’s nowhere near perfect—bits of its material seems painfully dated—but other bits are still oddly ahead of its time.
So this is the story of the show Lynn Bayonas—a woman who worked with Orson Welles—called her best experience on television.  It’s the story of talented-maniac writers and producers like Gwenda Marsh, Keith Aberdein and Everett de Roche, of acting stalwarts like Michael Caton and Mercia Deane-Johns, the tragedy of Cathy Godbold and the breakout stardom of Jeremy Sims.  It’s the story of Chances.

Some win.  Some lose.  And some just make you say “What the hell was that?!?”

Check out the Brief History for an overview of what they got up to and why, or follow the episode guide for a step-by-step guide to how a show's cheese can gradually slip completely off its cracker.  And then check out the show itself on DVD!