Friends, Australians, countrymen, lend me your ears: we come to bury Neighbours, and not for the first time. In an attempt to break the record for most cancellations of a primetime TV drama, the fate of Neighbours is once again sitting on a precipice.
The series was cancelled two years ago, but saved by the streaming platform Amazon in a deal that put it on another Amazon-owned platform, Freevee, around the world, and on Ten and Amazon’s Prime Video in Australia.
The cast of Neighbours attend the Logie Awards in 2022.Credit: Chris Hyde/Getty Images
But Freevee has fallen, one of the many casualties of television’s hyper-competitive streaming space, and according to UK media reports a new deal to save the series could not be hammered out in time to save it. It is, as they say in the soaps, curtains.
That means, according to the report, the show will wrap production when the current order of episodes is completed. Because of its financing deal, it is essentially dependent on a foreign sale – or, in this case, a global streaming deal – to remain in production.
In 2022, the deal that kept the 40-year-old series alive collapsed after its key investor – the UK’s Channel 5 – abandoned it. The decision was purely financial; at the time Neighbours was still performing well against the UK’s local soaps.
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The series then took a final bow, in a blaze of publicity that included final episode cameos by Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, and an appearance by Guy Pearce, which tied up the show’s decades-old romance between his character, Mike, and Jane, played by Annie Jones.
But as any soap fan will tell you, death in melodrama is never final, and Neighbours was pulled out of the ashes by Amazon, in a deal that put the show on the path to redemption, with a Daytime Emmy nomination thrown in for good measure.
Changing television economics means that without a new investor, Neighbours is somewhere between an uncertain future and the end of the road for a cultural institution that not only gave us Scott and Charlene, Bouncer the dog, Mrs Mangel, Karl and Susan, and Harold Bishop, but also served as an incubator for successive generations of Australian actors, writers and directors.
