Courtesy of
Netflix streaming video, my wife and I have recently gotten hooked on an
Australian TV soap opera, popular from 2001-2009 (224 episodes in all), called
“McLeod’s Daughters”. It has all the
elements of the best telenovelas I watched while I was trying to train my ear
to understand conversational Spanish spoken rapidly, as native speakers do,
before one of my trips to Uruguay, Argentina, or Chile. It’s corny, it’s hard to understand Aussie
slang, and it’s overly dramatic in spots, but it’s well enough written to root
for the characters and is set in a fascinating rural locale, the South
Australian outback. It was apparently
the most popular TV show in Australia for several years of its long running
history. We’re currently up to episode
#132, so we seem to be truly hooked, and we're into 2006, which means there’s
substantial cast turnover going on as characters reached the end of their cheap
contracts or just became bored with their roles. As a writer I find myself analyzing what
makes this show work and are there lessons here for me and other would-be
mystery novelists on how to reach out to a larger audience?
I looked up
the actors and actresses on IMDB and Wiki.
In a country as small as Australia, and with a sprinkling of talent from
New Zealand thrown in, the cast is a Who’s Who of 30 year old regional actors
with training and talent and of pop music stars crossing over. Pretty much all of them won Australian Emmy
awards, Logies, for their roles in this series.
Most of them went to acting school or played roles in other Nine Network
series shows together at one time or another so everybody obviously knew
everybody else in the cast. Maybe that’s
why they all seem to get along so well on the telly, if not in actuality. A couple of the cast members came to the USA
after the show ended its run to make their fortune. Matt Passmore and
Rachael Carpani, the actress playing Jodi, have starred (Matt)and guested (Rachael) in “The Glades” on USA
Network for the past 4 years. This is another quirky TV series, still in production I believe,
that I recommend highly. Rachael Carpani now has a new series, "Against the Wall", on Lifetime network so both seem to be making this transition successfully.
