AustLit

Chuck Finn follows Charles 'Chuck' Finn, a Canadian boy whose parents move from Toronto to the Australian country town of Tingalla. At first, he longs desperately to return to Toronto, but he soon finds the decommissioned and derelict paddle steamer the Tingalla Rose. Soon, he and his friends--some of whom are ghostly, rather than mortal--are enchanted by the possibility of getting the Tingalla Rose running again and seduced by life on the Murray River.

Unfortunately for Chuck Finn, Barron Entertainment declared bankruptcy during the production of season two. A truncated season of six episodes was completed and released, but the production was abandoned at that point.

Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, Thunderstone follows Noah Daniels who, with his family, lives in the underground colony of North Col, after all life on the surface of the Earth is destroyed by the impact of the Nemesis Comet. Fascinated with the holographic animals that the North Col colonists use to teach their children about the Earth's extinct species, Noah is accidentally transported forward in time, to the colony of Haven. 'Thunderstone' is the name given to the remnants of the Nemesis Comet, which allow Noah to travel through time.

Season one involves Noah's travels through time, in company with Arushka (a nomadic girl from Haven), in an attempt to repopulate the Earth with animals. Season two revolves around Noah's attempts to completely destroy the Nemesis Comet before it strikes the Earth, thereby preventing the apocalypse. Season three involves Noah's experiments in wormhole technology, his plans to set up a space colony, and the attempts of guerillas from the future to assassinate Noah before he can (allegedly) murder his own parents.

Season one has been released in its entirety on DVD, but neither season two nor season three have been made commerically available.

A character-based television drama series about the lives of police officers in the fictitious Australian country town of Mt Thomas, this series began with the arrival of Constable Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune) to the Mt Thomas station in the episode 'A Woman's Place'. Doyle and avuncular station boss Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon (John Wood) were the core characters of the series until the departure of Lisa McCune.

Immensely popular for a decade, Blue Heelers was cancelled in 2006 after thirteen seasons. The announcement was front-page news in Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Age in Melbourne, and Brisbane's Courier Mail.

On June 8, 2006 Ross Warneke wrote in The Age:

'It's over and, to be perfectly blunt, there's no use lamenting the demise of Blue Heelers any more. When the final movie-length episode aired on Channel Seven on Sunday night, 1.5 million Australians tuned in, a figure that was big enough to give the show a win in its timeslot but nowhere near big enough to pay the sort of tribute that this writer believes Heelers deserved after more than 500 episodes.It is unlikely there will be anything like it again. At almost $500,000 an hour, shows such as Blue Heelers are quickly becoming the dinosaurs of Australian TV.'

A mixture of live-action, puppetry, animation, and documentary, Lift Off centred on a group of children who lived in the same neighbourhood and whose imaginations made their environment a world of fun and excitement. However, the program also explored issues such as pain, loneliness, jealousy, and anger. The program was aimed at three-year-old to eight-year-old viewers (as defined by Harvard University developmental psychologist Howard Gardner), and was linked to school curricula through the Curriculum Corporation of Australia.

On the cold and inhospitable planet of Zyrgon in a galaxy light years away, X's father wins the state lottery for the 27th time in a row. Knowing he will now be severely punished, twelve-year-old X is determined to save her family from jail, and decides to buy a spaceship. The whole family then set off into space, head halfway across the galaxy, and turn left. They land on an even stranger planet: Earth.

American revival of the 1966 television program, but filmed in Australia (largely in Queensland), and making extensive use of Australian directors and script-writers: eight of the twenty-two writers and five of the nine directors are Australian. As with the earlier version (and the later film incarnations), the program made extensive use of high-tech gadgetry that often crossed the line from science into science fiction.

Another Roger Mirams production, Professor Poopsnagle's Steam Zeppelin was a spin-off from Mirams's previous series, Secret Valley. In this series, Professor Poopsnagle, grandfather of one of the Secret Valley children, is kidnapped while working on a means of stopping air pollution. The children, in an effort to save him, complete his half-built steam zeppelin (a combination of an old bus and a hot-air balloon) and set off in pursuit of six golden salamanders: each salamander contains the name of a mineral, and the six minerals combined will complete the professor's formula.

The children are aided by the professor's friend, Doctor García, and opposed by the sinister Count Sator, a retired local land magnate. In the figure of the latter and in the concern with environmental destruction, Professor Poopsnagle's Steam Zeppelin (like Secret Valley) echoes the concerns of other children's programs such as Falcon Island and series one of The Henderson Kids.

The program also touches on the iconography of the then nascent genre of steampunk: though the program does not borrow the British Victorian or American Wild West settings associated with steampunk, the zeppelin itself is a distinctly steampunk device. Moran notes, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'The effect of the flying bus was achieved through a combination of front projection photography, a double set of models, and front shots and interiors of a real bus hoisted on a crane'.

The program was successful on Australian television, and also aired in Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, France, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom (where, unlike Secret Valley, it was immensely popular).

The 1986 television series is set seven years after the events of the 1983 mini-series. Stephanie Harper, Australia's richest woman, is happily married to her plastic-surgeon husband. Her two children are now young adults, involved in the Harper 'empire' but with their own problems. The release of Jilly Stewart from prison starts a dramatic chain of events.

A daily television drama series set in the fictional Melbourne suburb of Erinsborough, Neighbours chronicles the lives of the residents of Ramsay Street. The series initially revolved around three families: the Ramsays (at number 24 Ramsay Street), the Robinsons (at number 26), and the Clarkes (at number 28). The scope of the series has since broadened to include new Ramsay Street familes.

Ernie is a fourteen year old who lives with his alcoholic father in the harsh and lawless opal fields of inland Australia. When his precious cache of opals is stolen, Ernie determinedly sets out with a friend to find the thief.

Four children fight attempts to close down an old steam engine and railway line in favour of building a new highway.

Set in a small, fictional, New South Wales country town called Wandin Valley, A Country Practice focused on the staffs of the town's medical practice and local hospital and on the families of the doctors, nurses, and patients. Many of the episodes also featured guest characters (frequently patients served by the practice) through whom various social and medical problems were explored. Although often considered a soap opera, the series was not built around an open-ended narrative; instead, the two one-hour episodes screened per week formed a self-contained narrative block, though many of the storylines were developed as sub-plots for several episodes before becoming the focus of a particular week's storyline. While the focus was on topical issues such as youth unemployment, suicide, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and terminal illness, the program did sometimes explore culturally sensitive issues, including, for example, the Aboriginal community and their place in modern Australian society.

Among the show's principal characters were Dr Terence Elliott, local policeman Sergeant Frank Gilroy, Esme Watson, Shirley Dean Gilroy, Bob Hatfield, Vernon 'Cookie' Locke, and Matron Margaret 'Maggie' Sloan. In addition to its regularly rotating cast of characters, A Country Practice also had a cast of semi-regulars who would make appearances as the storylines permitted. Interestingly, while the series initially targeted the adult and older youth demographic, it became increasingly popular with children over the years.

A serial drama set in an airport, which followed the familiar soap-opera structure of combining self-contained guest stories (usually involving stranded passengers, drug trafficking, and the like) with ongoing narratives affecting the regular cast.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series,

Industry wags suggested at the time that Skyways was Crawford's version of the Ross Hunter feature film smash hit of the early 1970s, Airport. A soapie with an airport setting, Skyways was a chance to say hello again to many television drama faces, including Tony Bonner, Bruce Barry, Carmen Duncan, Ken James, Tina Bursill, Brian James and Gerard Kennedy.

Set in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell during World War Two, The Sullivans follows the lives of Dave and Grace Sullivan and their children John, Tom, Dave, and Kitty. However, the storylines reach beyond the immediate Sullivan family, allowing viewers to see their extended family, friends, and neighbours also struggle through everyday war-time life.

The series also featured war-action sequences involving various characters. Arguably the most dramatic moment, and the event that effectively became a turning point in the series, was the death of Grace Sullivan in a London air raid. The series finished after a seven-year run, by which point most of the original cast had left the series and the remaining characters had settled into a new life in the post-war era.

Another Crawford Productions soap opera, The Box was set in a Melbourne television-production studio. According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian Television Series:

The setting for the continuous drama was a television station populated by a series of familiar types. These included Sir Henry Usher, chairman of the company; Max Knight, the harrassed station manager; Tony Wild, the egotistical star of the station's on-air detective series; the inevitable tea lady; Paul Donovan, a harrassed station executive, and many others. Most memorable of all was a wonderful bitch-figure in the person of reporter Vicki Stafford.

Like Number 96, The Box was designed for a late-night timeslot, and so focused on 'adult themes', including adultery and bisexuality.

Moran also suggests that The Box was 'very important to Crawford's in generating a cash flow at a time when they were losing the contracts on their police dramas' and that writers used the character of television police officer Tony Wild as 'an opportunity to settle the books against the egotism of some of the actors in Crawford's police series'.