AustLit

Six years after the end of Packed to the Rafters, Dave and Julie have settled down in the country with baby Ruby, while the Rafter children and Grandpa Ted face new challenges.

'An intense, high concept contemporary drama series about two disparate and disconnected worlds, thrown together by death and a sacrifice in one and the chance for new life in the other. Bold, daring, emotionally gripping, fast paced and unpredictable, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS will push the boundaries of popular commercial drama in Australia.'

Source: Screen Australia.

'The series looks at the lives of four best friends bound together by their shared experience of being 'the losers' in high school. Now ten years later the women are about to become winners, but at what cost?'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 2/12/2013)

One of Australia's highest rating dramas, All Saints is a Logie Award-winning Australian medical drama set in the fictional All Saints Western General Hospital in suburban Sydney. The stories originally focused on the nursing staff of Ward 17 run by Nursing Unit Manager Terri Sullivan. It was sometimes referred to as the 'garbage ward' because it took the overflow of patients.

In 2004 Network Seven producers overhauled the series in an effort to increase the show's gradually dwindling audience. They achieved this by closing down Ward 17 and transferring some of the staff to the Emergency Department managed by Frank Campion. Several other new lead characters were also introduced. The changes also saw the storylines begin to focus more on the lives of the doctors and nurses.

Another significant change to the series came in early 2009 when the producers introduced the Medical Response Unit. Central to this development was the helicopter which took doctors to rescue situations outside the hopsital and which in turn brought patients to the All Saints Emergency Department. The show's name was also changed at this time to All Saints: Medical Response Unit. The increased production costs created by having scenes shot on location played a part, however, in the series being cancelled mid-year. The series ended with the Emergency Department and Medical Response Unit teams having a dinner to farewell the last remaining original character, Von Ryan on her final day at All Saints.

All Saints was popular in many countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium and Iran.

A 'second-generation' Skippy, with Ranger Hammond's younger son Sonny grown up and running an animal-based theme park, Habitat, on Australia's Gold Coast, in company with his ten-year-old twins, Jerry and Lou. The theme park is adjacent to a national park, bringing in Ranger Dave as a character, along with Sonny Hammond's housekeeper Thelma and assistant Kate.

Home and Away is a television serial created by Alan Bateman and produced by the Seven Network. The idea for the series came to Bateman (then head of drama at Seven) after he stopped to buy ice-creams in a small country town in southern NSW. While chatting to some locals, he learned that the town was unhappy about plans to build a home for foster kids from the city. At that time, Channel Seven was still smarting from its decision to let Neighbours go to the Ten Network, where it had become hugely popular, and was looking to create another series to rival its success. Bateman saw in the idea that became Home and Away the potential for plenty of storylines and conflict by having streetwise city kids being relocated to a small regional environment,

In the beginning, the series focused on Pippa and Tom Fletcher, who, being unable to have children of their own, decide to become foster parents. When Tom is retrenched from his city job, the couple buy the rundown Summer Bay Caravan Park and move there with their five foster children. Soon after arriving, they also take in troublesome Bobby Simpson.

The series debuted in January 1988 with an hour-long telemovie. Although this rated well, the series itself took some while to develop an audience. Having learned their lesson from the Neighbours debacle, Network Seven gave its new show time, and its ratings gradually increased. As with Neighbours, the Home and Away series and performers became very popular in the United Kingdom.

Another Grundy soap opera, Possession was, like the ill-fated Taurus Rising, designed to challenge the American soaps Dynasty and Dallas, in that it was (to use Moran's description from his Guide to Australian TV series) 'nicely set to gravitate betweem motifs of material wealth and unbalanced, emotionally wrought behaviour'.

Like Taurus Rising, the program was unsuccessful, and was pulled from its 7:30pm slot early in its run, to run out the rest of its episodes in a late-night slot. Moran notes that the program was 'one of a long series of misses' for Channel Nine, as they struggled to find a replacement for The Sullivans and The Young Doctors.

Moran also notes, 'For industry watchers--the serial was producer Eric Taylor's first dip in the waters of commercial television after many years' flotation in ABC TV Drama'.

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.

Sons and Daughters explores the dramatic incidents in the lives of the wealthy Hamilton family and the working-class Palmer family. The premise that underpinned the show's early years concerned the character John Palmer, on the run from the Melbourne police, who suspect him of murder. He travels to Sydney and falls in love with the wealthy Angela Hamilton, but they are later revealed to be twins who were separated at birth and raised separately: John raised by the wise former prostitute Fiona Thompson before returning to live with his father and Angela raised by her mother, who subsequently married into money. More wealth later arrives through the introduction of the Morrell clan, who have managed to marry their way into the Hamilton family.