Seven aims for three-peat
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Tonight: Packed To The Rafters
The new edition to the Rafter family is making her presence felt.
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Most program makers focus on growth, constantly tweaking their shows to attract more viewers. The producers of Seven’s Packed to the Rafters, which drew up to 2 million viewers a week in its first two seasons, face a more complex task. As the series returns for a third season, producer Jo Porter admits her job is not so much letting things change but helping them stay the same.
“We’re just hanging on, really, and trying to keep the show fresh while we do,” she says. “You will still, hopefully, reach people through word of mouth and you might gain new viewers but the job is to keep it fresh without giving into the temptation to tinker. It’s a delicate balance.”
Unexpected arrival…The birth of baby Ruby is a central plotline in series three of Packed to the Rafters.
Last year’s final episode, in which Julie Rafter (Rebecca Gibney) gave birth to baby Ruby, was watched by 2.04 million people. It was beaten only by the second season premiere and the episode in which Ben (Hugh Sheridan) married Melissa (Zoe Ventoura).
Porter says the production team were “very happy, exhilarated” by the ratings. “We were all just gobsmacked that the show maintained those audience numbers, which is remarkable really,” she says.
Asked if she is surprised by the show’s success, she pauses, knowing the answer isn’t one from the television producer’s playbook. “Yes, I guess,” she says. “We never take it for granted. When we went to the Logies this year, for example, I really didn’t think we would win. We weren’t on air during the voting period – and audiences can be fickle – and yet we won. So maybe I set myself up for delight because I believe in the program enormously but I’m always very cautious. And so I’m always thrilled when it does keep working.”
The series was created by Bevan Lee, is written by a team led by Lee and Anthony Ellis and is produced by Porter and Seven’s head of drama, John Holmes. It tells the story of the Rafter family: Julie and Dave (Erik Thomson) and their three children, Rachel (Jessica Marais), Ben and Nathan (Angus McLaren) who, as growing adults, find it difficult to cut ties with the family nest.
Porter says the central element of the show’s enduring appeal is recognition. She’s so sure of it, the word is said before the question is even finished. “It’s all about recognition: that is me, that is my family, that could be me and there is also an aspirational aspect of it too, so sometimes it’s ‘I wish that was my family’. They are stories which people recognise in their own lives.”
The production is housed at Seven’s new studio in Redfern, a maze of studios, meeting rooms, offices and – the preferred toy of television writers these days – whiteboards. But the whiteboard is deceptively simple, Porter says, and reveals only the tip of the creative iceberg.
The story department focus on “various peaks for various characters that they would like to achieve across the year” but the writing team – a large group that includes Jeff Truman, Dave Warner, Margaret Wilson, Marieke Hardy and Tony Morphett – then build episodes “very organically”.
Porter commends Lee and Ellis for delivering characters who, she says, almost want to tell stories for themselves. “I think they tell us where they want to go. I’m not pretending they’re not being shaped, of course they are, but it comes out more organically.”
The second season left viewers hanging, with Julie giving birth to baby Ruby and the possibility that Nathan and Sammy (Jessica McNamee) have split after he gambled away their windfall.
“We knew we had a challenge for ourselves with the baby, which we now have to make work from a storytelling point of view, and we loaded it up dramatically at the end with stories so there were a lot of jumping off points to take us through,” Porter says.
She promises “a lot of immediate payoff” for the show’s cliffhanging threads and that there will be “some other large pebbles we’re going to drop in the pond through the rest of the year”.
The question of balancing payoff with suspense is a critical one, Porter says. “I think, as viewers, we all like being tantalised a little bit and anticipation is a really big part of any form of entertainment on television. They do it on MasterChef when they cut to a commercial break, so, in terms of the dramatic structure of entertainment, they’re no different to us in some ways. You do need to have natural builds and spikes within an episode and across the structure of a series.”
The big lesson, she says, “is that question of keeping the characters and the world true to the rules of the world you establish with your audience at the very beginning.
“There is a commitment you make to your audience that this is a world they’re joining and that it will stay true to that world. That doesn’t mean there won’t be surprises – of course there will be and they would be disappointed if there weren’t – but it’s keeping it true to that world.”
Keeping it real
Packed to the Rafters looks to be an unstoppable force. But is it? Even the best shows can “jump the shark”, an expression that refers to the point when creative ascent turns into commercial descent, either by recasting a role, resolving unresolved romantic tension, moving the show’s setting or — worst-case scenario — introducing new characters to replace old ones.
Producer Jo Porter concedes time will bring change but is hopeful Packed to the Rafters can side-step the cliches. Curiously, one of the classic shark-jumping twists — the birth of a new baby — was a major storyline last year but the show’s ratings remained solid. Porter says the audience bought into it because the show remained true to its promise.
She says changing the show’s setting is unlikely, though she points out that families like the Rafters often move house. And she won’t recast a character with a new actor. “We were joking about that the other day. There will be no hairdryer scene where someone goes under and emerges with a new face,” she says, laughing.
The trickiest twist is known as “cousin Oliver syndrome”, a nod to cousin Oliver (Robbie Rist), who joined the cast of The Brady Bunch in its final hour.
Porter, unexpectedly, won’t rule out the arrival of a Rafter cousin. “We’ve kept the family very tight up to this point but we have introduced other family in season two — we met Dave’s mother, there was a suggestion of his father. There is a lot of rich story material in that but it would have to happen organically.”
Packed to the Rafters returns to Seven on Tuesday at 8.30pm.