Touches You

That was an excellent one.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This was a wonderful series, and I found many of the issues that the characters had to deal with actually reflecting the issues facing a number colleagues and friends. While the situations were not of course fictional the emotions and ways to manage issues are no different to the way we have to manage in real lifeI loved the wide range of interactions that so realistically reflected real life in its many layered complexity. The writers had managed to portray how we try to live and survive in our hectic world.I did feel however that as the series came to the last part it seemed to me as though the actors were starting to get out of character and a different director was at the wheel, or a new writer was involved . This meant for me a great series sort of tapered off in quality at the end of the series runCome on series 2.

Reading other reviews for this series confirmed in my mind that one would either hate it or love it. I expect that women would like it and men would generally hate it. (Perhaps I'm bisexual in giving it 5). The cast is as good as could be expected in an Australian drama. The failure comes from the plot and the script. The story went nowhere. It is a typical soap. The comparison with the never-ending series "Days of Our Lives" is apt. Added to this is the stultifying political correctness that hangs over the series. Children have baths in clothes!! We have the token Asian woman. All the main men are Sensitive New-Age Guys whose characters must have been defined by the women who produced the show. The men are one-dimensional. Only some of the female characters have any depth and then not much. One outstanding feature of the series is the standard of the acting by the children. The twins, Carmody and Luce's daughter are stars, believable and natural. The show's scenario could have produced some excellent episodes but the promise was never realised.

Despite some big names (in Australia at any rate) this fails to deliver any kind of emotional or dramatic punch. Formulaic characters, meandering story line and a clunky script make for an uninteresting and downright boring offering. Surely Australian scriptwriters can come up with something better than this! I tuned in with the hope of seeing something along the lines of "Sea Change"......perhaps because of William McInnes?. No such luck. The dialogue seems forced and wooden, and even the likes of the aforesaid W M, Claudia Karvan etc, can do nothing to bring it to life. In fact, I have to wonder what the producers were intending with this series....whatever it was, I'm afraid they failed.

If you look at the premise of this series - one more examination of the daily lives of a bunch of suburban characters, most of them somehow related, chronicling their triumphs and disappointments - one could be forgiven for thinking that it's just another soap. After all, the line between upmarket soap opera and quality drama can be confusingly thin at times.For mine, this definitely falls into the latter category. It's true that the story lines fall into the usual run of spousal tensions, generational issues, affairs, blended families and how the kids are affected, with associated logistical problems. But then, that's life, innit? You don't need to be in a train-wreck to have at least one phase of your life that resembles one.The trick in making such well-worn stories worth watching anew is in providing moments of genuine drama, with authentic emotional reactions and dialogue that rings true for each character, with sufficient nuance to let us feel that we are they, and we know exactly what they're going through. Yes, perhaps some of the situations here are a bit familiar and obvious, but at least they don't all say the bleedin' obvious.In the end, the main differentiator between the two genres is a well-wrought script coupled with an ensemble cast that's capable of doing justice to it. Not to mention having the restraint to avoid a closing shot of a character staring into the middle distance with the expression of a stunned mullet. And resisting the temptation to include an explosion or inferno to ramp up the stakes a bit.On that basis, this is a fine effort. Good, thoughtful scripts, and excellent performances all round.