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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Carrie Fairchild" data-source="post: 320497" data-attributes="member: 673">Pacific Drive - 1996 to 2001 <img src="https://images.mubicdn.net/images/film/195372/cache-304451-1516813678/image-w1280.jpg?size=800x" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Despite flopping in Australia and the US, the defunct Paradise Beach was selling well enough in Europe and South America, for it's producers to look at creating a type of replacement show to pick up on the successful overseas sales. Nick McMahon and New World's Brian Frons (later, of ABC Daytime infamy) wanted to target the "hip viewing audience in their twenties and thirties, the key demographic audience for every international TV market from Australia to Zanzibar". One early draft was called Breakers and would be set in an apartment block (unrelated to Ten soap of the same name) while another was called Sunset Beach (unrelated to the US soap), a "scorching new serial about violent ex-cops, restless teens and ruggedly handsome heartbreakers". Nine joined New World as production partners, bringing with them A Country Practice's Bruce Best as producer and a writing team including Bevan Lee, Coral Drouyn and Ro Hume. They settled on Pacific Drive as the title and began hammering out the premise. Bruce Best wanted social realism, Coral Drouyn wanted wackiness but Bevan Lee thought it should fall somewhere in between. New World, on the other hand, just wanted a copy of the super successful Melrose Place. Lee defended comparisons to the hit US show, saying "A lot of people later said it was a direct rip off of Melrose, but let's face it, it's not like they cast the mould. Melrose is a rip-off of Dynasty, which itself is a clone of Peyton Place. My feeling was to go for broke and try and do something Australian that would be flagrantly, outrageously melodramatic and high camp".Pacific Drive would begin with a whodunnit, as rich socialite Sonia Kingsley is murdered on the beach, with the 14 regular characters then being introduced via the ensuing police investigation. There were production issues from the outset as Bruce Best and New World butted heads over casting. Best refused to start production "with a cast of models" while New World objected to the casting of unknown Christine Stephen-Daly as the lead antagonist Amber. New World also took issue with the male cast, describing them as "weak" and insisting that producers look to New World's new Valley of the Dolls adaptation for inspiration. When Valley struggled to sell in certain territories due to onscreen nudity, the cast of Pacific Drive put their clothes back on, should they suffer the same fate. There was also debate about who would play Sonia Kingsley, in her brief appearance as she's mowed down on the beach, with the stunt casting of Lynda Stoner being one suggestion, but the part was eventually filmed using a stunt person. As the show began, Sonia was dead and there was a long list of suspects including her much younger husband, radio shock jock Trey Devlin (Lloyd Morris). Sonia's recently arrived bad girl daughter Amber was in line to collect her inheritance windfall once she turned 30, but unable to wait until then, she ditched her hustler boyfriend Joel (Adrian Lee) and set her sights on her newly widowed stepfather. Sonia's sister Georgina Ellis (Kate Raison) ended up falling for Martin Harris (Joss McWilliam), the police officer investigating Sonia's murder but he broke it off with her when his fugitive sister Laura (Simone Buchanan) showed up and brother and sister had to pretend to be married in order to protect her identity from her stalker ex-boyfriend. Laura wasn't able to hide away for too long and fell for lifeguard Luke Bowman (Steve Harmon), who turned out to be Sonia's secret son and therefore possible heir to the fashion house and radio empire that Sonia left behind. On the peripheries of the Kingsley family drama were gigolo Brett Barrett (Erik Thomson) who worked on a floating bordello that Sonia frequented, Canadian backpacker turned prostitute Tim (Darrin Klimek) who was mates with lesbian Zoe (Libby Tanner) whose best mate was paramedic and Brett's love interest, Callie (Danielle Spencer). Callie was having a fling with estate agent Rick (Andre Eikmeier) who had recently dumped model girlfriend Bethany (Melissa Tkautz) after she was diagnosed as HIV positive.The pre-launch publicity promised a new kind of soap for Australian TV, with more location filming and the use of single and hand held cameras to make the show look more "filmic". Pacific Drive was pre-sold to over 20 countries ahead of it's launch but in Australia, the ABA refused Nine's request to air it at 3.30pm five days a week, so it was scheduled for a late night timeslot at 11pm, twice a week. On it's launch night in January 1996, it premiered in a one-off 9.30pm slot followed by the second episode at 11pm. Ratings were good, with the opening episodes pulling in 1.7 million viewers across the country but within weeks, this fell to 135k viewers for the show that critics were calling Pacific Drivel. The reviews were merciless. "Neither great trash nor clever satire" said Time. "Painfully clumsy" according to the Sydney Morning Herald while the Herald Sun called it "the worst Australian drama ever made". It wasn't all doom and gloom though as the gay audience and gay press hailed the character of Zoe as one of the first positive portrayals of a lesbian in an Aussie soap, who enjoyed as many personal entanglements and affairs as the straight characters on the show including an attention grabbing love triangle with Margauz (Virginia Hey) and Dior (Clodagh Crowe). Melissa Tkautz's portrayal of somebody living with HIV was also praised, with Melissa becoming involved with fundraising events for the AIDS Council nationwide. One area of unexpected support came from the real-life sex workers of the Gold Coast, who said "It was great for sex workers to represented by non-stereotypical characters like Brett and Tim". Their support was recognised when cast members attended the Rose & Ribbons Ball organised by the Queensland AIDS Council and SQWISI (Self Health for Queensland Workers in the Sex Industry) although the mainstream press refused to recognise the event, instead labelling newspaper photos of the cast attending it as "Travelodge Surfers Paradise Ball".With the late night ratings sinking, Nine began repeating Pacific Drive at 3.30pm on weekdays (albeit with some cuts), and it ended up rating better in daytime than it did at night. The show trundled on in typical soapy fashion. Sonia's killer was finally revealed to be her lover Adam (Mark Constable) while Laura got the Rita Lesley treatment as her doppelganger Anna tried to assume her identity in a bid to claim some of Sonia's fortune. Facing deportation, Tim married Zoe to secure his visa, only to fall in love with her. They slept together to see if it would work but Zoe preferred women and they subsequently both fell for the same woman, Sondra (Helen Dallimore). Sondra wasn't long for this world though, as the producers turned to the old reliable serial killer storyline in a bid to spice up the show and the ratings. Sondra, Callie, rocker Nick (Salvatore Coco), Bethany's boyfriend Cameron (Malcolm Kennard) and Georgina all fell victim to the killer. It was a bittersweet departure for Kate Raison. Having noticed that her nipple was visible during a bedroom scene, she asked for the shot to be cut. When it wasn't and it went to air, she slammed Bruce Best, her "old friend and mentor" from A Country Practice and reacted to the drama by announcing that she was leaving following her maternity leave. The serial killer was eventually revealed to be Trey, who had lost control following an ill advised marriage to stepdaughter Amber and the arrival of the mysterious Mara De Villenois (Rowena Wallace), who Trey initially said was his mother but was actually his scheming first wife. The first season drew to a close with Trey being arrested after trying to kill new wife Amber.In addition to the uncertainty over Trey's fate, producers weren't sure if the show would return for a second year, as New World had been bought over by Fox, who had no appetite for a Australian soap. Hoping to benefit from the profits of the lucrative overseas sales, Nine saved the day by agreeing to take on 50% of production costs while Village Roadshow started shopping it around territories it hadn't been picked up in. Trey's trial took centre stage as the new season began with Carmen Duncan guest starring as a magistrate. After the critical pasting of season one, reviews were a lot better this time around with the Sydney Morning Herald saying it was "immeasurably improved in looks, acting and writing" while the Sunday Telegraph named it as one of the '10 Best Shows on TV' for 1997, with them praising Rowena Wallace for "delivering what could be the performance of her career as superbitch Mara. She's not Pat the Rat but she is typical of this show's richly textured characters, trapped in overwhelmingly silly storylines". Wallace would soon be garnering less positive column inches when she had to be written out of the show following an accidental overdose of vodka and pills. Mara eventually returned to Pacific Drive, just in time for ex-hubby Trey to be released without charge after faking multiple personalities to cover for all the murders. He would eventually meet justice of a sort, when he was electrocuted in the bath while trying to murder girlfriend Bethany. Rowena Wallace left soon after, due to health issues, but Mara remained on the show, this time played by Olivia Hamnett, the switch happening after Mara was hit by a car and got amnesia.By now, Nine had decided that Pacific Drive's future was as a daytime soap and asked producers to tone down the content for a daytime audience. Zoe's lesbian romances would cease for the moment (in a convoluted plot, she was now pregnant to Tim) while Bethany made a throwaway comment about how well her HIV treatment was working, with a view to it never being mentioned again. This was all for the purpose of Nine lobbying the ABA again to get the daytime soap counted towards their local drama content. "If quality Australian drama programs can compete with American soaps in the afternoon, then they should be able to qualify for local content quotas" said Kris Noble, Nine's head of drama, while also pointing out that in the 3.30pm timeslot, Pacific Drive was "consistently drawing a 40% national audience share and 70% to 80% share of it's target audience: women aged 18-39". With production schedules well ahead of what was airing onscreen, Nine announced a six month break in production. The Sydney Morning Herald reported "By pulling the plug and at the same time renewing it's quota campaign, Nine hopes to turn necessity into virtue, gaining political clout with the ABA by drawing attention to the drastic action of cancelling (albeit temporarily) a program it cannot find the time to screen". Nine went further by removing the show from both of its timeslots but when the ABA refused to change it's rules, the production break became permanent. The remaining episodes aired sporadically over the next four years. Sometimes it would air once a week, sometimes five nights a week but usually always late night and during a non-ratings period. Loyal fans followed the show around the schedules until the supposed final episode in April 2000. In it, Bethany had called off her wedding to Mara's scheming son Grant (Les Hill) while viewers were left wondering if Tim would live or die after being pushed from a height while trying to save Zoe from a sleazy drug dealer. Seeing a write up on the finale in The Age, the show's former publicist (and author of the wonderful Super Aussie Soaps) Andrew Mercado realised that the "finale" that Nine had aired wasn't the actual finale. Due to an episode numbering mix up, there was still actually one episode left to air, and after her raised the issue, Nine eventually did show it in November 2001. In it, Tim died but not before declaring his undying love for Zoe, while Amber, presumably tired of all the drama on Pacific Drive, took off in a convertible up the highway in search of true love Brett (whose former lovers included Amber's mother and aunt). Had it aired uninterrupted, the whole show would have been over in 18 months but it took nearly six years for all 390 episodes to air. The show is another of those 90's soap rarities, of which there is little online, but the premiere episode is available to watch here - <a href="https://archive.org/details/pacific-drive-1995" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/pacific-drive-1995</a></blockquote>

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