WARNING!!! For those of you currently "Taking a chance on Chances", you may want to skip this post until you've finished watching, as it'll contain spoilers.
Chances was originally conceived in 1988 by Nine's head of drama Lynn Bayonas and was the straightforward enough tale of a family that would (according to TV Week) experience
"an event that turns their comfortable middle class existence inside out". The Taylor family consisted of housewife Barbara (Diane Craig), husband Dan (John Sheerin) and their three kids - ad exec Alex (Marcus Graham), bride-to-be Rebecca (former Miss Australia Natalie McCurrey) and the youngest sibling Nikki (Mouche Phillips).
The Sullivans' Michael Caton would play Dan's best mate Bill Anderson while Mercia Deane-Johns played Dan's saucy sister Sharon. Keen to get some local drama on the air, Nine commissioned it as a telemovie which opened with Rebecca's tragic wedding day and ended with the family winning $3 million in the lottery. However, they clearly weren't that keen as after the film was finished shooting, Nine never aired it, instead choosing to invest in the ill-fated
Family and Friends. When that show crashed and burned, Nine revisited the
Chances pilot and decided to get it on the air as a weekly serial.
By this time, several of the cast had moved on to other projects, most notably Marcus Graham who was enjoying success over on
E Street, so roles had to be recast. Lynn Bayonas expressed disappointment at losing Marcus but said
"he couldn't have been any better than Jeremy Sims", the actor who'd now stepped in to play Alex. John Sheerin, Mercia Deane-Johns, Michael Caton and Natalie McCurrey were all able to return, albeit to two major changes. Firstly, while the pilot had been shot in Sydney, the show was now being produced in Melbourne, meaning they'd to decamp south. And most notably, the show was now being produced as an adults only drama in the vein of
Number 96 and
The Box, which required the actors to strip off. McCurrey was unhappy with the changes, stating
"I'm not happy about doing nude shots but it's part of the job. As long as it isn't gratuitous and is done with some class, it's alright. But if it's nudity for it's own sake then it really degrades the show". Little did she know what was to come.
In the lead up to the show's premiere, the producers began talking up the sex and sin angle. Lynn Bayonas told the press that most cast members had to sign a nudity clause.
"The first bare backside in the show belongs to Jeremy Sims and I'd say by the end of the month, it will be seen from here to breakfast". She also told TV Week that it wouldn't be an "issues" show and that they'd
"leave that to A Country Practice and GP". She said that what Chances did have was
"older women and younger men, marriage break-ups, affairs with secretaries and women desperate for love and racing off with everybody". It was actually the network who pushed producers to add more spice to the series, for two reasons. One, while winning the lottery is an exciting opening premise, research had shown that what comes after is actually quite boring. And two, more importantly, after a string of drama flops over the course of the previous decade, Nine were trying everything to build a buzz around
Chances, insisting on more and more sex and nudity in order to make full use of it's adult 8.30pm timeslot. Bayonas looks back and admits that scenes like this didn't fit into the early episodes
"It made the actors uncomfortable because it looked gratuitous. Later on it fitted perefectly and nobody was embarassed".
Amid ads proclaiming that "TV Sex is Back",
Chances premiered in January 1991. It opened to the same premise set out in the original unaired TV movie with daughter Rebecca's wedding to David Young (Rodney Bell). Patriarch Dan was hiding his financial woes from his newly recast family including wife Barbara (now played by Brenda Addie), daughter Nikki (now played by Cathy Gobold) and the aforementioned troublemaker son Alex (Jeremy Sims). In addition to Dan's sister Sharon, there were more Taylor siblings rounding out the cast including nurse Connie (Deborah Kennedy) and her two sons - gym instructor Chris (Mark Kounnas) and younger Sam (Simon Grey) as well as Dan's brother Jack (Tim Robertson) who had a rocky relationship with wife Sarah (Anne Grigg). By the end of the episode, Alex had accidentally killed his new brother in law in a car crash that he subsequently blamed on dead groom and the press showed up to announce that one of the troubled clan had won the lottery. Opening night ratings were high but after the lottery reveal in the second episode (Dan had won), ratings began to fall. It faced tough competition on the both nights that it aired, going up against
L.A Law and
Beyond 2000 (from the same producers as Chances) on Tuesdays and against established Aussie hits
Police Rescue and
Fast Forward on Thursdays.
Despite ratings troubles, the sexy show still drummed up lots of publicity, both good and bad. Actress Tammy McIntosh had a public falling out with the producers over a cut of a nude scene that they used, with her featuring in TV Week under the headline "I was treated like a piece of meat". Other tabloid tales included the actress that would call for ice cubes to "enhance" her performance before nude scenes and the on set stripper, hired to train the cast in various moves and positions. Onscreen, as Dan distributed his wealth, various relatives showed up including Barbara's mother Hettie (Yvonne Lawley) and Connie's bad boy ex-husband Eddie (Dennis Miller), who seduced Connie despite having a secret wife Cheryl (Louise Siverson). There were affairs aplenty as Chris slept with his uncle's wife Sarah while cousins Ben and Alex had a fling with the same woman, leaving them wondering just who was the father of her baby. Tiffany Lamb (later to be seen on
Paradise Beach) showed up as prostitute Brandy "Mistress of Fantasies" while in a moment of high drama, Barbara was struck by a speeding car and when Dan went to see what had happened, he too was struck by another car, leaving Barbara in a coma and Dan requiring the services of a sex therapist played by Lynda Stoner. When none of this helped the flagging ratings, producers resorted to the tried and tested whodunnit arc, which saw Eddie murdered and an ensuing court case when the killer was revealed. Ratings continued to slide which prompted Nine to announce that the show would be pulled from it's twice weekly timeslots and would only air one episode a week on Tuesdays at 9.30pm.
The change in broadcast pattern and in budget prompted producers to pare the original cast of 17 down to just 6 regulars. It was announced that they would tackle
"more contemporary issues" and that it would be
"deliberately controversial". Jeremy Sims said
"The tailed wagged the dog from the word go with Chances. They started with a concept that would bring in a certain audience and when that didn't happen, they just started trawling for any audience they could. The ratings would determine what demographic or niche they would go for. Every other week there was a change in style or tone".
Chances relaunched with episode 60, which saw the show jump forward one year in time. Alex was presumed dead following a plane crash but was actually living on a farm, his memory slowly returning following a trip to the city. Producers decided to make the most of the later timeslot and go for broke by trying something they thought hadn't been done on Aussie TV before - high camp and outrageous storylines (they clearly hadn't watched
Return to Eden). Jeremy Sims said
"the actors wouldn't have minded doing high camp from the very beginning. What pissed us off early on as the attempt to do Home & Away with the odd cutaway dropped in of some tits. We were quite happy to get naked but we wanted it to be sexy rather than stupid. Everyone had a ball on that show during the last six months when we all got on famously and laughed and laughed making some of the silliest TV ever".
As the new
Chances headed into 1992, Alex was hooked on drugs and under the control of an evil doctor who was supposed to be helping him recover his "lost year", mother Barbara had picked up poolboy toyboy Cal (Gerry Sont), who was actually a jewel thief while uncle Jack was killed off after Stephanie (Molly Brumm) gave him a heroin overdose, only for Jack to return as a ghost, seeking revenge for his death. Around this time,
Chances was sold overseas. In the UK, Sky TV's raunchy billboard campaign featuring a Page 3 model that gradually lost more of her clothes as it got closer to the premiere date, caused controversy among London councils who demanded she be covered up while in Russia, questions were asked in parliament about why a seedy import was getting more viewers than local programming. Playboy TV in the US tried to buy the show but producers refused as
"they felt Chances wasn't soft porn".
In Australia,
Chances wasn't enjoying the same success as it was abroad, this time being beaten by reality soap
Sylvania Waters. Writers continued to pile on the wackiness in a bid to keep the show afloat. Crowley Lander (Barry Hill), one of the world's richest men, showed up and revealed that he had been manipulating everything, including the lottery win, up until this point. He announced that Alex was "the chosen one", who would donate his DNA to Crowley so he could live forever. Soap stalwart Abigail (in her final soap role) was drafted in as ex-porn star turned TV host Bambi Shute who tried and failed to help Dan and Barbara save their marriage. While they went their separate ways, they continued as colleagues, running the high class brothel that the late Jack secretly owned. As things got wilder, the timeslot got later, with Chances seeing out it's days at 11pm. Crowley's daughter Imogen (Ciri Thompson) married Alex and was sent off to a convent to hide as Melbourne was invaded by Triads and Nazi's while another character plotted with the Hong Kong mafia to stop the British handover of Hong Kong in 1997. A supernatural necklace once owned by Eva Braun cast a spell on Madeleine (Karen Richards), turning her into an Egyptian sun goddess. After 127 episodes, Chances drew to a close, but not before Alex was saved from death and then spoken to by God in Melbourne library. Along the way, the show had featured sex, nudity, Israeli secret agents, man eating plants, voodoo and vampires. Notice had obviously been given that the show was ending, as the final scene saw everyone celebrating Crowley's death in Sharon's bar when Alex walked in and told them that he'd inherited Crowley's fortune and had bought everyone lottery tickets as a gift.
"You never know" he said, "
Some win.....".