WINNERS AND LOSERS WEEK THREE REVIEW

No real time for a full review tonight – so just a hail of hastily assembled spoiler-related bullets on the fourth episode of Winners and Losers:

·    Upbeat, funky pop song? Check? Women getting dressed in fancy clothes? Check? We’re off to the races!! This could be promising, despite the by-the-numbers intro. The races is a place where ritual humiliation could humanize these characters a bit more.

·      Damien Bodie’s character still might as well have a neon sign saying ‘Homosexual Character’ around his neck, for all the subtlety in the dialogue. Nothing much happening there development wise.

·      One of the things I like about ‘Packed to the Rafters’ doesn’t look too much like Home and Away – it elevates it a little bit. The scene early in the episode with Jenny and her brother (who is a bit funny) could have been inserted into a Home and Away episode without anyone really noticing.

·      Yes – Michala Banas is back. About time, this show desperately needs a villain. Or just, you know, conflict. Unfortunately, that conflict is that Jenny is being sued for making a mean speech at a high school reunion. Good luck with that one.

·      Zoe Tuckwell-Smith is very charming isn’t she? I am warming to the performances now, including Melissa Bergland, though the women are so much better-defined than the men I’m still finding it hard to enjoy any scene with a bloke in it. Sophie is still an incredibly unlikeable character. Can’t work out what the handsome doctor sees in her. He’s a doctor yes?

·      The scene in the toilet was ridiculously sitcom-y. Humour is generally better when it comes out of believable situations. Then when Bec took the inevitable underwear-less tumble on the catwalk (telegraphed much?), that was soon followed with serious drama with her father’s gambling issues. How tonally all over the place.

·      It’s been a while since I’ve watched Packed to the Rafters, but I don’t recall every episode wrapping up quite this neatly for the majority of characters. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

·      Overall? Enjoying the lead performances, hating the writing, production and the storylines. The one saving grace was the last scene, with Michala Banas’ Tiffany crying in her living room. It gave her a bit of depth and I may have not paid enough attention, but I didn’t really know exactly WHY she was crying. Guilt or desperation? Both? It was a shades-of-grey moment, and there have been zero like it so far. I’ll stick with it for those that would like to read ep-by-ep thoughts and because I’m interested in the ratings and general popularity, but I’m struggling.

WINNERS AND LOSERS EPISODE TWO REVIEW

Spoiler-related thoughts on episode two of Winners and Losers after the jump...

I said in my review of the first episode of Winners and Losers that I had massive qualms over the late-episode plot development where the four friends become lottery winners. The reason for this is that it is incredibly difficult for us to become invested with people who are so rich we will soon have nothing in common with them. Every show I’ve ever seen feature a lottery winner has fallen away soon afterwards (Roseanne comes to mind) because the money that person won came to define them.

What W&L needed to do in its second and third episode was make sure that the problems the characters were having were universal and not solved or created by the money they had come into. Sadly, what we got instead was every single main character using their lottery win to improve their lives – Frances uses her money to advance her business career, Sophie buys an apartment, Bec’s fiancé uses money to set a date, buy a ring and does it all on a boat and Jenny buys herself a car and quits her job. None of this involved actual character development – it was just the use of money to paper over each character’s flaws and also handily erased any conflict the first three episodes had set up. It was a little bit galling towards the end – maybe I’m just bitter but I have flaws and problems I can’t fix through a Lotto win. It's a happy show, for the most part, but Parks and Recreation is one of the happiest shows I've ever seen, but it has more wit, charm and character development in five minutes than I've seen so far here - and the characters on that show aren't rich. If the characters here are going to be wealthy without actually earning it, they have to earn their emotional wealth instead. They don’t even go close here.

The lottery win also had me cringing at the beginning of the episode where Jenny whines constantly about how unfair it is she isn’t getting any money. Maybe I just fall in the category of if you don’t invest, you don’t get the rewards, but it seemed incredibly selfish that she would even think about asking for some. Her persistence proceeded to make me dislike all the characters bar Bec as they tussled over a problem only 0.00001% of us will ever have to deal with, especially on that scale.

Enough of my ranting about the plot – the performances are coming through from the four main girls with Virginia Gay still being the standout and Melanie Vallejo still being the weakest link – mainly thanks to having the weakest character. On the flipside, the periphery characters are getting worse. The one I have the biggest issue with is Frances’ gay best friend Jonathan. Damien Bodie’s line readings aren’t great but worse is the character plays into every single stereotype you would expect. Why does the show’s primary gay character have to play into every single stereotype we would expect? I’m sure every gay man on the planet isn’t like this. It’s like every straight young male character on the show has an aversion to shirts, drinks beer and looks like he stepped out of a GQ cata-…oh.

You may have guessed by now that I’m losing interest in Winners and Losers, so if you’re out there, I would love to hear from people that are enjoying it. What am I missing? Is there more to this show than Rafters meets Sex and the City (meets last season Roseanne). Help?

I actually wanted Michala Banas back.

TV REVIEW - WINNERS AND LOSERS

Winners and Losers is a show for women.

That’s not to say it’s a bad show, or an unworthy show – but it’s just not a guy’s show.

This is Sex and the City (there’s even two blondes, a brunette and a redhead) meets Packed to the Rafters – and it’s Channel Seven’s attempt to double down on the Rafters audience, whisking that incredibly popular program off the air to make way for this – and in the process they’ll be hoping that they get two massive dramedy franchises off the ground.

Of course, they might risk alienating the Rafters audience, a casually diehard fan base that has forged a deep connection over the last four years to this particular family.

My question is simply this - by aiming the show squarely at half the country are they not giving it a chance to get out of the blocks?

The show itself tells the story of four friends – Bec (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith), Frances (Virginia Gay), Sophie (Melanie Vallejo) and Jenny (Melissa Bergland). They are, to unfairly reduce each character to a single adjective, the nice girl, the career woman, the party girl and the homely girl. One by one, they are invited to their 10-year high school reunion by Tiffany Turner (Michala Banas), the girl who tormented them in high school.

But that’s not really what the show is about. Like Rafters, which began life as a show about what happens when adult children move back into their family home and eventually became a show that told stories about family, this is a show that will eventually tell stories about friendship. The most crucial part of any of this is whether the characters themselves are worth hanging out with.

On that score, Winners and Losers had a 50% strike rate with me. Virginia Gay is always a welcome presence on my TV screen, never overplaying her clichéd ‘career woman’ role and always charming even without decent material. Zoe Tuckwell-Smith is equally luminous – playing a nice girl with enough depth behind her eyes to keep her interesting, rather than vacuous.

Melissa Bergland as Jenny and Melanie Vallejo as Sophie fare less well for varying reasons. Both characters are clichéd ‘types’, just like their friends, but neither the actresses nor the writers give me any hope that they’ll add depth and become more likeable as the series progresses. Having said that, this is a character drama – so time must be allowed for the characters to flourish – but having watched the second episode and liking those two characters even less, I’m rapidly losing confidence.

The supporting characters are tracksuit-pants comfortable – familiar enough to never threaten to overtake the driving force of the show in our main four characters. We have the doting but commitment-shy fiancé, the adoring gay best friend, the adoring straight best friend, the comforting, quirky family – and they are all serviceable.  The weakest link is Damien Bodie, who gets one note and one note only to play as the gay best friend. I know there must be some low-key gay men out there somewhere, but you wouldn’t know it from watching TV…

I’ve seen two episodes so far and the pilot was far superior to the episode that follows it. Unfortunately, the pilot ends on a plot development that I have never seen end well for any show I’ve ever watched. I won’t spoil it for you, but I think it is extremely difficult to have a show about characters that go through this particular situation. On top of that, this particular plot development is clumsily inserted and painfully telegraphed.

In the end, though, I will not be the harbinger of doom and glory for this particular show. That will be the female audience, who will either take to this with Sex and the City-like abandon, or shun it like they did the Cashmere Mafia.

In the end, the deciding factor will be how much we want to hang out with these four friends. I don’t, but you might.

All in all, a nil-all draw.

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So weigh in, if you like! Did you like the characters? Do you think this show plays as strongly to gender roles as I do? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.