Please go away!

mentalcritic

I wonder a lot whether this show and Friends occasionally share writers, as both show symptoms of the same stagnant, horrid writing. In addition to that, Home And Away, or Please Go Away as I like to call it, suffers the same annoyance that made The Cosby Show such an atrocity. In essence, the adult characters talk down at any character under the age of twenty-five as if they are lower than the proverbial. This, combined with the stereotypical representation, make the show seem more like Liberal Party propaganda than an actual drama.

Although I must admit that I stopped watching the show (after six months of on/off viewing, I admit) a long time ago, but the lack of anything remotely resembling character or story development in those six months makes me feel pretty safe in betting that absolutely nothing has happened on the show since. It's just the same old crap over and over - bunch of ditzy teens go through life with not a clue about what they're doing until arrogant and stupid adults basically give them the old "you must be like us or you are worthless" speech a few hundred times. Given that this show started life as a story about a foster family of about seven children who came from broken and abusive homes, the whole current attitude of the show is quite upsetting from my perspective.

Interestingly enough, there was a reunion of the original seven foster children recently, but this only served to highlight how far beyond the use-by date the show had gone. The actors had gone on and lived lives that basically made this series seem like a big mistake, and they looked embarassed to be there. Some of them had this look that said "hey, I've gone on to do stage productions and modelling, why the hell am I back on this turkey?" or something to that effect. This is probably aggravated by the fact that the writing has gone from lame to outright recycling since about 1990. Honestly, I have read copies of screenplays from the 1990 and 1995 seasons, and apart from changes in character names, there is not any real difference.

Unfortunately, this series is basically an expression of how stagnant television has become in the last thirteen years, and it will probably keep recycling itself until even the youngest cast members are pushing up the daisies. This show is the antichrist, I tell you! Anyway, I would just like to conclude by issuing the following statement to channel seven: I rarely, if ever, watch your network anymore because you keep recycling crap like this while interesting new ideas like The Weakest Link are shelved in a year. The simple fact is that your evening line-up is more a pale imitation of the other networks, and it is getting to a point where even the desperate don't want to watch. Bring something new to the air already, or the two hours a week I spend watching television could soon be reduced to nothing.

score /10

mentalcritic 30 June 2002

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0252822/