Offspring
Channel Ten
Wednesday, 8.30pm
LAST year’s final few episodes of Offspring tugged at the heart strings as Nina lost the love of her life and gave birth to her first child, they were emotive and pretty much had a large portion of the female population of Australia in tears.
Facebook and Twitter went wild!
The death of Matthew LeNevez’s popular Patrick Reid had us all harking back to the days of A Country Practice and the death of Molly Jones.
It’s the only other time I can remember seeing such an out-pouring of emotion and grief over the demise of a television character.
So I’m sure sitting down to watch the first episode of Offspring Season Five was the first and only time many of us had hoped for a “Bobby Ewing coming of the shower” Dallas-type re-boot.
Where Nina dreamed all of last season and Patrick was still with us.
It’s possible – one of the strengths of the show is that we get to live in Nina’s imagination, right?
But what we got was a slightly hyper-real but still very sensitive portrayal of grief and loss and trying to move on.
It had its very funny moments and probably tried a bit too hard in spots (Nina’s impromptu family celebration) but mostly it was a little piece of television gold.
Asher Keddie has described this series as “the best one yet” and if the rest of the season is like this then I can certainly see why.
Offspring is never going to appeal to everyone (my husband takes himself off to Ten Pin at the mere mention of the show) but there is something quite unique about Offspring and the nice thing is that it seems to be going from strength to strength.
Lead character Nina Proudman is an every woman with a very overactive imagination (which will hopefully keep Matthew LeNevez in a bit more work for Channel Ten for a little while longer) and for a whole segment of the population it is so nice to finally see ourselves portrayed well on the small screen.
-Tania Phillips
