Cirrus@Austlit

A character-based television drama series about the lives of police officers in the fictitious Australian country town of Mt Thomas, this series began with the arrival of Constable Maggie Doyle (Lisa McCune) to the Mt Thomas station in the episode 'A Woman's Place'. Doyle and avuncular station boss Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon (John Wood) were the core characters of the series until the departure of Lisa McCune.

Immensely popular for a decade, Blue Heelers was cancelled in 2006 after thirteen seasons. The announcement was front-page news in Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Age in Melbourne, and Brisbane's Courier Mail.

On June 8, 2006 Ross Warneke wrote in The Age:

'It's over and, to be perfectly blunt, there's no use lamenting the demise of Blue Heelers any more. When the final movie-length episode aired on Channel Seven on Sunday night, 1.5 million Australians tuned in, a figure that was big enough to give the show a win in its timeslot but nowhere near big enough to pay the sort of tribute that this writer believes Heelers deserved after more than 500 episodes. It is unlikely there will be anything like it again. At almost $500,000 an hour, shows such as Blue Heelers are quickly becoming the dinosaurs of Australian TV.'

A family saga, following four generations of the Irish-Australian Quinn family (both working class and Catholic) and their intimate involvement in the Australian labour movement. Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, summarises the plot as follows:

Paddy Quinn is a shearer involved in the great shearers' strike of the 1890s that saw the formation of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Married to Maureen, he becomes the lover of Nesta Darling, a silvertail and suffragette. He dies young and his wife becomes both the custodian of his memory and also, in a way, custodian of the founding ideological vision of the ALP. Her children and their children receive the political torch, but somehow drop it. It is only in 1972-73 coinciding with the election of Gough Whitlam and the first federal ALP government for 23 years, that Maureen, now a very old woman, sees her aspirations fulfilled with the decision of her great-grandchildren to join the party and work for the ALP.

Moran notes that some critics dismissed the program as 'Land of Soap', since it concentrates as much on 'more personal and domestic matters such as adultery, divorce and religion, filial betrayal, ideological defection, alcoholism and suicide' as on 'great political events and actors such as the Great Depression, World War 2, Menzies and the Communist referendum'. He does note, however, that 'the series is feminist in its politics, seeing women as the guardians of the social and political equality while men are, for the most part, corrupt, cowardly, unfaithful and chauvinistic.'

The series cost, according to Moran, $4.6 million to produce, but achieved good ratings even when aired against Sixty Minutes.

A soap opera set, according to Moran in his Guide to Australian TV Series, 'in a boarding house/university college called Thornleigh. It is populated by medical students, the inevitable good-hearted housekeeper, and a professor in charge'.

Starting Out replaced The Young Doctors in the slot immediately prior to the Nine Network's main evening news broadcast, where it did so poorly that it affected the latter's ratings and was rapidly pulled, to run out the remainder of its eipsodes in a later timeslot. However, as Moran points out, 'This fate was not deserved. The pre-news slot is very difficult to fill with a drama series, and The Young Doctors was one of the very few such fillers to succeed. Starting Out was not worse (or better) than the latter'.

Set in a small, fictional, New South Wales country town called Wandin Valley, A Country Practice focused on the staffs of the town's medical practice and local hospital and on the families of the doctors, nurses, and patients. Many of the episodes also featured guest characters (frequently patients served by the practice) through whom various social and medical problems were explored. Although often considered a soap opera, the series was not built around an open-ended narrative; instead, the two one-hour episodes screened per week formed a self-contained narrative block, though many of the storylines were developed as sub-plots for several episodes before becoming the focus of a particular week's storyline. While the focus was on topical issues such as youth unemployment, suicide, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and terminal illness, the program did sometimes explore culturally sensitive issues, including, for example, the Aboriginal community and their place in modern Australian society.

Among the show's principal characters were Dr Terence Elliott, local policeman Sergeant Frank Gilroy, Esme Watson, Shirley Dean Gilroy, Bob Hatfield, Vernon 'Cookie' Locke, and Matron Margaret 'Maggie' Sloan. In addition to its regularly rotating cast of characters, A Country Practice also had a cast of semi-regulars who would make appearances as the storylines permitted. Interestingly, while the series initially targeted the adult and older youth demographic, it became increasingly popular with children over the years.