australian television information archive

Gripes and stereotypes

MUCH has been made about how easily identifiable and relatable the four twentysomething protagonists of Winners & Losers (Tuesdays, 8.30pm on Channel Seven) are supposed to be. Female viewers throughout the country are expected to react with astonished delight - with dainty manicured fingers held up to their painted, O-shaped lips - bedazzled and enchanted that at last their TV reflects all their own thoughts and desires - nay, their entire lives - just as if they're gazing into a mirror. For here we have Frances, a successful, single businesswoman; Bec, a bright, hard-working beauty therapist; Sophie, a hot fitness instructor who used to be fat and smart but now she's skinny and thus has heaps of sex; and Jenny, a whiny fat girl who lives at home with her parents.

I'm about the same age as these four and if they're a mirror reflecting my life and the lives of my friends, I'll need bucketfuls of Windex to see it.

The premise of Winners & Losers is simple: four women who were ''losers'' at school meet again at their 10-year reunion. The bully who made their lives horrible at school is still - please suspend your disbelief - a ghastly, heinous bitch from hell. Ten years hasn't changed her at all and, for no apparent reason, she still harbours a seething hatred of our four heroines. Luckily, they escape her ludicrously over-the-top evil glare and go off to party on their own, after which they buy a lottery ticket together and promptly win millions of dollars.

From losers to winners: it sounds kind of fun, except everything about the show is painfully obvious: from the name of Bec's beauty salon (which is - wait for it - Bec's Beauty Salon) to the characters' predictable, knee-jerk reactions in every scene.

Virginia Gay, Melanie Vallejo, Zoe Tuckwell-Smith and Melissa Bergland do their best and are all genuinely lovely to watch. I really want to like them.

The supporting cast isn't bad either: Denise Scott and Francis Greenslade shine as Jenny's parents - partly because they seem to be playing it up and having fun with it - and Blair McDonough suits the role of Bec's blokey fiance.

But the caricatures are all so cringeworthy, it's hard to look past the simplistic and underdeveloped characters and find anything that's worth sticking around for.

The only character who seems at all real is Bec, who is so sweet and insipid you actually do believe her dream in life is just to have a nice wedding and a well-behaved hubby.

The worst is bully Tiffany Turner, played by Michala Banas, who has to portray an inferior, colourless facsimile of Sophie Lee in Muriel's Wedding.

Even though the set-up of Winners & Losers hinges on the sinister spectre of bullying, the theme is only brandished when it suits the narrative.

Tiffany appears at convenient moments to deliver inexplicable gibes to spice up some scenes and only occasionally is the school-yard bullying of the past elaborated, including an instance in which we learn that Tiffany once smeared dog poo in Jenny's hair. It's truly awful imagery and if only the writers would let us under the surface of Jenny's character, we'd be more capable of sympathising. Instead, her personality has been watered down and she spends most of the time whining, being annoying and cuddling an oversized teddy bear.

In the closing scene last week, we finally saw Tiffany weeping dramatically by herself, which made us wonder if - shock, horror - bullies have feelings, too. But unfortunately, after five episodes of watching her act up a dull cliche, we just don't care about her either. There's nothing wrong with caricatures but they need to make a point if they are to work. If they don't and all you see are characters who are about as fleshed out as anorexic teenagers (and just as embroiled in high-school-esque concerns), you just want to forget about them and sit back up at the adults' table.

The notion that viewers want to be able to relate to the characters they see on screen is a

no-brainer but I for one can more readily relate to a bunch of blue Na'vi people or to a robot such as Wall-E than to a bland, two-dimensional Everywoman.

Which reminds me of a memorable line from Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, about how stories reflect our lives back at us: ''A novel is a mirror walking down a road.'' Winners & Losers, though, is like a mirror walking down the middle of the road. I wouldn't call it a loser so much as just plain lost.

By Lorelei Vashti
April 14, 2011
Sydney Morning Herald