Why The Secret Life of Us is still winning new fans 25 years on
SOURCE:Sydney Morning Herald|BY:Karl Quinn
It was a series that spoke of its time and place, but a quarter-century on The Secret Life of Us still feels relevant and relatable.
There aren’t many TV shows that are still being watched 25 years later, let alone being discovered by new generations of fans. But that’s precisely what has happened with The Secret Life of Us, a show about the intertwined lives and loves of a group of 20-somethings living in an apartment block in St Kilda at the turn of the millennium.
Secret Life debuted on Ten in 2000, with a feature-length pilot episode. But its four-season, 88-episode run kicked off properly the following year, winding up in 2005. The show has since screened repeatedly on its commissioning network (Ten here, Channel 4 in the UK), as well as on 9Now and 7Plus.
But the show got a whole new lease of life when Netflix picked it up during COVID, fuelling lifestyle envy in a younger generation that could only dream of bar hopping, bed swapping and rooftop drinking in St Kilda during those dark days of social isolation.
Now the entire thing is on the ABC’s iview (to find the pilot, you’ll need to search for The Secret Life of Us telemovie; episode one, season one makes a whole lot more sense if you’ve watched that first).
To mark its quarter-century anniversary, Spencer McLaren, who played Richie on the show and has since gone on to a career as a producer as well as an actor, is hosting a series of episodes for his podcast, McLaren Versus, in which he speaks with his former castmates about their experiences, both while making the show and in the years since.
And, just like those rambunctious neighbours, we decided to invite ourselves in for a chat of our own with some of the key figures from the series: cast members McLaren, Deborah Mailman (Kelly), Samuel Johnson (Evan) and Claudia Karvan (Alex), as well as Amanda Higgs, who co-created and produced the show with John Edwards, and Judi McCrossin, who was, with Chris Lee, head writer on its first three seasons.
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In the beginning …
Amanda Higgs: I’d just been fired off Water Rats, where I was a script editor, because I dared to speak up against two men who spoke very rudely to me in the writing team. I was thinking, “Now I’ll never produce … so I’ve really got to start putting things of my own into action.” That was 1997. We pitched it to [Channel Ten head programmer] David Mott in 1998, and wrote and shot the pilot in ’99.
Judi McCrossin: The pilot was written as a telemovie, so if it never got up it could stand alone.
AH: That was John’s [Edwards] idea. You could fit a lot into that 90 minutes.
Writer Judi McCrossin (left) and co-producer Amanda Higgs at the Logies in 2003, when the show won most outstanding drama (and Claudia Karvan was voted most outstanding actress).
The secret life of people like us
JM: We never saw people like us on TV in Australia – and to be honest, most of the characters on TV, the people who were writing those shows had never seen them either. The people writing shows about country cops were not people who knew country cops.
AH: We were watching This Life [the UK series about a bunch of young lawyers sharing a house in London] and I was obsessed. I thought, “This is designed for me; why aren’t we making shows designed for us?” I didn’t feel like there was anything in Australia at the time that was speaking directly to my experiences.
JM: We wanted to write something we would watch, because we loved TV but we didn’t watch much Australian stuff. We’re not particularly special; there’s a lot of people like us, yet we never saw people like us on TV. And let’s face it, the whole country cop thing – I mean, how many country cops are there? It just seemed stupid, the way the industry was structured, and the way ideas were allowed to flourish, or weren’t allowed to.
The Secret Life Us cast (from left) Deborah Mailman, Spencer McLaren, Abi Tucker, Joel Edgerton, Samuel Johnson and Claudia Karvan.
Congrats, you’ve got the part. Now what?
Deborah Mailman: For me, it was a job, and it was a good, sturdy job – six months of the year. For the first time in my life I felt I could be financially settled for a little bit.
Samuel Johnson: Every actor is looking for work, but it’s fairly hard to predict what will be good and what won’t be, in my experience.
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Spencer McLaren: It was straight out of drama school for me, so it was exciting. I had no idea, no understanding of how the business of television worked. But I felt like this show was definitely something different because there were lots of police dramas and medical dramas, and this was [a show about] where we lived.
Claudia Karvan: I hadn’t done television since The Last Resort (1988) for the ABC, when I was in year 11, and it tanked. And that was a really hard gig to get through; it was so depressing every week to come to work knowing no one’s watching this but we’ve still got to march along and do these scenes. So, I was allergic to television, I was very nervous about coming onto Secret Life of Us. I thought my agent had lost faith in me because she was recommending I take this job.
Setting it in a block of flats in St Kilda
JM: I don’t know if it was ever said, but I know we really liked Melrose Place.
AH: We both lived in Bondi at that time, and we knew we wanted it to be about people who knew each other and lived close together. What we were trying to create was a community of friends, where there was an emotional closeness, and there was a physical closeness, too, where you can walk to other people’s houses and drop in.
The St Kilda location was almost as much a character as any of the actors in The Secret Life of Us.Credit: Ten
JM: My daughter rang me the other day and said, “I’m working with a girl and she moved to St Kilda because she watched Secret Life and she wanted to live in an apartment like that”. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a studio set.
The characters felt real because they were real (sort of)
AH: There were lots of characters based on people we knew. Everything was blurred. People would tell us things, and I did sometimes say to people, “Look, you have to be careful, because I will take it down and use it against you.”
JM: I was mining my own life and hers and everyone else’s – yours, too, if you had talked to me. Because when you write that many episodes, you’re always wanting to hear stories. But also, we were young, we were single, we were up for anything. We were having a lot of adventures.
AH: Because we were making a show that was purely character driven, the events had to come from what would you do in that situation, how would you respond, how would you feel?
Spencer McLaren, who played Richie, will present a podcast special series on the show from January 13.Credit: Simon Schluter
JM: And to be honest, every time we stole from someone’s life, even things that I didn’t think were that complimentary, no one complained. People still loved it.
AH: There were not a lot of young women writing the amount of television we were making, but we did also have two men [co-writer Chris Lee and producer John Edwards] who were very good at saying, “Men don’t speak like that”, because we would get very caught up in our own heads.
JM: I remember one conversation about whether you would have sex with someone if you don’t really like them, but you’re attracted to them. And I was going, “You would never do that. I would just have to say to that guy, ‘No, I would just be using you for sex.’ And I remember Chris just going, “No man has that feeling. They would just be going, ‘Feel free to use me.’”
McLaren (left) and Joel Edgerton in The Secret Life of Us.
Represent! The power of seeing yourself on screen
CK: Before I took the part, I had a call with Amanda and Judi – and I think this is testament to their excellent character development – and I said, “I don’t understand this character, Alex Christensen. She’s clearly so smart, she’s a surgeon, why is she so dumb with men?” It was one of the first contradictory, nuanced characters I’d had to wrap my brain around.
DM: It was really refreshing to come to a character that was very similar to who I was, a little bit romantic, trying to get that trifecta in life that Kelly was. It spoke to me so clearly and so directly – that’s what I was loving. I didn’t really sit down and go, “How do I represent First Nations?” That wasn’t happening in my world or my thoughts. On reflection, I go, “Yeah, that was pretty cool that I was given that opportunity to be on a mainstream drama that had the audience that it had, and it was never questioned in terms of me being in that role.” It’s pretty brilliant.
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SM: To be on a show that was openly exploring queer storylines, the first prime-time male-to-male kiss, that kind of stuff, it was quite ground-breaking. People still come up to me to talk about that and say, “Thank you for doing that show; that gave me the courage to come out”, those kinds of things. It clearly reached an audience and helped people and affected people, so that was really cool.
SJ: And I think it helped highlight issues around foul language and drugs, too.
SM: It certainly did. Three “f---s” in the first half hour, six “f---s” in the second half hour. They were our limits.
SJ: Weed became less taboo as well. And we were drinking real alcohol on the rooftop parties in season one, if you didn’t have speaking lines. In season two it was fake alcohol because the powers that be found out.
Actor Claudia Karvan was nervous about signing up for The Secret Life of Us but then adored it.Credit: Janie Barrett
Why does it still resonate with young audiences today?
JM: When I’ve asked younger people who are watching it if it has aged well, they say the fashion has, because it’s sort of come back; It’s just the phones that are really obviously wrong.
CK: I think the new audiences that have found it have been fascinated to see what being in your 20s is like without phones. That’s the big game changer.
SM: Yeah, no social media either. We didn’t all have followers and LinkedIn accounts and Facebook accounts and all that kind of stuff.
DM: I was doing a show set in the ’70s, and I remember being with some of the young actors in a car that had wind-up windows, and they were like, “What is this?” You just go, “Of course, there’s a whole world here that these generations just have no clue about, and never will.” They literally have no idea of the world we grew up in.
Cast members (rear from left) Sybilla Budd, Samuel Johnson, Damian de Montemas and Deborah Mailman: Front from left: Spencer McLaren, Claudia Karvan, Joel Edgerton and Abi Tucker.
Some things change, some things don’t
JM: I mean, we drank more than young people do now, but I think the issues are the same and the things you do are the same.
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CK: Kids today drink a lot less, they take fewer drugs, there’s less risky behaviour there, they’re more emotionally literate and evolved, and they’ve got better languaging ... I just think it’s wholly improved. As much as people go on and on and about how terrible social media is blah, blah, blah, I just think their lives are so much better.
DM: I look at my boys’ generation, and they are just so aware, far more aware than I was.
CK: I flipped through a few episodes when I was getting lots of texts from young actors rediscovering it, just to sort of revisit it. And yeah, it’s beautiful. I was actually shocked a couple of times that Alex referenced Palestine quite specifically. I was like, “Oh, I wonder if you would get away with that in this day.” They had their finger on the pulse.
Joel Edgerton with Deborah Mailman and Abi Tucker.
Is it time for The Secret Afterlife of Us?
JM: I’m sick of seeing nostalgic shows. I want to see new stuff. I just want new and original ideas that really are Australian ideas, not copies. I wish there was a contemporary Secret Life of Us. I don’t think we should make it, but I would love to see it.
SM: What was meant to happen at the end of season three was you realise that Evan has been narrating that final episode from the grave. He’s passed away, and we’ve come back.
AH: We wanted that episode to be everyone at Evan’s funeral, 10 years later. If the cast were up for it, it would be so lovely and nostalgic to get back together with everyone, and to revisit those characters. It would be a different show; it would be a show of that generation now.
SM: We’re all in. We’re gonna pitch the reunion, and everyone will come back, and maybe we use that storyline. It’s not our show and we don’t have the rights, but we’re happy to talk it through with whoever. We’ll see what will happen.
The Secret Life of Us episodes of the podcast McLaren Versus drop on January 13. The pilot telemovie and all four seasons of The Secret Life of Us are on ABC iview.
