One of Australia’s most popular TV series for six effervescent seasons, Packed to the Rafters packed up and moved on from Channel 7 back in 2013. The show began with middle-aged suburban parents Julie (Rebecca Gibney) and Dave (Erik Thomson) being forced to welcome their three adult children back into the family home, but over the years the gang happily made room for 13 Logies, too.
You can never really farewell family, though. As part of Amazon’s bid to support Australian film and TV production, Prime Video is the polished new home of Back to the Rafters, the Rafter family’s return to Aussie screens. Subscribers are welcomed back into the fold on September 17, when the sequel series gets its global release on Prime Video.
Back To The Rafters will start off with the Rafters spread all over Australia—and the world—with mum and dad raising their youngest daughter Ruby in the blissfully serene countryside (Willow Speers) and Ben (Hugh Sheridan) settling down with new bride Cassie (HaiHa Le).
Georgina Haig takes over from Jessica Marais as daughter Rachel Rafter, now stranded away from the fam in New York, whilst Nathan (Angus McLaren) struggles with life as a single dad and granddad Ted (Michael Caton) tries to find his place amongst it all. It seems like just about everyone is on the verge of some kind of breakdown: upsettingly, even the heads of the household are facing marital troubles, with Gibney’s Julie worrying, “this feeling isn’t going away.”
With most of the original cast returning for another chapter of too-close-for-comfort family bonding, it looks like Prime Video has done a seamless job reviving a beloved network series to our 2021 streaming landscape. The big move is reminiscent of a similar tactic on Paramount+, where Channel 10’s Five Bedrooms was scooped up onto that platform.
The streaming shake-up is not as much of a drastic move as the one our fictional family face, though: in the feel-good trailer above, Ben stresses about how the enlarged Rafters clan is even going to reunite now, this time squeezing “seven people into a two-bedroom house.” I have a feeling they’ll make it work.
