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For regular updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

by David Dale
Once in a while-- every four years seems to be the average -- a production team manages to catch the zeitgeist. In the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty, someone generates a concept that sums up the times we live in, and out comes a movie or TV show that doesn't just entertain us - it reflects us. Australians watch in their millions because they recognise what they are, or what they would like to be.

The latest zeitgeist-catcher is Packed to the Rafters, which is attracting 2 million viewers a week in the mainland capitals. At a time when national tastes are fragmenting into ever narrower niches, PTTR is a favourite of every demographic measured by OzTAM - male and female, rich and poor, old and young. It has the nation in the warm hold of its loving mind, and vice versa.

Lets look at some zeitgeist catchers of the past ten years, all of which managed the magic two million ...

Friends. Its rise through the late 90s coincided with a belated realisation by Australians that we were not a nation of bronzed bush battlers but a nation of urban coffee drinkers. With the breakdown in traditional marriage structures, mates were the new family. We saw ourselves in six sexy New Yorkers who solved each other's problems over lattes.

SeaChange. As the millennium turned, a generation slightly older than the single coffee addicts fantasised about escaping from urban life to a village with all the conveniences of the city, but none of the hassles.

Kath and Kim. Of course we weren't really Manhattanites, we were the most suburbanised nation on earth, and we masochistically embraced a satire on our Hills Hoist lifestyle.

Desperate Housewives. Identifying with the suburban village again, we aspired to the glamour of Wisteria Lane. In the first season, the Despos were watched by one in 13 Americans and one in seven Australians. Quite by accident, the dramedy caught our zeitgeist more than it caught theirs.

Packed to the Rafters. Family is the new mateship. The flipside of Friends was constructed by demographic analysis. Channel Seven's head of drama, John Holmes, has been reported as saying that the show's creator, Bevan Lee, "looked at the world we all live in, with high mortgages and the price of property, and saw that in tough times kids are staying at home. There is tremendous opportunity for identification with the show."

So have the programmers finally found the magic formula: Check the Bureau of Statistics website and create characters and situations that match the sociological shifts?

Maybe it's not that easy. Channel Ten's latest attempt at zeitgeist-catching was Friday Night Download, developed on the premise that if young people are giving up television to surf the net, you can get them back by making a program out of the most outrageous material in the webiverse. Ratings were so low Ten had to cancel the show after two episodes. There's still hope for creativity.

Tell us how to catch the zeitgeist at Comments

David Dale is the author of The Little Book of Australia -- A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.