Forever Young: Remembering When Channel Ten Was For Teens

Channel Ten in its heyday was a lot of things. It was watching Marissa Cooper binge drink in a beach house while clutching your best friend on the other end of the (landline) phone. It was dutifully tuning in every night to The Simpsons, then miming along to every line. Waking up for Cheez TV before school and feeling clever for picking up on Ryan and Jade's barely-hidden sexual innuendos. Choosing Neighbours over Home and Away. Texting in to vote on Australian Idol. Begging your parents to let you stay up and watch Big Brother.

Those days are long gone. While the network was placed into voluntary administration in June after majority shareholders Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer announced they wouldn't guarantee a new multi-million dollar loan, we really we should have started preparing Channel Ten's eulogy when Rove McManus announced he'd be hosting a panel show about Doctor Who on the ABC back in 2016. On Monday, US broadcaster CBS announced they'd likely purchase Channel Ten, so it may yet be saved. But it will never be the monolith it once was.

Network Ten's ratings peaked in the mid-2000s, and there's a direct correlation between this and Ten's prime time programming becoming almost exclusively aimed at young people. It's interesting to look back on that time now and recall how, compared to Seven and Nine, Ten was the fun channel. While the other two commercial networks were cheerfully family-friendly, Ten wasn't worried by the fact that mums found Big Brother: Up Late too risque.

The assumption of parental disapproval just made Ten's shows even cooler in the eyes of millennial viewers. Every piece of primetime programming was made with them in mind. Perhaps the most iconic Channel Ten promo of the 2000s era featured a group of rich, carefree teenagers making out on the beach while a song literally called "Forever Young" by a band called Youth Group played in the background.

Unfortunately, and within an incredibly short span of time, those same young people Ten was so relentlessly targeting would become distracted—by YouTube, by Netflix, by DVD box sets, by the easy ability to torrent television shows and watch them without becoming a slave to the TV Guide or sitting through one million "Brand Power! Helping you buy better" ads. And the network would never really recover. Its market share slid steadily from 2010 onwards, despite being buoyed by the success of Masterchef—notably the most diverse show on Australian television in terms of casting, and centred on a premise that viewers of any age group could get behind.

If you're as inclined toward nostalgia as most people who grew up watching The Simpsons are, you can recapture the spirit of Channel Ten's golden years by YouTubing its promo spots from that era. They're iconic. You probably know them off by heart, even if you think you don't. There are a few lovingly repeated tropes: some Logie-nominated actress, her face almost forgettable now, bopping the Ten logo with her finger. Rove and Peter Helliar laughing together on a couch. The confused cast of an American crime show mugging for the camera. And, most memorable of all, that sexily whispered slogan: Seriously.

The irony being, of course, that Channel Ten was never particularly earnest or solemn. There was always a sense of carefree abandon—as though, at any moment, things could go delightfully and scandalously wrong. As though a Big Brother contestant would spontaneously start a pro-refugee protest on life television while the audience booed and Gretel Killeen looked on in horror. Shout out to Merlin.

The Channel Ten of the 2000s was cheeky, but the laughs weren't necessarily cheap or in bad taste. Ten was willing to experiment, too. There was always a palpable sense of optimism. The network invested not only in reality TV and imported US sitcoms but local drama and comedy. There was The Secret Life of Us, a show quite literally made for and starring young people in the throes of twentysomething existential crises. And sketch comedy shows like Skithouse and The Wedge, which were unapologetically Australian in tone and therefore kind of charming even in their unfunnier moments.

Despite its financial struggles, it seems like Channel Ten will continue its programming for the foreseeable future. Masterchef isn't dead, but in order to compete with other major networks, Ten will have to do what they've never done particularly well: focus on content that appeals to mums and dads who don't know how to work the Netflix. Rove Live is never coming back. We'll never see Powderfinger perform live on primetime television ever again.

And that's alright. Let the boomers enjoy what remains of traditional TV while they still can. Because literally everything else is made for us. We're living the dream of 2005 Channel Ten every single damn day.

Seriously.

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