The Seven Network has a heritage of marketing to the middle ground. It is the family station, full of household improvements, lifestyle features and feel-good drama. So it’s no surprise that Seven is also the home of Packed to the Rafters, a new one-hour tale about the trials of baby-boomers coping with an unexpected influx of adult children. The question is, will the series rise about the sentimentality of forbears like Always Greener, or the simplistic morality of Home & Away? The answer may lie in its early commitment to the concept of truth.

Julie and Dave Rafter are the veterans of 25 years of marriage and the parents of three adult children. The series begins with them looking forward to that modern nirvana for Australian baby-boomers, the ‘empty nest’. However even as their final child takes flight, the family is struck with a series of tragedies that sees a sudden influx of unexpected, long-term house guests. Their daughter returns home to escape an abusive boyfriend; the youngest son and his new wife arrive looking for a shelter from mounting financial woes; and the unexpected death of Julie’s mother sees Grandad take up residence. The result is drama heaven:  a house full of frustrated dreams complicated by adult insecurities.

Packed to the Rafters is not your traditional escapist drama. To begin with episode storylines often run concurrently, so viewers keep travelling back in time to see difficult family days from the perspective of a different house member. It’s a neat tool for demonstrating that households are often dealing with more than one crisis at a time. But more importantly, the series avoids the usual selection of quirky characters and sets its sites firmly on exploring the anxieties of the middle class. Dave Rafter (Erik Thomson) struggles to reinvent himself after a late-life retrenchment and Grandad Taylor (Michael Caton) provides some career performances as a comfortably retired man coming to terms with the loss of a life-partner.

However the most familiar member of the cast is the grim spectre of financial collapse that stalks the young as well as the old. It is a character that many Australians, particularly Sydneysiders have become all too familiar with. Nathan Rafter (Angus McLaren) struggles under the burden of tremendous credit card debt, and Julie Rafter (Rebecca Gibney) is kept awake at nights wondering how she will pay the mortgage now her husband has lost his job. For the Rafters and many other Australians, the golden years of financial security promised to all hard workers still seem to be somewhere over the horizon.
The Rafter family solution, though, is to pin their hopes to the power of truth. Nathan realises that the pride that keeps him maintaining the fiction of his financial success is threatening to undo his marriage. “Not telling the truth was the problem,” he tells the viewer. “It was the ticking time bomb that was threatening to blow us apart.” Julie realises that her marriage has problems when she comes to the conclusion that, “Some subjects were still off limits even with the person I normally talk to about everything.” In every episode so far the Rafters have learned that even the most humiliating truths are better than destructive deceptions, particularly self-deceptions. It is also incredibly refreshing to view a series that presents small lies as the beginnings of betrayal rather than the regrettable necessities of day-to-day life.

Packed to the Rafters has its limitations – what series doesn’t? Mum and Dad Rafter seem to approve, even admire their children’s sexual explorations and the announcement that they are moving in with their partners is invariably celebrated like the news of an engagement. But for a society that has basked in the deceptive freedom of postmodernism for so long, it is good to watch a show that steadfastly presents truth as its own reward. Episodes often end with the key crisis unresolved. But the relationships remain sound because the people involved have been honest about their problems – which is, of course, the first step to dealing with them. One step is lacking though if Packed to the Rafters is going to be truly useful to modern Australia. The sort of honesty we really need is that which admits the problem, then admits that we aren’t capable of finding a solution on our own.