Home and Away's lack of Returnee Characters

[adam436]

  On 05/03/2025 at 23:25, Revealed said:

I could see this being a problem if Home and Away was to bring back older characters. That said I do think that a character has to be gone for a certain length of time for their comeback to mean anything. 

Expand  

I can see both sides of the argument there. A shorter hiatus can actually help a return be more successful, such as with Marilyn and Steven in 1995, or Kirsty in 2008. Whereas Steven or Kirsty have become so irrelevant as characters now I think their return would make no sense storyline-wise because they have no strong ties to the current characters. And I assume that the core demographic of H&A has changed so much that most viewers would have no idea who they are, so the buzz and excitement generated from the news would be much less. 

I was a little apprehensive about Marilyn's 2010 return for that reason. Thankfully she close to the two remaining characters from her previous stint (though from memory, she didn't even share that many scenes with Irene early in her return!), but otherwise there had been a complete turnover from cast in absence, so I was a bit worried the writers would have to shoehorn her into a cast and she'd be written out after a year because her return was a flop, Luckily it paid off, and she's still around 15 years later. 

Many of the early 2000s returnees like Celia, Sophie, Frank, Martin and Lance had been absent for 10 or more years when they returned, so I think there was a certain buzz about them coming back.

[c120701]

  On 06/03/2025 at 19:28, adam436 said:

I was a little apprehensive about Marilyn's 2010 return for that reason. Thankfully she close to the two remaining characters from her previous stint (though from memory, she didn't even share that many scenes with Irene early in her return!), but otherwise there had been a complete turnover from cast in absence, so I was a bit worried the writers would have to shoehorn her into a cast and she'd be written out after a year because her return was a flop, Luckily it paid off, and she's still around 15 years later. 

Expand  

They also used her relationship with Lance to connect her to Colleen. I agree, I felt the same, but they’d taken her from being ditzy and naive to being a little more Worldly wise and more ‘alternative’ with being vegetarian, into tarot etc… so because of that and that her friendship with Irene was forgotten, it wasn’t really until her relationships with John & Jett I started to like her again, but I still don’t really connect the Marilyn of today with the Marilyn of the 80s & 90s. I appreciate this is a woman who has lost a child (and apparently given another up) and gone through cancer, but if they could bring back a little bit more of the Marilyn who’d pick up a box and have the contents fall out the bottom that’d be good. Marilyn & Leah both used to speak a million words per minute, but that’s been lost too.