The first season of Winners & Losers, an Australian drama television series, began airing on 22 March 2011 on the Seven Network. It replaced Packed to the Rafters while the series went on hiatus.drama series first broadcast on the Seven Network on 22 March 2011. It was created by the producers of Packed to the Rafters and is aired in the show's former time slot. Winners & Losers focuses on the lives of four women living in Melbourne, after they win a large amount of money in the Oz Lotto.Winners & Losers was created by Bevan Lee. Lee wanted to create a drama focusing on females for a number of years before the programme's creation.[2] He also created Packed to the Rafters.[3] While the former is focused on family relationships, Winners and Losers concentrates on friendships and is aimed at a younger demographic. Lee said it focuses on the "fun and drama of how we all carry the inner loser inside us, no matter how much life makes a winner of us."[3] Lee said the programme's genre is "charmedy" consisting of drama, comedy and charm.[2]
The series revolves around the lives of four women: Jenny Gross (Melissa Bergland), Bec Gilbert (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith), Frances James (Virginia Gay) and Sophie Wong (Melanie Vallejo). The girls were "the losers" in high school. Ten years later, they realise they are really winners once they are reunited at their school reunion and afterwards, win the Oz Lotto.[3] At the time of early production, the main actresses were required to spend time together off set to build believable chemistry between themselves.[4]A pilot episode for the programme was created and shown to a research group. Network Seven's head of drama, John Holmes, said the research produced the expectation of high ratings.[2] The series began airing on the Seven Network from 22 March 2011,[1] four weeks earlier than originally planned.[2] The fourth season of Packed to the Rafters was put on hiatus to allow Winners & Losers to air in its timeslot. The move was part of a programming strategy, with the aim of attracting a high viewing figures.[2] The first episode gained the highest ratings of the evening,[1] averaging at 1.7 million viewers.[5] The Seven Network decided to air the second and third episodes back to back, securing the highest ratings once again.[6] The programme continued to fare well with ratings in the following weeks.[4] However the ratings for episode seven indicated that Winners and Losers had lost over four hundred thousand viewers.[5] Though it was considered a ratings success and is among the twelve most watched programmes in Australia.[5][7]On 5 July 2011, Seven announced that it had renewed Winners & Losers for a second season in 2012.[8] Filming for the new season began in August 2011 and Lee said viewers would see big changes.[8] He told the Herald Sun, "We turn the girls' lives on their heads in a pretty major way in the final episode (of series one). That will give us a new launching pad for season two."
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