"Five Bedrooms is the new Offspring and I'm now so in love with this must-watch dramedy."

For many Australians, the plot of Network Ten’s new dramedy Five Bedrooms might hit just a little too close to home.

Along with telling a comedic story about a complex cast of characters, played by a series of actors and actresses well-known to Australian audiences, Five Bedrooms is also the equivalent of a ‘we see you and please have a drink on us’ love letter to the single people of our nation who will never be able to buy property of their own.

The action of Five Bedrooms kicks off with a group of mismatched people who are all relegated to a ghastly singles table, all the way behind the speakers, at a wedding.

There’s the enthusiastic Ainsley (Katie Robertson), who is in love with her kind of hopeless boss Lachlan (Hugh Sheridan), who has been relegated to the ‘lonely hearts’ table because he and his wife are once again on the outs. There’s also straight-laced lawyer Liz (Kat Stewart) and her best friend Harry (Roy Joseph), a doctor who still lives at home with his mother and is unable to tell her he’s gay. Rounding out the group is tradie Ben (Stephen Peacocke) whose claim to fame is that he lives in a caravan.

As the smugness of the happily married couples around their table begins to suffocate them, talk at the singles table turns to the idea that the only way the five of them will ever own property is if they all go in on a house together. A few bottles of champagne and a real estate Google search later and our singletons are well on their way to buying their own home.

While the house they finally do buy appears to be their dream home upon initial inspection, they’re greeted with quite a few surprises come moving day. Like the fact that half of the backyard pool has been removed by the previous owners and just one use of the upstairs shower floods the majority of their new home.

From there, this mismatched group of people from different backgrounds and different ages must learn to live together, creating an urban family while also dealing with their various work and relationship dilemmas.

Now, for anyone out there who is thinking ‘ugh, that is so unrealistic, as if a group of strangers would buy a house together after getting drunk at a wedding’ I politely must ask you to sit down. To those people, I would then say that you’ve obviously never had to trek through the desolate wasteland that is inner-city housing as a solo buyer or be seated at an outlier single’s table at a wedding. It is a place where relationships of fire are forged.

Five Bedrooms is the type of drama that will appeal to lovers of Offspring, the iconic Australian drama that ran for seven seasons and starred Asher Keddie. This is due to the fact that Five Bedrooms was created and written by Michael Lucas and Christine Bartlett, who worked together on Offspring. They've been developing this new drama since 2014. Of course, this new offering also stars Kat Stewart, who played the beloved Billie Proudman on Offspring.

While all these elements together make both the soul and DNA of Offspring and Five Bedrooms very similar,  there's still a vibrant freshness to this new series that makes it not only inherently watchable but also entirely addictive and endlessly comforting.

There's a realness to this cast of characters, these people in their 30s and 40s whose lives we become quickly invested in, because they feel so organically created. As if they could have been pulled from your apartment building or your workplace and placed on the screen. From the first episode, I was utterly hooked by this cast of characters.

While there's plenty of sexual chemistry in this new share house (you're certain from the first few moments of this show that at least four people in the house are on the road to heartbreak and/or love) the story really gets going as they slowly learn about each other's pasts and find a way to survive with their new share house reality.

Thankfully for us, Five Bedrooms is entertaining enough to make you forget you'll probably never own your own home. At least for a few hours.

Five Bedrooms will premiere Wednesday, May 15 At 8.40pm on Network Ten. You can also watch it on Ten Play. 

For more stories like this, you can follow Mamamia Entertainment Editor Laura Brodnik on Facebook.  You can also visit our newsletter page and sign up to “TV and Movies”  for a backstage pass to the best movies, TV shows and celebrity interviews (see one of her newsletters here).