Top End Wedding sequel: Miranda Tapsell had unfinished business after her NT romcom, so she made Top End Bub

What happens after the happily ever after? Usually the credits roll, the book closes and we’re left the imagine what will become of the happy couple we’ve just spent a few hours with.

Especially when that story has the word “wedding” in the title.

When Miranda Tapsell wrapped up Top End Wedding in 2019, she and co-writer Joshua Tyler felt as if they’d only just scratched the surface of the film’s characters, Lauren and Ned, their love story and the tales of their family.

She had no idea there would be an opportunity to explore them. But the movie was a hit, racking up $5.28 million at the box office —which usually means the people controlling the budgets are open to having conversations.

The other thing that happened was people on social media started pitching Tapsell plot points for a sequel.

“We just thought it was so funny that fans of the show had all of these great ideas for Lauren and Ned and we thought, ‘Let’s give them what they want’.”

While one of the follow-up thought bubbles that came their way was “Top End Divorce”, that’s not the direction Tapsell and Tyler decided on.

Top End Bub is an eight-part series that will premiere next year. It picks up with Lauren and Ned’s lives being up-ended when her eight-year-old niece is suddenly orphaned and it falls to them to become her guardians.

That means giving up their Adelaide jobs and their careers and moving to Darwin to be challenged by what it means to be responsible for a young person who depends on you.

“We thought that Top End Bub was a great opportunity to explore the kinds of families that are formed without the process (of giving birth),” Tapsell told The Nightly. “Because so many people have formed a family in different ways.”

“In the Aboriginal community that I grew up in in the Northern Territory, so many people were taking nieces and nephews into their care, or looking after them. Or grandparents were looking after their grandchildren.”

There’s also the challenge of quickly adjusting to the changed rhythms of your life when you don’t have a nine-month runway to prepare for a child to take over.

“It really opens up the question, for a working woman who becomes a mother, at what point are you allowed to keep putting yourself first?

“Lauren and Ned didn’t have a lot of time to consider this and it really rocks their world.

“Quite often, as a mum, you don’t get to compartmentalise your world. Now that I’ve become a mum, I’ve started to consider these things a lot more as well.”

The production was shot in the NT and South Australia earlier this year with many of the returning cast from the film — including Gwilym Lee, Ursula Yovich, Huw Higginson, Shari Sebbens, Tracy Mann and Elaine Crombie. Newcomers to the cast include Brooke Satchwell, Guy Simon, Clarence Ryan and Rob Collins.

The role of Lauren’s niece is played by Gladys-May Kelly, who Top End Bub found after a nationwide open casting call.

For Tapsell, being able to showcase where she grew up was a point of pride.

“I adore the community that I grew up with, so it felt right to me to be able to speak from that perspective and really subvert the stereotypes that we know about the territory and the people that live there.”

She said she wanted viewers to see beyond the “parochial, non-curious, beer-chugging people” that are associated with the NT, and show people who love to fish, camp and be in the outdoors.

She described moving to Sydney as a big culture shock because “so much of your worth is how much money you make, what you wear and how you present yourself” whereas the pace in Darwin “makes you think about the kind of person you want to be”.

In addition to the natural beauty of the NT, there is also its tradition of fantastic South Asian food, name-checking the Middle Beach Markets or the Parap Markets as spoiling it for everywhere else.

“I’m such a snob about South East Asian food now. When people go, ‘Oh, let’s go and have Malaysian and let’s go and have Thai (in Sydney)’, I’ll go, ‘No, I’ll be severely disappointed, let’s just stick to Italian and Spanish’.”

Top End Bub will premiere on Prime Video in 2025