But fans will need to open their hearts wide to embrace this extensive modern family.

The series comes from Offspring creator Imogen Banks, whose extensive track record includes drama hits Gallipoli, The Beautiful Lie and Party Tricks.

In Sisters, Julia Bechly (Maria Angelico) is an only child, nursing her sick father (Barry Otto). On his deathbed, the Nobel Prize-winning fertility scientist admits to having used his own sperm in hundreds of IVF pregnancies. Suddenly Julia has siblings … lots of them.

While the supporting cast includes Aussie TV royalty — Otto, Magda Szubanski and Roy Billing — the three leads aren’t yet household names. Lucy Durack is best known of the group for her extensive theatre work, starring in Wicked, and small roles in Nine’s Doctor Doctor and ABC’s upcoming comedy, The Letdown.

Durack, who plays ‘hot mess’ Roxy, reckons Banks used “magic” to cast the core group of three sisters.

“She files away all these different people in her mind then puts them all together in her cauldron,” she says. “Abracadabra, here’s a TV show.”

Banks is more practical, describing the casting process as “like air traffic control”.

”You’ve got all these different idea planes in your brain, and you’re trying to figure out how they work in sync,” she says.

“Lucy Durack and I had been having conversations, she’s very active in her career and she was looking for opportunities. I really wanted to work with her, I love the possibility of who she can be on screen.”

Next came Angelico, who Banks spotted in a web series she had written herself.

“I immediately got that slight hysteria, like, ‘this girl needs to be on television — she is a show’. She’s so immediately engaging.”

Antonia Prebble (Outrageous Fortune), a well-known actor in New Zealand, was the third piece of the puzzle, and Banks says “once we started thinking about Antonia as Edie, that’s how it fell into place.”

“The beauty of having these three very different women is there’s room for people to feel different things about each of them at different times,” Banks says.

“They might start loving one then find them annoying.

“They’ve got different identity struggles, whether it’s about family or sexuality.

“That’s why this is such a great format. It pulls out the central tenets of who you are and goes, ‘nope’.”

Excited to be working with industry veterans, Sisters’ three stars all say they were most starstruck by Magda Szubanski.

Maria, in particular, got carried away when they met.

“I was obsessed with Big Girl’s Blouse when I was younger, I love seeing women being funny,” she says.

“I’m one of three girls, and we would do our own skits from Big Girls’ Blouse, I think we taped them on VHS, even though some of the jokes went way over my head.

“When I first met her on set I thought I’d be really cool and I just started running through skits … but Magda was awesome, and went with it. I hope she wasn’t thinking I’m a nutter.

“Now that we know each other it’s pretty amazing. She’s so smart, intelligent, opinionated and bloody funny.”

While Offspring’s seventh season finished with a satisfying conclusion in September, Banks will still never say never on ending the show.

“That’s an open question,” she says.

“It’s always interesting to know where there’s life in it, and appetite. The fans are generally there. It’s been a really interesting process bringing it back (the series was cancelled after five seasons, then brought back by popular demand), and it’s such a high stakes process for everybody involved, it’s a big decision to do it.

“You want to honour the show, you want to honour the premise, you want to honour the friendships. Everybody, all the people who’ve worked on it since the beginning who have a relationship with the show and an expectation … it sort of becomes its own thing.

“Once you’ve made a couple of seasons of it, it doesn’t belong to anybody, it becomes its own universe. And I work with the masters of that universe.”

Sisters, Wednesday, 8.30pm, Ten

By Anna Brain for The Daily Telegraph