After a sorry week on X Factor, Robyn Gallagher heads way north to televised music comp perfection. // The Eurovision Song Contest is easily the greatest television musical extravaganza, but a couple of months earlier there’s another show that’s almost as good. It’s Melodifestivalen, the Swedish national competition to select their Eurovision entry – and … Read more
Has any TV show fallen as far or landed as hard as X Factor NZ did over the last seven days? We watched one of the 20 or so most controversial moments in our televisual history last week; this Sunday we sat and watched a bunch of mostly mediocre singers singing mostly mediocre songs, while … Read more
After an exciting introduction to The Bachelor NZ this week, Alex Casey delivers her first in our weekly series of Bachelorette power rankings. I can’t believe it has happened. Our headless oiled Bachelor has finally washed ashore, and revealed his handsome mug to the nation. What a week it has been. There’s been tears, there’s been somewhat excessive … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Calum Henderson discusses In Bed With Chris Needham, a self-shot teenage cult classic from the BBC. It starts with a pale, spotty youth, shifting from foot to foot, hanging on the telephone. His astonishing barnet is the cumulative result of not just one but a prolonged series of bad haircuts. “I’m not … Read more
Inside the Lightbox is a sponsored feature, mining the extensive Lightbox catalogue for the very best shows on a given theme. This time we took a look at the brand new haul of great British shows, fresh to Lightbox this week. / Moone Boy Created by Chris O’Dowd (the lovably Irish man from Bridesmaids), Moone … Read more
Duncan Greive breaks down the performances from last night’s X Factor NZ and power ranks the participants Natalia Kills: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just going to state the obvious and say we’ve got a doppelganger in our midst. As an artist who respects creative integrity and intellectual property I am disgusted by how much you … Read more
Calum Henderson looks back at the 1992 World Cup through the garish lens of Sky’s incessant memorialising and finds the coverage was as fine as the cricket. Was the 1992 Cricket World Cup really as good as everyone remembers it? Is it wrong to hold a flame for the golden summers of One World of Sport? … Read more
The debut of Duncan Greive’s weekly X Factor power rankings, which will drop Monday mornings and serve as a guide to where the show’s momentum lies. Season two of X Factor New Zealand started recording months ago, and already feels like it’s been going for years. The show has already run for 14 hours, versus the 18 … Read more
The Spinoff knights meet at the television roundtable to discuss Judges’ Retreat Week on X Factor NZ, and look towards our Top 12 contestants. // Eli Mathewson on Lili’s Lockdown Lili stands inside a Bangkok hotel when a sudden realisation seeps over her. With all the excitement of a beach holiday, a chance to plan some cheap dental and tough … Read more
Aaron Yap checks the pulse of In The Flesh‘s peculiarly English zombies. // If there’s still an abundance of forgettable, interchangeable zombie movies around to convince seasoned horror fans that the genre’s practically played out, Dominic Mitchell’s BBC 3 mini-series In the Flesh can be considered the counterargument. For those who appreciate a little ambition … Read more
With the shocking departure of Jazzy “Jazzy” Acton from our screens last night, beaming Archie Hill represents the last of the 14-year-olds standing on stick thin, vinyl-trousered legs at this year’s X Factor. He absolutely ripped Ed Sheeran a new one at the auditions, before walking on stage and into our hearts with ‘Blank Space’ … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Alex Casey discovers a deeply bizarre 1970s period show packed with family drama and, er, neighbourly relations. // I don’t know a lot about softcore pornography, but I know that the trailer for Swingtown looks like one: This 2008 series is set in 1976, and was made with the hopes of recreating … Read more
The Spinoff knights meet at the television roundtable to discuss boot camp week of The X Factor NZ.// Robyn Gallagher on The Forgotten Four During the first boot camp episode, we were very quickly introduced to the 48 contestants who were going on to the merciless six-seat challenge. They were all familiar faces from the audition shows, but … Read more
This Music Monday, Alex Casey draws parallels between a fake singing competition featured within The Office and all the thrills, spills and celebrities of X Factor NZ. // The past few weeks have been filled with a literal and metaphorical airing of X Factor NZ‘s dirty laundry. We have had Slim Shady killers being edited out faster … Read more
For this Throwback Thursday, Alex Casey looks back at Adam Levine’s brief but brutal stint in American Horror Story: Asylum. // It’s been a huge week for the American Horror Story anthology. Two days ago, there was some sad news that Ben Woolf, aka loveable Meep from American Horror Story: Freak Show had tragically died in … Read more
Checking in With… is a regular column which features a Spinoff writer watching one or more episodes of a current show and attempting to decode its appeal. This week: Kina’s K9s. // Episodes Consumed: One – the series debut on Maori TV last Friday. What’s it about? It’s a show about “the world of dogs … Read more
Stevie TV is a new monthly column for the Spinoff by Steve Braunias. Here he imagines scenes from a New Zealand Borgen. “Teflon Key’s coat’s wearing thin as she trades chips with Sky City who wants us to stump up with some cash for the new convention centre in Auckland that the PM promised would be … Read more
The Spinoff knights meet at the television roundtable to discuss from the much-improved second week of X Factor NZ. // Jack Riddell on Darren Smyth This is Darren Smyth, 36 from Point England. He’s one of many who you won’t see on X Factor this year. He was accepted into the audition round, cameras followed him back … Read more
Monitor is a new bi-weekly column from Aaron Yap. Each edition will see him critically examine a new show or trend in current television. First up is Better Call Saul. // Much has been made about modern mainstream cinema’s over-reliance on mining existing properties for content. More than ever, the studios are operating in a safety bubble, with … Read more
Tonight Drake plays Vector Arena in Auckland. Half his life ago he played Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Duncan Greive watched his first appearance on the show to see where it all began. // Imagine if Frankie Adams quit Shortland Street and became Lorde. That’s basically what happened for Canada when Aubrey Graham left the Degrassi universe after … Read more
Aaron Yap argues that family crime drama Brotherhood deserves to steal some of the family-crime-drama limelight away from its older television siblings. // One consequence of the monumental successes of The Sopranos and The Wire is that a perfectly decent show like Showtime’s Brotherhood remains undeservedly underseen, unable to escape from their far-reaching shadows. This crime drama, … Read more
This Music Monday, Alex Casey rediscovers the music video for ‘This is Outrageous’, the ridiculous debut single from Jez of the British comedy Peep Show. // The first ever episode of Peep Show still stands as an example of pure heart-attack-inducing hilarity. Part of it’s tremendous success, for me anyway, is the way it perfectly introduces our … Read more
At the end of last year all the episodes of the ’60s Batman TV show were packaged together on Blu-ray and DVD for the first time. Alongside the original 120 episodes, there’s also three hours of special features. How special they are is a matter of opinion. José Barbosa offers his. It’s either comforting or dispiriting … Read more
Fragmentary Thoughts is a new comic strip by José Barbosa, in which he’ll tackle a different television show or phenomenon each month. The first is a response to the debut episode of Better Call Saul. Warning: contains a spoiler. // Straight out of the starting blocks Better Call Saul‘s first episode didn’t quite knock it out of the … Read more
In this special Bad edition of Throwback Thursday, Joseph Harper looks back at Bob ‘Saul’ Odenkirk’s alternative comedy career. // Before he joined the cast of Breaking Bad as unscrupulous attorney Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk carved himself out a broad and varied career in the alternative undercurrents of American comedy. Stints with Second City, Saturday Night Live, … Read more
The New Zealand Initiative’s Head of Research Eric Crampton breaks down the depressing drug market economics which drive Walter White to murder and mayhem. // The most successful anti-methamphetamine campaign ever run in the United States came in 1995, resulting in a short-run tripling of the price of meth and a drop in purity from 90% … Read more
Before Breaking Bad, the world’s sharpest look at the scourge of methamphetamine was written by Deja Voodoo. Ten years on, songwriter Matt Heath recalls the fallout from their hit single ‘P’. ‘I smoke P and I’m alright’. It’s the first line of the fourth single from Deja Voodoo’s debut album Brown Sabbath. We wrote the … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Aaron Yap applauds the metaphysical triumphs of a particularly buzzy episode of The Twilight Zone. // The conflation of metaphysical concepts and science has always been a difficult, tricky thing for me to swallow in TV and movies. Not that it’s impossible to achieve; for example, Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica was persuasive … Read more
Each month we bring you the latest arrival to streaming service Lightbox, the good people who sponsor The Spinoff. This month features some HBO classics and a brilliant pair of ‘00s dramas. // News broke today that Lightbox will be free to all Spark broadband customers, an extremely fortuitous turn of events for everyone in … Read more